I just happened on Loren Webster's beautifully done blog and these posts about Richard Hugo. His blog's title, "in a Dark Time," obviously comes from the incantatory Theodore Roethke poem of the same name (which Webster admires here); as you remember, Roethke was the subject (along with James Wright) of a recent essay by Adam Kirsch, who writes: "Decades have now passed since their sadly premature deaths—Roethke’s in 1963, Wright’s in 1980—and today they need to be reintroduced to a generation of readers who are likely to know them only from a few anthology pieces." While thoughtful and appreciative, Kirsch's analysis of Roethke's poetics isn't entirely right, I think, but the piece is an excellent reintroduction to both poets and their relationship to modernism and the (masuline, deeply feeling) self. Roethke also had more boisterious fun on the page than a lot of poets—there are notable exceptions—let themselves have these days, Billy Collins or no Billy Collins (indeed, when I saw Collins read it seemed to me he was a very melancholy man). Roethke was often ferociously depressed. But his poems are pure joy and, if you haven't read them yet, will delight you. "His best and most characteristic poems concoct a new language for the shapeless urges of the unconscious," writes Kirsch, who later quotes Roethke (who was, endearingly, a Lit-Law major at Ann Arbor): " 'Believe me,' he adjured the reader in a 1950 'Open Letter,' 'you will have no trouble if you approach these poems as a child would, naively, with your whole being awake, your faculties loose and alert.' " Look at Loren Webster's Merlin falcon, too. The shapes a bright container can contain!