Influences and Sources of Theodore Roethkes Elegy for Jane Essay

Influences and Sources of Theodore Roethkes Elegy for JaneIn In Memoriam A. H. H., a bare-ass kind of threnody with roots in the elegiac tradition, Tennyson writes, For words, like Nature, half(prenominal) reveal/And half conceal the Soul within (1045). The truth of Tennysons mastery appears in Theodore Roethkes Elegy for Jane My Student Killed by a Horse. Roethke conceals much roughly himself as a person yet reveals much about himself as a poet when he puts his grief into words. Without knowing something of Roethkes personal and professional life, wholeness would think that a bookman named Jane was the sole earnestness for this moving elegy however, in The meth House, the poets biographer, Allan Seager, reveals more than one possible source of inspiration for the poem. At the University of Washington, as at Roethkes other teaching posts, students liked him, and he frequently formed close relationships with his students--in fact, he married one of his cause students however , this was not the case with Jane Bannick. Seager reveals that Ted had not known her Jane very well. She was a student of Teds for only one quarter. She was thrown from a vaulting horse and killed (193). Yet some other one of his students may in any case have had an influence on this elegy. harmonize to Seager, Roethke may have been influenced also by Lois Lamb, who had f onlyen from a horse the previous summer and described the attendant fears to him in detail (193). Seager also mentions that the poet and Lamb conducted a series of experiments with a flock of turkeys on the loony bin Pinel grounds (187) during the poets 1949-50 hospitalization of manic-depressive illness. These visits by Lamb indicate a closer relationship between Roethke and Lamb t... ... us all. We can all relate to it. Thus, drawing not only upon his personal experiences and emotion scarcely also universal emotion as well as elegiac and pastoral traditions, Roethke reveals himself as not only a warm , caring teacher but also as an outstanding, and perhaps instinctive, poet. Works CitedParini, Jay. Theodore Roethke An American Romantic. Amherst U of Massachusetts P, 1979. Roethke, Theodore. The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. bleak York Anchor-Doubleday, 1975. Ross-Bryant, Lynn. Theodore Roethke Poetry of the Earth . . . Poet of the Spirit. Port Washington, N.Y. Kennikat, 1981. Seager, Allan. The Glass House The Life of Theodore Roethke. New York McGraw-Hill, 1968. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. In Memoriam A. H. H. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 3rd ed., Vol. 2. New York Norton, 1974. 1042-84.