Warren, Roethke, and Wilbur: Exterior

Warren, Roethke, And Wilbur: Exterior and Interior Poetic Landscapes

The poet Robert Penn Warren is best known for his elliptical poems about the natural world, such as "Evening Hawk." Warren's poems are filled with meditations upon the subjects of time and eternity and how philosophical truths manifest themselves in nature. The poem, which depicts an image of a hawk in the sky at dusk ends with these words:

His wing

Scythes down another day, his motion

Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear

The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The real-life curved wing of the bird mirrors the metaphorical scythe of time. The wing hews the seamless blue of the sky as death hews men's lives like stalks of wheat.

Warren was a member of a group of Southern poets known as the Fugitives, "The Fugitives were advocates of the rural Southern agrarian tradition and based their poetry and critical perspective on classical aesthetic ideals." This can be seen in "Evening Hawk" as Warren first describes the animal's power, but then uses the description as a vehicle to examine higher concerns, embodied in the agricultural image of Death as a reaper. The Fugitive influence is also manifest in "Tell me a story," which begins "Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood/by a dirt road, in first dark, and heard/the great geese hoot northward." But concludes with the demand that "The name of the story [told to the poet] will be Time."

The poet Theodore Roethke also used images from his childhood in his poetry. Unlike Warren, whose personal images tend to be stereotyped, classical and iconic, Roethke uses personal and idiosyncratic examples from his life. In "My Papa's Waltz," Roethke addresses his father: "The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

In "Pickle Belt," Roethke does not explicitly identify the adolescent that the poem focuses upon as himself, but he once again shows his sense of humor and irony as he notes that the boy is: "Prickling with all the itches / of sixteen-year-old lust" when he is standing near a girl. Even when Roethke's poems are set outside, in nature, his focus is less upon abstract, classical allusions and truths than upon the human element found in the natural world.

Like Roethke and Warren, Richard Wilbur blends classicism and philosophy with humble images: "Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection" ("Richard Wilbur," Poets.org, 2010). Like Roethke, Wilbur's use of nature tends to be personal, even though Wilbur's diction is more formal and archaic in tone than "My Papa's Waltz." For example, in "The Writer," Wilbur writes of his young daughter, writing a story in her room, and compares her effort to chasing a frightened starling out of her room: "It is always a matter, my darling, / of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish / What I wished you before, but harder."