This is quite a good teaching tool, isn't it? It demonstrates Roethke's art and shows why art makes the difference, art and artifice, that art is (at least in great part) artifice, and that much of the teaching about poetry in schools has been wrong for forty years, I mean the stuff that says anyone can be a poet just like that.
Mind you I couldn't bear to do such a thing to, say, Larkin.
Seasonally, one could compare the Christmas story in the King James version with the Christmas story in some ghastly modern version, say the New English Bible. It would come up with many of the same points, plus the one about immediate intelligibility not being the most important thing, or even an important thing at all.
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