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| Introduction to English Literture(35576-01)(2018-1) |
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Theodore Roethke Theodore
(Huebner) Roethke (1908-1963), American poet, was born on 25 May 1908, the only
child of Helen Huebner and Otto Roethke. The latter ran a large and successful
commercial florist business with some twenty-five acres under glass, and
Roethke's experiences in these greenhouses would prove formative; as he wrote,
later in life: 'They were to me, both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created
in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere German Americans turned their
love of order and terrifying efficiency into something beautiful.' If the
family's greenhouses constituted a verdant paradise, then their demise
corresponded to the Fall; in 1922 a dispute between Roethke's father and uncle
(a partner in the business) resulted in their sale. Within a few months
Roethke's uncle had committed suicide, and in the following year his father died
of cancer, a sequence of events that profoundly traumatised the
thirteen-year-old Roethke.In
youth Roethke displayed equal facility in classroom and on the tennis court, and
after attending Saginaw's Arthur Hill High School, went on to study at the
University of Michigan. After a period of vacillation (during which he served as
a tennis coach) he devoted himself to the study and composition of verse,
although following graduation family pressure led him to spend an unhappy year
in law school, leaving to pursue postgraduate study at Michigan and later
Harvard. In 1931 Roethke took a post at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, where
he immediately distinguished himself as an energetic, unpredictable and
inspiring teacher. At Lafayette, Roethke met Louise Bogan whose poetry would
prove an important influence on his early work, and with whom, after a brief
affair, he enjoyed a lifelong friendship. This period also saw the establishment
of the pattern of heavy drinking that would remain a constant and detrimental
factor in Roethke's life. In 1935 he returned to Michigan to teach but during
his first semester suffered his first nervous breakdown, which resulted in
hospitalisation and the loss of his post. Roethke, who suffered from bi-polar
disorder, would suffer periodic bouts of mental illness, often precipitated by
his alcoholism and feverish commitment to the realisation of his artistic
vision.From
1936 to 1943 Roethke taught at Pennsylvania State University. Here he began to
collect and revise the poems he had been publishing in increasingly
distinguished periodicals into Open House , his first collection, published by
Knopf in 1941. Although well reviewed, notably by W.H. Auden , it was the work
of a poet still in thrall to his influences and desirous of demonstrating his
mastery of traditional prosody. This resulted in a costive, affected formalism;
mannered verse adhering to strict metrical schema, in the service of abstract,
nebulous themes. In marked contrast to his later work, Open House is largely
impersonal, devoid of the intense meditation on private experience and
personality that would become the defining feature of Roethke's art.Although
he had demonstrated his proficiency, Roethke had not yet found his own voice.
This discovery would necessitate a confrontation with his personal and familial
past. In 1943 he moved to Virginia to lecture at Bennington College, while in
1945 a second bi-polar episode resulted in hospitalisation. Roethke's
manuscripts suggest that the struggle to find and realise his unique idiom
pre-dated these events, but in the light of his subsequent verse some critics
have seen this in terms of a katabasis -- a descent into the underworld to
retrieve a personal prize. Certainly this experience, like his meeting (and
subsequent friendship) with Robert Lowell in 1947, provided a further impetus
for the 'journey to the interior' on which he had embarked.The
so-called 'Greenhouse Poems' that made up the first section of The Lost Son and
Other Poems (1948) announced the arrival of a major voice, signalling that
Roethke, having recognised his earliest work was 'rather dry in tone and
rhythm', had succeeded in his aim of writing poems of 'greater intensity and
symbolic depth'. Adopting a supple, affirmative free verse, the borrowed
abstractions of the Open House give way to an immersion in the particular. This
great leap forward is indissolubly bound to retrograde motion -- to the
greenhouses of his childhood understood as a 'symbol for the whole of life, a
womb, a heaven-on-earth'. The poems are distinguished by the pellucid detailing
of the emergence of organic life, with how 'One nub of growth / Nudges a
sand-crumb loose / Pokes through a musty sheath' ('Cuttings') and finds in such
a process a metaphor for the invisible yet herculean struggle for individuation;
'I can hear underground, that sucking and sobbing / In my veins, in my bones I
feel it -- / [. . .] The tight grains parting at last' ('Cuttings ( later )').
Yet this heaven on earth is also sinister, the life animating it inhuman in its
rude vitality, and kinship with death; thus 'Root Cellar' invokes a mephitic
domain of 'Roots ripe as old bait / [. . .] rank, silo-rich' or 'Lolling
obscenely from mildewed crates'. In addition to these poems the volume saw
Roethke continue his exploration of traditional forms (notably in the much
anthologised 'My Papa's Waltz'), while the volume's closing section, commencing
with the eponymous 'The Lost Son', initiated a sequence of what critic Karl
Markoff in 1966 termed Roethke's 'developmental poems'.These
poems, which took the form of experimental monologues subdivided into numbered
sections that often alternated between free verse and short quatrains, saw
Roethke explicitly engage with the trauma of psycho-spiritual emergence.
