A Celebration of
Theodore Roethke
Pulitzer-Prize Poet & U-M Alumnus in the Centenary of His Birth
October 17th Rackham Amphitheatre
to the Public
Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia in 2005 published Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems, which contains three essays on poems by Theodore Roethke. She credits her teacher Milton Kessler as having inspired in her a love of Roethke’s poetry, both the tightly-controlled early poems and the more expansive free-verse poems of Roethke’s late period.
As readers of her landmark study of western culture, Sexual Personae, are aware, Paglia values the struggle of art and nature, of the artist and society, and finds most worthy those artists who express in their work the daemonic intensity of their creative energies, whether as high art or popular culture. Poetry possesses a significant value in culture, she claims, because, like song, it presents powerful emotions and compelling ideas in a condensed form—an orderliness that holds at bay the disorder of desire while still representing desire in its most vehement forms.
Paglia has published several collections of essays and reviews in a wide field of study, as well as a book on Hitchcock’s film The Birds. She is much in demand for her commentaries on political, social, and entertainment topics, and writes a regular column in the online magazine Slate.com responding to readers’ questions.
Paglia photo: Misa Martin
Sponsored by the Department of English, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, LSA Development Office, and Office of the Vice-President for Research
Roethke photo credit | Site design by Anthony Cece // Department of English
