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 The 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