Sullivan (1975) describes them in the following terms: 'the poems appear to be
surrealistic juxtapositions of nursery rhymes, riddles, songs [. . .] Roethke is
imitating an Elizabethan tradition, that of the Bedlam beggar [. . .] stripped
of all pretences, who stands on the edge of incoherence, courting madness and
the recovery of sense'. On a personal level, this phase of Roethke's corpus is
an encounter with the legacy of his father's death; indeed 'The Lost Son' -- the
poem that inaugurates the cycle -- begins, 'At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry',
an allusion to the cemetery in which his father (as would Roethke) lay, and
Roethke's own illness.The
Lost Son was well received, and in its wake Roethke divided his time between
teaching and increasingly intense immersion in his own work, with the result
that in 1950 he was again hospitalised. The following year saw the publication
of his third collection Praise to the End! (1951), its title taken from
Wordsworth 's Prelude . However, Roethke's own account of the 'growth of the
poet's soul' is not written from the vantage of an achieved identity (as in The
Prelude ), but re-enacts from poem to poem the attempt to escape from the 'mire'
where 'man is no more than a shape writing from the rock'; thus 'the method is
cyclic. I believe that to go forward as a spiritual man it is necessary to go
back [. . .] There is a perpetual slipping back, then going forward; but there
is some "progress".' Here the mire is the inchoate domain of the preconscious,
and in attempting to convey this, through infantile vocabulary and nightmarish
illogical imagery, Roethke saw himself as participating in the lineage of 'mad'
poets: 'with the likes of Blake / And Christopher Smart / And that sweet man,
John Clare ' ('Heard in a Violent Ward').Roethke's
marriage to a former student from his time at Bennington, Beatrice O'Connell, in
early 1953 appears to have brought to a close this exploration of the
experimental interior monologue. Thus the new poems included in the Pulitzer
Prize-winning retrospective collection The Waking: Poems, 1933-1953 (1953) saw
Roethke return to the traditional prosody of his early verse while developing a
new-found concern with sexual love. In one of these, 'Four for John Davies',
Roethke appeared to reflect on his own poetic evolution: 'I take this cadence
from a man named Yeats / I take it and I give it back again / For other tunes [.
. .] / Have tossed my heart [. . .] / Yes, I was dancing mad'; this trajectory
was confirmed with the appearance of his next collection, Words for the Wind
(1958). Here, especially in the series of love poems that introduced the volume,
Roethke abandoned the 'dancing mad' poetic of his early poetry in order to
celebrate physical love with Yeatsian musicality and 'metaphysical' imagery (as
'The Swan' has it, '[. . .] I am John Donne / Whenever I see her with nothing
on'). The reception accorded Words for the Wind -- which saw Roethke awarded the
Boreston Mountain, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bollingen, Longview and National
Book awards, confirmed his position at the forefront of a major resurgence in
American verse, leading one reviewer to comment that, within it, he
'accomplished a language which many of the best poets of his age [. . .] among
them Lowell and Berryman , have been dreaming and working toward' ( W.D.
