SOURCE: "Martyr to a Motion Not His Own: Theodore Roethke's Love Poems" in Ball State University Forum, Vol. 16, No. 2, Spring, 1975, pp. 71-5.

In the following essay, La Belle asserts that Roethke's love poems place him in the tradition of John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and Dante Alighieri, among others.

For Theodore Roethke writing poetry was like making love: it was an activity requiring a partner. All of his poems are literary love children, the issue of a union between Roethke's own vision and the work of other poets whom he admired. This way of creating was not mere imitation. It was an attempt to connect with another sensibility, to merge, finally to "see and suffer [himself] in another being, at last."

Roethke's early spiritual romances did not produce "real" poems, only premature little verses scarcely able to stand on their own iambic feet. He began by falling in love...