TAKE TWO POEMS AND CALL US

Nancy Mairs enrolls Sexton in “the roster of modern poets dead by their own hand . . . “ Three of those poets belong in that list; the third does not.

According to newspaper reports at the time, Roethke died of a heart attack, on Aug. 1, 1963, in a friend’s swimming pool on Bainbridge Island near Seattle. This is substantiated by Allan Seager’s 1968 biography, “The Glass House”:

“It was still hot at five in the afternoon and Ted said he was going to take a swim. The women were sitting at the edge of the pool talking, and, since they knew Ted swam well enough, paying little special attention to him. He dove in and swam to the shallow end. A moment or two later, they noticed him floating face down. The three women got him out of the water, his face blue, and (one) tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while the others called Beatrice (his wife) and a doctor. The doctor arrived, examined Ted, and pronounced him dead of a coronary occlusion.”

While it has been proposed (by Jeffrey Meyers in “Manic Power” that Roethke “pursued self-destruction” through excessive use of alcohol and “self-induced” madness, he did not step off a high bridge like Berryman, nor stick his head into an oven like Plath. However we view the desperate act of suicide, it casts a different light on a life--which should not be cast if that is not the case.

Mairs’ inaccuracy devalues Roethke’s struggle with mental illness.

JOHN RIDLAND, SANTA BARBARA