Snodgrass , Poetry , 1958). However, it was the volume's final sequence
('Meditations of an Old Woman') that marked the true realisation of Roethke's
poetic vision. Ostensibly a series of reflections by its narrator as she
approaches death, it shows Roethke integrating the disparate themes and motifs
of his verse into a unified whole. In 'Meditations of an Old Woman' the implicit
tension between an immersion in the natural world and a traumatic realisation of
death -- such that the latter effectively shatters the covenant apparently
offered by the former, which initiates the enquiry into identity that is an
abiding concern of Roethke's verse -- is finally resolved. 'I no longer cry for
green in the midst of cinders, / Or dream of the dead, and their holes': death's
approach does not countermand nature but becomes the catalyst of its
re-enchantment, permitting access to '[. . .] the still joy: / the wasp drinking
at the edge of my cup / A snake lifting up its head; / A snail's
music'.Although
Roethke's next volume, I am Says the Lamb (1961), was a collection of light
verse, his final years saw him consolidate this poetic breakthrough, so that at
the time of his unexpected death from a heart attack in 1962, he had completed
what is generally regarded as his crowning achievement, the 'North American
Sequence'. The opening section of the posthumously published The Far Field
(1964), the 'North American Sequence' consisted of six poems in the lithe free
verse that characterised his 'Meditations of an Old Woman'. Within them Roethke
offered startling images drawn from both the landscapes of his midwestern
childhood and the Pacific North West in which he spent the majority of his adult
life, and through their delicately delineated flora and fauna delivered a summa
of his perennial theme: the growth of the psyche as reflected in nature. In
keeping with his belief that process was intermittent, images of spiritual
torpor (the 'agony of crucifixion on barstools') and trauma of the discovery of
death in the midst of fecundity (the lesson of the 'eternal' in a child's
discovery of the 'tom-cat, caught near the pheasant run / Its entrails strewn
over the half-grown flowers') alternate with moments of epiphany ( 'when the
small drop forms, but does not fall / I have known the heart of the sun'),
without arriving at a final illumination. The measure of Roethke's achievement
was reflected in the response of his fellow poets, Berryman and Lowell both
commemorating his passing in verse; and in Plath and Hughes 's respective
responses to his verse, one drawing on his fearless sounding of the depths of
his troubled psyche, the other on his preternatural attentiveness to the
minutiae of nature's workings.Roethke's
work has been the subject of a number of monographs, including R.A. Blessing's
Theodore Roethke's Dynamic Vision (1974), Rosemary Sullivan 's Theodore Roethke:
The Garden Master (1975), Jay Parini 's Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic
(1974) and Peter Balakian 's Theodore Roethke's Far Fields: The Evolution of his
Poetry , which have variously treated Roethke's art in terms of its relation to
the wider confessional turn in American verse; as an expression of the personal
turmoil of its author's life; as an instance of an ongoing 'Orphic' or
Emersonian tradition of American romanticism; and in terms of its complex
intertextual dialogue with its precursors (including Whitman , Donne , Eliot and
Yeats ). Selections of Roethke's prose drawn from essays, correspondence and
notebooks -- sources of invaluable insights into his methods of composition and
poetics -- can be found in R.A. Mills's On the Poet and his Craft: Selected
Prose of Theodore Roethke (1965) and Selected Letters (1968), and David Wagoner
's Straw for the Fire: Selections from Theodore Roethke's Notebooks 1943-1963
(1972). Alan Segar's biography The Glass House (1968) remains the best source of
information on the poet's life.
Roethke, Theodore, 1908-1963.
from Literature Online biography
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Theodore Roethke
Theodore
(Huebner) Roethke (1908-1963), American poet, was born on 25 May 1908, the only
child of Helen Huebner and Otto Roethke. The latter ran a large and successful
commercial florist business with some twenty-five acres under glass, and
Roethke's experiences in these greenhouses would prove formative; as he wrote,
later in life: 'They were to me, both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created
in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere German Americans turned their
love of order and terrifying efficiency into something beautiful.' If the
family's greenhouses constituted a verdant paradise, then their demise
corresponded to the Fall; in 1922 a dispute between Roethke's father and uncle
(a partner in the business) resulted in their sale. Within a few months
Roethke's uncle had committed suicide, and in the following year his father died
of cancer, a sequence of events that profoundly traumatised the
thirteen-year-old Roethke.
In
youth Roethke displayed equal facility in classroom and on the tennis court, and
after attending Saginaw's Arthur Hill High School, went on to study at the
University of Michigan. After a period of vacillation (during which he served as
a tennis coach) he devoted himself to the study and composition of verse,
although following graduation family pressure led him to spend an unhappy year
in law school, leaving to pursue postgraduate study at Michigan and later
Harvard. In 1931 Roethke took a post at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, where
he immediately distinguished himself as an energetic, unpredictable and
inspiring teacher. At Lafayette, Roethke met Louise Bogan whose poetry would
prove an important influence on his early work, and with whom, after a brief
affair, he enjoyed a lifelong friendship. This period also saw the establishment
of the pattern of heavy drinking that would remain a constant and detrimental
factor in Roethke's life. In 1935 he returned to Michigan to teach but during
his first semester suffered his first nervous breakdown, which resulted in
hospitalisation and the loss of his post. Roethke, who suffered from bi-polar
disorder, would suffer periodic bouts of mental illness, often precipitated by
his alcoholism and feverish commitment to the realisation of his artistic
vision.
From
1936 to 1943 Roethke taught at Pennsylvania State University. Here he began to
collect and revise the poems he had been publishing in increasingly
distinguished periodicals into Open House , his first collection, published by
Knopf in 1941. Although well reviewed, notably by W.H. Auden , it was the work
of a poet still in thrall to his influences and desirous of demonstrating his
mastery of traditional prosody. This resulted in a costive, affected formalism;
mannered verse adhering to strict metrical schema, in the service of abstract,
nebulous themes. In marked contrast to his later work, Open House is largely
impersonal, devoid of the intense meditation on private experience and
personality that would become the defining feature of Roethke's art.
