Life & Wisdom Quote by Theodore Roethke

A poet asking for “more people who specialize in the impossible” isn’t lobbying for delusion; he’s taking a swing at the cult of the merely practical. The line works because it borrows the language of bureaucracy and industry - “specialize” - then slams it into a word that refuses credentialing. You can major in accounting. You can’t major in the impossible. That friction is the point: Roethke makes imagination sound like a job category, and in doing so, indicts a culture that treats value as whatever can be measured, shipped, or cited.

Roethke’s intent carries his mid-century context: postwar America’s confidence in systems, expertise, and productivity, plus the Cold War’s obsession with technological solutions. In that climate, “impossible” reads less like fantasy than like the necessary frontier - the kind of thinking that produces new art, new science, new politics. The subtext is a defense of risk and failure as civic virtues. Specialists of the impossible are the people willing to look foolish first: artists, yes, but also anyone who refuses to accept the current limits as natural law.

There’s also a quieter self-portrait embedded here. Roethke, whose work turns inner weather into craft, is arguing for the legitimacy of the irrational, the intuitive, the half-known. The impossible isn’t an endpoint; it’s a working method. By framing it as specialization, he elevates daring into discipline: not a mood, a practice.