Word: whitmans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Stuart Davis might be viewed as good examples of the what - I-did-last-summer-when-I-was-in-Paris genre. But, althouph he over-writes, Davis succeeds where others in this issue fail; in "City of Statuary" he links together several strains of imagery. So too Ruth Whitman's "I Laugh in Russian" knits at least three strands of metaphor in a compact but highly readable form...
Most of these poems are restrained when compared with Walt Whitman's effusive When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd. Nor are they elegiac in the usual sense. In poetry as elsewhere, the sea of faith has receded, and poets no longer have recourse to the traditional symbols of comfort and deliverance. The poems are for the most part stoical, terse, plainspoken. But all of them bespeak a grief as great as any poetry of the past...
...eagerness to pardon military deserters (the mothers of the country, he argued, should not be made to suffer more than they had), and for the "exhibitionistic and self-destructive impulses" reflected in a recurrent dream that he would be assassinated before his second term was out. As for Walt Whitman, he would never have poured so much sexuality into his poetry and realized it so imperfectly in his life (he was impotent, with strong homosexual inclinations) if he had not been so strongly attached to a mother who was illiterate and unable to understand him or his literary ambitions...
...resonances somehow develop with rereading. Then Roethke's driest lines can blossom as unexpectedly as the desert cactus. One of his repeated, even self-conscious influences in such passages is Walt Whitman ("Be with me, Whitman, maker of catalogues / . . . the terrible hunger for objects quails me"). But for Roethke, "all finite things reveal infinitude," and . . . if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant...
...Beyond Whitman, the poems poignantly betray Roethke's consciousness, like Andrew Marvell's, of "Time's winged chariot hurrying near," and Roethke cannot even playfully think of love without remembering death. The Wish for a Young Wife is characteristic...