I don’t read much literary criticism, but if I’m exploring a poet new to me, I like to read a bit—after I’ve read the poems themselves!—to see what I’d missed.
For this collection, Harold Bloom gathered what he calls “a representative selection of what I judge to be the most useful criticism” about Roethke’s work. There are differences of opinion among the contributors, which I take to be a good thing. All agree that the “Lost Son” sequence is a masterpiece, which is how it struck me when I read it, but opinion differs over the quality of his later work. This seems to correspond with whether a critic felt that Roethke succeeded in the quest underlying all his work or not.
That his work was grounded in a lifelong pursuit of one goal is one of my takeaways from this book. I should have figured that out myself, given the recurrent symbols. It was also helpful to see how the poems written in a child’s voice fit the overall scheme.
That central preoccupation? As Rosemary Sullivan put it, it was “his desire to trace the evolution of spirit;” she quotes Roethke, who wrote: “to see the self so completely that it might become a soul.”
In the end, the question “what’s it about?” isn’t the determiner of the quality of a poem. Nevertheless, It matters to the extent that it interested me to see how unified Roethke’s body of work is, including the great and not-so-great poems. The essays in this collection helped me see that, so I’m glad I read them. ( )