Roth and the Poets

Abstract:Beginning with a survey of the key poets in Philip Roth's personal library—there are over eighty—this essay considers the function, style, and value of poetry in his work. At many of the most intense moments in Roth's fiction, a poetic lyricism dominates, whether it is Mickey Sabbath at the Jersey shore or the final paragraph of The Human Stain (2000). From the start of his career, Roth found a place for poetry—whether in his earliest short stories or in his most successful fiction, notably Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Sabbath's Theater (1995), or American Pastoral (1997), although its function shifted from the explicit sexuality of "Leda and the Swan" in Portnoy's Complaint to the meditative pastoralism of Indian Hill camp in Nemesis (2010). Its presence constantly reflects Roth's literary grounding originating in his undergraduate and graduate readings supplemented by contact with poets at Chicago, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Princeton, and Penn. Specific remarks on individual poems will reflect their use in individual novels with Donne, Milton, and Keats featured.