Theodore roethke awards
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Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke was born on May 25, 1908, in Saginaw, Michigan. As a child, he spent much time in the greenhouse owned by his father and uncle. His impressions of the natural world contained there would later profoundly influence the subjects and imagery of his verse. Roethke graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1929. He later took a few graduate classes at Michigan and Harvard, but was unhappy in school.
Roethke’s first book, Open House (Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), took ten years to write and was critically acclaimed upon its publication. He went on to publish sparingly but his reputation grew with each new collection, including The Waking which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1954.
Roethke admired the writing of such poets as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, William Blake, and William Wordsworth, as well as W. B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Stylistically his work ranged from witty poems in strict meter and regular stanzas to free verse poems full of mystical and surrealisticimagery
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Stanley Kunitz on Theodore Roethke
The poet of my generation who meant most to me, in his person and in his art, was Theodore Roethke. Immediately after Frost and Eliot and Pound and Cummings and Hart Crane and Stevens and William Carlos Williams, it was difficult to be taken seriously as a new American poet; for the title to "the new poetry" was in the possession of a dynasty of extraordinary gifts and powers, not the least of which was a stubborn capacity for survival. When Roethke was a schoolboy in Michigan in the twenties, these poets had already "arrived." For a long time, in the general view, they remained the rebels and inventors.
Roethke took his own work seriously indeed. Lashed by his competitive and compulsive temper, he committed himself fully to the exhausting struggle for achievement and recognition—a desperately intimate struggle that left its mark on him. Only a few years before his death, he could refer to himself sardonically as "the oldest younger poet in the U.S.A."
Some seven decades have passed since he blew into my life like the "big wind" of on
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Theodore Roethke
The poet of my generation who meant most to me, in his person and in his art, was Theodore Roethke. To say, in fact, “poet of my generation” is to name him, Immediately after Eliot and Pound and Hart Crane and Stevens and William Carlos Williams, to mention only a handful, it was difficult to be taken seriously as a new American poet; for the title to “the new poetry” was in the possession of a dynasty of extraordinary gifts and powers, not the least of which was its capacity for literary survival. When Roethke was a schoolboy in Michigan in the twenties, these poets born late in the nineteenth century had already “arrived.” Today, in the general view, they are still the rebels and inventors beyond whom even a college course in contemporary literature scarcely dares to venture.
Roethke took his own work seriously indeed, as he had every reason to do. Lashed by his competitive and compulsive temper, he committed himself fully to the exhausting struggle for recognition—a desperately intimate struggle that left its mark on
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