Theodore Roethke: This is about the basic life story and the meaning behind this dramatically influential American poet's works. It's AP English vocabulary, change as needed.

A Rose in a Dark Time: Theodore Roethke

Throughout his entire life, a fervent poet writes his personal feelings and interpretations in the form of symbols: the lifeblood of the metaphor. Often these words are written in a form of expression not usually associated with normal everyday thought, but that of a profoundness that evokes only the highest level of emotion. In the early twentieth century America was introduced to the poetry of Theodore Huebner Roethke after a long period of dark, realistic and depressing verse among writers. The son of a greenhouse owner would one day use his vivid ideas of nature and interpretations of the world in a manner that would provide the wilting world of the arts with witty, moving, and provocative verse. That same man would also write of intense personal tensions and the horrors of living in peccadillo.

Famous poets such as Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and Yeats were just a few of the many poets and writers that young Theodore took a particular interest in studying.

Theodore Roethke

Alley side of the Blue Moon Tavern, University Dis...

[Theodore] Roosevelt & reporters - Syracuse (LOC)

These stirring lyrical artists all provided a great deal of undeviating augmentation in his ability to turn passionate words into the written work. An equal amount of influence was his personal ambiguity towards emotion in general. He neither loved or hated his father, and constantly felt that he had never truly lived as a human being should. This is evident in his poem "The Flight", which is a personal account of the meanings behind death, and the loss of one's individuality, two subjects that he viewed nearly synonomous. Because of his feelings of isolation in regards to his persona Roethke often felt like he was an outcast, a man with no true identity. To combat these feelings, Roethke would write about the connection between man and nature, an appealing...