Although
he had demonstrated his proficiency, Roethke had not yet found his own voice.
This discovery would necessitate a confrontation with his personal and familial
past. In 1943 he moved to Virginia to lecture at Bennington College, while in
1945 a second bi-polar episode resulted in hospitalisation. Roethke's
manuscripts suggest that the struggle to find and realise his unique idiom
pre-dated these events, but in the light of his subsequent verse some critics
have seen this in terms of a katabasis -- a descent into the underworld to
retrieve a personal prize. Certainly this experience, like his meeting (and
subsequent friendship) with Robert Lowell in 1947, provided a further impetus
for the 'journey to the interior' on which he had embarked.
The
so-called 'Greenhouse Poems' that made up the first section of The Lost Son and
Other Poems (1948) announced the arrival of a major voice, signalling that
Roethke, having recognised his earliest work was 'rather dry in tone and
rhythm', had succeeded in his aim of writing poems of 'greater intensity and
symbolic depth'. Adopting a supple, affirmative free verse, the borrowed
abstractions of the Open House give way to an immersion in the particular. This
great leap forward is indissolubly bound to retrograde motion -- to the
greenhouses of his childhood understood as a 'symbol for the whole of life, a
womb, a heaven-on-earth'. The poems are distinguished by the pellucid detailing
of the emergence of organic life, with how 'One nub of growth / Nudges a
sand-crumb loose / Pokes through a musty sheath' ('Cuttings') and finds in such
a process a metaphor for the invisible yet herculean struggle for individuation;
'I can hear underground, that sucking and sobbing / In my veins, in my bones I
feel it -- / [. . .] The tight grains parting at last' ('Cuttings ( later )').
Yet this heaven on earth is also sinister, the life animating it inhuman in its
rude vitality, and kinship with death; thus 'Root Cellar' invokes a mephitic
domain of 'Roots ripe as old bait / [. . .] rank, silo-rich' or 'Lolling
obscenely from mildewed crates'. In addition to these poems the volume saw
Roethke continue his exploration of traditional forms (notably in the much
anthologised 'My Papa's Waltz'), while the volume's closing section, commencing
with the eponymous 'The Lost Son', initiated a sequence of what critic Karl
Markoff in 1966 termed Roethke's 'developmental poems'.
These
poems, which took the form of experimental monologues subdivided into numbered
sections that often alternated between free verse and short quatrains, saw
Roethke explicitly engage with the trauma of psycho-spiritual emergence.
Sullivan (1975) describes them in the following terms: 'the poems appear to be
surrealistic juxtapositions of nursery rhymes, riddles, songs [. . .] Roethke is
imitating an Elizabethan tradition, that of the Bedlam beggar [. . .] stripped
of all pretences, who stands on the edge of incoherence, courting madness and
the recovery of sense'. On a personal level, this phase of Roethke's corpus is
an encounter with the legacy of his father's death; indeed 'The Lost Son' -- the
poem that inaugurates the cycle -- begins, 'At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry',
an allusion to the cemetery in which his father (as would Roethke) lay, and
Roethke's own illness.
The
Lost Son was well received, and in its wake Roethke divided his time between
teaching and increasingly intense immersion in his own work, with the result
that in 1950 he was again hospitalised. The following year saw the publication
of his third collection Praise to the End! (1951), its title taken from
Wordsworth 's Prelude . However, Roethke's own account of the 'growth of the
poet's soul' is not written from the vantage of an achieved identity (as in The
Prelude ), but re-enacts from poem to poem the attempt to escape from the 'mire'
where 'man is no more than a shape writing from the rock'; thus 'the method is
cyclic. I believe that to go forward as a spiritual man it is necessary to go
back [. . .] There is a perpetual slipping back, then going forward; but there
is some "progress".' Here the mire is the inchoate domain of the preconscious,
and in attempting to convey this, through infantile vocabulary and nightmarish
illogical imagery, Roethke saw himself as participating in the lineage of 'mad'
poets: 'with the likes of Blake / And Christopher Smart / And that sweet man,
John Clare ' ('Heard in a Violent Ward').
Roethke's
marriage to a former student from his time at Bennington, Beatrice O'Connell, in
early 1953 appears to have brought to a close this exploration of the
experimental interior monologue. Thus the new poems included in the Pulitzer
Prize-winning retrospective collection The Waking: Poems, 1933-1953 (1953) saw
Roethke return to the traditional prosody of his early verse while developing a
new-found concern with sexual love. In one of these, 'Four for John Davies',
Roethke appeared to reflect on his own poetic evolution: 'I take this cadence
from a man named Yeats / I take it and I give it back again / For other tunes [.
