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    Roethke listened, and he learned how to manipulate the silent beats of a poem, something many lesser poets never think about. Roethke’s best lyrics have a resonance after the close which reinforces the meaning of the final line or stanza, so that the reader, like the bemused passerby of Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper,” continues to hear the haunting music “long after it was heard no more.”
    The thirties was a decade when political activism was of principal concern to artists; writers like Auden, Spender, Orwell, Lorca, and Malraux had the center stage. So it was natural that Roethke should attempt a kind of engage writing. But this was never his mode; he was, say his friends, comically uninformed on political matters, especially in the late thirties. He was only vaguely aware of the international catastrophe that had been gathering wind over Europe for a decade, though he made some attempts at political poetry. With great wisdom, Louise Bogan wrote on 28 June 1939 to warn him against writing poetry with any overt political interest. She makes overly generous remarks about his mediocre poem “Ballad of a Clairvoyant Widow,” which appeared in Open House , then comes to her real point:
    The Clairvoyant Widow is good, too. One of the lenses of the telescope is on the Auden side, but not too much so. And I wish the Widow—who is a really evocative and strange conception—didn’t go Simplified Left in the end. After two years of studying the proletariat at first hand, I should say that they don’t resemble those New Masses pictures of Everyone Holding Chained Hands Up Toward the Heights, in the least. They are all different—like any class. Don’t get too simplified. Life isn’t like that. Don’t let the Zeitgeist get you. 12
    Bogan liked to mother Roethke, and it seems clear enough from the younger poet’s letters that he needed someone to do this. One moving example of his role playing is this little note of 25 May 1936:
    Dear Louise: It’s three o’clock in the morning, and I’ve just finished reading, of all things, ‘Time Out of Mind’ by Rachel Field.
    Just twenty-eight years ago today little Theodore came into the world. Touching, isn’t it? I’ve never thought much about the passage of time over my flesh, but this time it really gets me down. Twenty-eight years, and what have I done? No volume out and I can’t seem to write anything. You can say what you want, but place does have a lot to do with productivity Hell, I don’t care what happens to me,—whether I go nuts or my entrails hang out; but I can’t stand being so mindless and barren as I’ve been…. ( SL , pp. 36–37)
    He was asking to be knocked over the head, sympathetically; and Bogan liked doing this.
    In the forties Roethke became such an accomplished craftsman that the advice Humphries and Bogan had been giving him was no longer so urgent. Still, the persona of moral counselor to Roethke appealed to Bogan, and Roethke didn’t object, so the letters went on. Here is a brief sample from an undated letter of 1942 in which Bogan characteristically admonished Roethke for being adolescent:
    Auden respects and likes you thoroughly, I should say. He wrote that review, you must realize, against all his decisions not to review contemporaries. He thinks you are a good poet, a good teacher, and a fine person generally; but we agreed that you should grow up , and stop pretending that your childish side is melancholy, which it isn’t . Now, worry over that one! 13
    Roethke was thirty-four at this time and had been hospitalized for manic-depression, an illness that would plague him throughout his life. It seems that Louise Bogan either didn’t understand Roethke’s psychological problems or thought that by making light of them she could jolt him out of his melancholy states.
    A third mentor of great importance to young Roethke was