Theodore Roethke on Craft

Theodore Roethke. Manic-depressive, hard-drinking male-chauvinist-pig. Extraordinary, nurturing teacher and legendary poet. In class he tread lightly on some students' strange work, in case this evidenced a hallmark of an emerging style.

We love to call him our Northwest poet, but he was imported from University of Michigan to the University of Washington. At the infamous Blue Moon in the University District where he hung out, there is a picture of him on the wall. The adjoining alley is named after him.

Here are some of his quotes taken from the book, On Poetry & Craft:

• Literalness is the devil's weapon.
• Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
• There are only two passions in art; there are only love and hate--with endless modifications.
• God is one of the biggest bores in English poetry.
• The sneer is easy to master and usually the mark of the adolescent.
• Break in on the reader sideways. Think with the wise, talk like the common man: Give noun a full swat, But adjective, not.
• The idea of poetry itself is a vast metaphor.
• Simple and profound; how little there is.
• Too eager to say what a lot of people will want to hear.
• I long to be a greater failure in life so I can write better books.
• Today I'm going to lecture on confusion.  I'm all for it.
• This course is an act of faith. In what? In the imagination of us all, in a creative capacity--that most sacred thing--that lies dormant, never dead, in everyone.
• Transcend that vision.  What is first or early is easy to believe. But...it may enchain you.
• I dream of a culture where it is thought a crime to be dull.
• Never be ashamed of the strange.
• There are those who can hold forth, but me, I have to holler.
• He was a man with little capacity for any kind of thinking: therefore he was made an administrator.
• Teaching goes on in spite of administrators.