. .] / Have tossed my heart [. . .] / Yes, I was dancing mad'; this trajectory
was confirmed with the appearance of his next collection, Words for the Wind
(1958). Here, especially in the series of love poems that introduced the volume,
Roethke abandoned the 'dancing mad' poetic of his early poetry in order to
celebrate physical love with Yeatsian musicality and 'metaphysical' imagery (as
'The Swan' has it, '[. . .] I am John Donne / Whenever I see her with nothing
on'). The reception accorded Words for the Wind -- which saw Roethke awarded the
Boreston Mountain, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bollingen, Longview and National
Book awards, confirmed his position at the forefront of a major resurgence in
American verse, leading one reviewer to comment that, within it, he
'accomplished a language which many of the best poets of his age [. . .] among
them Lowell and Berryman , have been dreaming and working toward' ( W.D.
Snodgrass , Poetry , 1958). However, it was the volume's final sequence
('Meditations of an Old Woman') that marked the true realisation of Roethke's
poetic vision. Ostensibly a series of reflections by its narrator as she
approaches death, it shows Roethke integrating the disparate themes and motifs
of his verse into a unified whole. In 'Meditations of an Old Woman' the implicit
tension between an immersion in the natural world and a traumatic realisation of
death -- such that the latter effectively shatters the covenant apparently
offered by the former, which initiates the enquiry into identity that is an
abiding concern of Roethke's verse -- is finally resolved. 'I no longer cry for
green in the midst of cinders, / Or dream of the dead, and their holes': death's
approach does not countermand nature but becomes the catalyst of its
re-enchantment, permitting access to '[. . .] the still joy: / the wasp drinking
at the edge of my cup / A snake lifting up its head; / A snail's
music'.
Although
Roethke's next volume, I am Says the Lamb (1961), was a collection of light
verse, his final years saw him consolidate this poetic breakthrough, so that at
the time of his unexpected death from a heart attack in 1962, he had completed
what is generally regarded as his crowning achievement, the 'North American
Sequence'. The opening section of the posthumously published The Far Field
(1964), the 'North American Sequence' consisted of six poems in the lithe free
verse that characterised his 'Meditations of an Old Woman'. Within them Roethke
offered startling images drawn from both the landscapes of his midwestern
childhood and the Pacific North West in which he spent the majority of his adult
life, and through their delicately delineated flora and fauna delivered a summa
of his perennial theme: the growth of the psyche as reflected in nature. In
keeping with his belief that process was intermittent, images of spiritual
torpor (the 'agony of crucifixion on barstools') and trauma of the discovery of
death in the midst of fecundity (the lesson of the 'eternal' in a child's
discovery of the 'tom-cat, caught near the pheasant run / Its entrails strewn
over the half-grown flowers') alternate with moments of epiphany ( 'when the
small drop forms, but does not fall / I have known the heart of the sun'),
without arriving at a final illumination. The measure of Roethke's achievement
was reflected in the response of his fellow poets, Berryman and Lowell both
commemorating his passing in verse; and in Plath and Hughes 's respective
responses to his verse, one drawing on his fearless sounding of the depths of
his troubled psyche, the other on his preternatural attentiveness to the
minutiae of nature's workings.
Roethke's
work has been the subject of a number of monographs, including R.A. Blessing's
Theodore Roethke's Dynamic Vision (1974), Rosemary Sullivan 's Theodore Roethke:
The Garden Master (1975), Jay Parini 's Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic
(1974) and Peter Balakian 's Theodore Roethke's Far Fields: The Evolution of his
Poetry , which have variously treated Roethke's art in terms of its relation to
the wider confessional turn in American verse; as an expression of the personal
turmoil of its author's life; as an instance of an ongoing 'Orphic' or
Emersonian tradition of American romanticism; and in terms of its complex
intertextual dialogue with its precursors (including Whitman , Donne , Eliot and
Yeats ). Selections of Roethke's prose drawn from essays, correspondence and
notebooks -- sources of invaluable insights into his methods of composition and
poetics -- can be found in R.A. Mills's On the Poet and his Craft: Selected
Prose of Theodore Roethke (1965) and Selected Letters (1968), and David Wagoner
's Straw for the Fire: Selections from Theodore Roethke's Notebooks 1943-1963
(1972). Alan Segar's biography The Glass House (1968) remains the best source of
information on the poet's life.
Roethke, Theodore, 1908-1963.
from Literature Online biography
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