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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.

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
Looks
Drained
Stones
Fear
Father
Look

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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
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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?
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In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows. We walk aware of what is far and close. Here distance is familiar as a friend. The feud we kept with space comes to an end.
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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The self says, I am The heart says, I am less The spirit says, you are Nothing.
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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But when I breath with the birds, The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessings, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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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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By daily dying, I have come to be.
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A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.
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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
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