"Nobody has written quite like him," said Lawrence Joseph '70, '75 JD, an alumnus-poet with a deep, rather than a Roethkian, interest in the law (See "Poet of Detroit," December 1989 issue, and "Lawyerland," Summer 1997 issue).  

Courtesy Lawrence Joseph Joseph

Joseph, a professor of law at St. John's Law School in New York City, is widely known as a legal scholar, but even more so as a poet and prose writer. He feels a special affinity with Roethke as a Michigan-born U-M honors graduate. "I got interested in him when I was younger," he said in a telephone interview. "I got one of his books for my birthday and read him a lot as an undergraduate. All his intensity is from Michigan—from that Saginaw world between 1908 and 1925, a rural landscape, a pre-Detroit and auto world—his mind was a mind coming out of the 19th century.

"His ethnic group, the Germans, who were the largest ethnic group to settle the country then; his father, a Prussian, dancing with him in 'My Papa's Waltz'; the violin and the dancing, the child smelling the animal smell. It's his father but not his father.

"He never turned his back on Michigan, and there's lots of biography in his poetry; much of it is a journey in to the interior. There's a ferocity to his poetry; it's physical and primal. Like Yeats he was a romantic in the way he dealt with nature and love, but he's not in a school. He wasn't a modernist but was innovative and idiosyncratic-but sometimes orthodox, too. He wasn't a moralizer, not indignant, although there was always a ferocity against God and nature. But then his children's poems, I am! Says the Lamb, are fairy-tale like, dark and funny, and his poems to his young wife [Beatrice] are astonishingly beautiful.

"Roethke had complex relationships, but what matters is his imagination. I think he'll do well when his competitiveness and illness are forgotten. It's the poems that count."