380 Western American Literature Along with the depersonalization coming from the modern over-use of Pike’s name is a failure to participate in the localized beauty of the region as symbol ized by the antelope. The incident is repeated in the same place in modern times as a mother and child ride a bus toward Colorado Springs. Upon arrival at the bus terminal (on Pike’s Peak Avenue), the mother says I must have dozed off back out where The driver said we saw a beautiful antelope jumping over a bush. To the child’s question “Mama, did we see the antelope?” the mother echoes the sad failure to personally experience events: We must have, dear, The driver said we did. Above all else, Ferril participates in the world around him and records the duality of finitude and infinitude inherent in each act, facing directly the granite world but finding more than rock. JAMES R. SAUCERMAN Northwest Missouri State University Theodore Roethke: The Journey from I to Otherwise. By Neal Bowers. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. 228 pages, no price stated.) The question of mysticism in Theodore Roethke’s poetry haunts the Roethke criticism like a bad dream or an interminable visit by a sickly maiden aunt. The problem is that the term is loaded: it insists on its own indefinability. Anyone who has looked into the matter at all knows that what sits at the heart of the “mystical experience” is “the ineffable.” That’s the way it is— one bows to that. But the irritating fact is that as soon as the word mystic crops up in criticism, critics begin spending too much time bowing and not enough time explaining. And anyone who stops bowing and starts asking questions can be dismissed as a philistine. Neal Bowers’ book not only fails to escape from the consequences of selfrighteous mystic-mongering, it positively embraces them. The result is an unhappy mixture of solid research, sloppy method, thesis-writing, and a severe case of intentional fallacy which keeps asserting itself like a nervous tic, dis torting and ultimately spoiling what might otherwise be a useful study. It is clear enough, from his drafts and notes as well as from the poetry itself, that Theodore Roethke was intensely interested in mysticism, knew a great deal about the subject, and studied many significant works dealing with it, notably Evelyn Underhill’s monumental work. Bowers notes these things, as have other critics before him. There are two main questions arising from all this: first, how does Roethke employ both the substance and the structure of mysticism (as described in its various stages, for instance, by Underhill) ; Reviews 381 and second, what does he mean by it? These questions are difficult; and like all difficult questions, they require a precise and subtle approach. Bowers’ thesis is enough to cast doubt on his subtlety. “The basic premise of this study,” he tells us, “is that Roethke’s manic-depressiveness, which troubled him most of his life, produced in him a propensity for mystical insight,” which in turn is the foundation for much, if not all, of Roethke’s poetry. Beyond that, Bowers (after alluding to friends and colleagues who look at him askance for his interest in mysticism, a subject they suspect, he says, because they obviously do not understand it) gives us his working definition of mysticism, which he borrows from S. N. Dasgupta: “ ‘a theory or doctrine or view that considers reason to be incapable of discovering or realizing the nature of ultimate truth, but at the same time believes in the certitude of some other means of arriving at it.’” There are many problems inherent in this approach — so many it is difficult to detail them all. In the first place, Dasgupta’s definition is inade quate, and Bowers does not stick to it (is mysticism a “theory or doctrine or view,” or is it as Walter T. Stace has it, an experience which cannot be embraced by any doctrine; and doesn’t all mysticism, whatever its religious affiliation, or lack thereof, contain certain assumptions about the nature of “ultimate truth” which Dasgupta’s definition does not address?). Further more...