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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.

Theodore Roethke

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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Overwhelmed
Disorder
Eternal
Poetry
Words
Beautiful
Virginity

More quotes by Theodore Roethke

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In a dark time, the eye begins to see / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade...Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
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What falls away is always. And is near.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
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What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
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In the kingdom of bang and blab.
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You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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By daily dying, I have come to be.
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I came where the river Ran over stones My ears knew An early joy. And all the waters Of all the streams Sang in my veins That summer day.
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swamplandDisturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planetAs if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
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The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
Theodore Roethke
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The indignity of it!- With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave.
Theodore Roethke