Theodore Roethke  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

"We of the craft are all crazy," remarked Lord Byron about himself and his fellow poets. "Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched."z This book is about being "more or less touched"; specifically, it is about manicdepressive illness-a disease of perturbed gaieties, melancholy, and tumultuous temperaments-and its relationship to the artistic temperament and imagination. It is also a book about artists and their voyages, moods as their ships of passage, and the ancient, persistent belief that there exists such a thing as a "fine madness."--Touched with Fire (1993) by Kay Redfield Jamison, incipit

"Robert Lowell and John Berryman, along with their contemporaries Theodore Roethke, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and Anne Sexton, were-among other things-"stalked" by their manic-depressive illness. Mercurial by temperament, they were subject to disastrous extremes of mood and reason. All were repeatedly hospitalized for their attacks of mania and depression; Berryman, Jarrell, and Sexton eventually committed suicide."

|}