SOURCE: "Poetic Empathy: Theodore Roethke's Conception of Woman in the Love Poems," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 56, No. 1, January, 1991, pp. 61-78.

In the following essay, Floyd-Wilson examines Roethke's representation of women in his poetry, noting Roethke's idealization of the female persona and attempt to transcend self by portraying women as the dual embodiment of the universal and particular.

In a poetic universe teeming with greenhouse life and distinctly lacking in human beings, Theodore Roethke's two series of "love poems" have a conspicuous presence in a complete collection of his work. While an "utter assent to other people, other lives … marks the best poetry" of his contemporaries, Roethke concentrates on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. His early verse focuses on the "I," and in a self-described "journey out of the self" the poet explores primordial memories, subhuman life and a child's perception of the world. Stephen Spender...