Theodore Roethke
SINCE THEODORE ROETHKE'S sudden, untimely death in summer of 1963, his work has been the subject of a steadily rising flood of critical assessments. The consensus of most of them is that his career can best be explained as an intense search for identity, wholeness, and grace. He shaped his private meditations into increasingly powerful esthetic forms that are at once original and charged with echoes from his various American and English poet-masters. A further aspect of Roethke's imaginative vision, however, remains to be adequately explored, namely his significant response to a regional America–the Midwest of his youth and, climactically, the Pacific Northwest where he lived his final sixteen years.
Roethke arrived in the Northwest
in autumn of 1947 to teach poetry at the University of Washington,
which remained his academic address until his death. The move
from Penn State westward marked the crucial turning point in
his career and the beginning of a serious identification with
place in America. There were, of course, hints of regional identity
in Roethke from the earlier period as he alternately suppressed,
deplored, and finally embraced his Midwest origins. Born in 1908
in Saginaw, Michigan, the son of a strong-willed, Germanic father
who operated the local greenhouse, he lived an introverted, troubled
childhood that bred lifelong demons of guilt and insecurity.
His biographer Allan Seager portrays, and somewhat oversimplifies,
Roethke as a self-absorbed youth who scarcely felt a spirit of
place in his Upper Midwest:
There is no memory of Roethke hanging
around the old folks listening, like Faulkner, and his old folks
were German, anyway. Their stories would have led him back to
the Old Country which never interested him. He also ignores all
the vivid racy tales of the lumber boom, tales that expressed
courage, will, and cunning that might have engaged another man.
Unlike Allen Tate or Robert Lowell, he ignores in his poetry
the events of his region's history. He must have been aware of
the Indians, for he collected a shoebox full of flint arrowheads
in his rambles along the riverbanks. But, of course, many boys did that.
Still, the environs of Saginaw and the Upper Midwest were implanted in a young poetic consciousness as a seminal force in the work to come. After graduation from Michigan and a year at Harvard, Roethke taught at Lafayette, returning home in 1935 to teach at Michigan State. In fall semester, he suffered a first mental breakdown. During convalescence, he recorded the following insight about himself in a long medical questionnaire: "Afraid of being localized in space, i.e. a particular place like W. E. Leonard in Madison. Question: What is the name of this? Hate some rooms in that sense, a victim of claustrophobia (sp)? Wasn't Dillinger a victim of this? Aren't many of the criminal leader types of this sort [sic]" (The illuminating reference to Dillinger discloses Roethke's self-image of the poet as an outsider in the Midwest community, and recalls the alienation he felt even earlier: in one of his college essays at the University of Michigan, he had discussed "the poet as criminal,"the instance being François Villon.)
His first two books of poetry firmly support a one-sided thesis
that the
maturing Roethke was never a midwestern
regionalist, either by sympathetic identity or literary example.
The year before Open House appeared in 1941, ten of the
poems were anthologized in a volume titled New Michigan Verse.
Hungry for a reputation, Roethke was delighted to be published,
but he worried, too, that he might be regarded as a merely regional
poet. Yet shortly after, he applied for a Guggenheim grant to
write "a series of poems about the America I knew in my
middle-western childhood. . . . poems about people in a particular
suburbia." Though he failed to receive the grant, Roethke persisted,
and in his successful Guggenheim application three years later,
he described two of his three projects as the writing of a distinctively
regional verse:
(1) a dramatic-narrative piece in prose and verse about Michigan
and Wisconsin, past and present, which would center around the
return of Paul Bunyan as a kind of enlightened and worldly folk-hero.
(2) a series of lyrics about the Michigan countryside which have
symbolical values. I have already begun these. They are not mere
description, but have at least two levels of reference.
To William Carlos Williams, who would understand this regional
program, Roethke worried over "the Paul Bunyan idea. The
more I think about it, the less I like it. But I've got to get
some device to organize some of my ideas & feelings about
Michigan, etc.–not too solemn or God bless America or Steve
Benétish. Maybe it's worth trying, anyway." When The
Lost Son appeared in 1948, readers would not discover Roethke's
early "ideas & feelings about Michigan" to be organized
around the Bunyan folk-hero; instead, he had created a primordial
myth of the child's Edenic greenhouse
world. But the urge to regional description
and symbolization, as well as to natural immersion and union,
had begun. After 1947 in his adopted Northwest, Roethke increasingly
drew from Michigan scenes of his childhood. The Midwest lived
in the residue of memory, at times bitter yet also positive and
cherished, to sustain the older poet and enrich the strong poems
that grace his final, prizewinning years.
As it would predictably have to
be for the mercurial Roethke, the final period in the Pacific
Northwest became an intense love-hate affair with the regional
culture and geography. After only a few months there, his life
amounted to a sort of physical and spiritual exile. "I tell
you, Kenneth," he wrote to Burke, "this far in the provinces
you get a little nutty and hysterical: there's the feeling that
all life is going on but you're not there." Within the year,
he had reverted to the earlier self-characterization of the poet
as at best an outlaw celebrity in his tame middle-class community.
"As the only serious poet within 1,000 miles of Seattle,"
he wrote another friend in the East, "I find I have something
of the status of a bank robber in Oklahoma or a congressman in
the deep south." Throughout his tenure at the University of Washington,
he inquired into jobs elsewhere or applied for Fulbrights and
other grants that might bring him relief or delivery from the
scene at Seattle and the University. This alienation was caused,
in part, by what to him was a psychologically depressing climate
in the Northwest. The region also affected him physically, exacerbating
the arthritis in his knees, the "spurs" in his shoulders,
and the bursitis in his tennis elbow (the fiercely competitive
poet had been tennis coach both at Lafayette and Penn
State).
Yet the Northwest had an immediate,
salutary effect on the poet as well. Some eleven years before,
a bookless Roethke in Michigan had lamented to Louise Bogan on
his twenty-eighth birthday, "No volume out and I can't seem
to write anything. You can say what you want, but place does
have a lot to do with productivity." By contrast, he exploded
with ideas and poems after he arrived in Seattle, as one discovers
from the Northwest images and tropes coming alive in the extant
notebooks, in their disciplined growth amid the felicitous prunings
of the manuscript poems, and in the final harvest of the published
work. Through the 1950s, the huge, unlikely poet-teacher had
caused an excited flowering of poetry on the Washington campus
and in the Seattle community. By the end of the decade he brought
home to the Northwest all the major literary prizes in America.
He was earning a place among the distinguished regional poets
of our literature.
The nature of Roethke's regional
expression has only begun to be appreciated. His first book of
poems in the Northwest appeared in 1951. Praise to the End
! is a "tensed-up" version of Wordsworth's Prelude,
according to Roethke, and carries nine new poems which can
be read, in one sense, as his completing the "lean-to beginnings"
in the previous Lost Son collection. Once more he tracks
his voyage of the mind's return to the dream logic, Mother Goose
rhythms, and purposeful gibberish of childhood, and then back
again to the varieties of rebirth after these mythic descents.
Oblique and occasionally even direct influences from his early
Northwest years can be recognized here and there in the expression
and form of these verses.
A stronger promise of the regional poems to come appears in the
new verses of his next book, The Waking: Poems 1933–1953
(1953). "A Light Breather," to select one, reveals a
joyous dynamism of the spirit, "small" and "tethered"
as before but now "unafraid" and "singing." Symptomatic
of a new phase, too, are poems like "Elegy for Jane," totally
inspired from Northwest experience, and the more ambitious efforts
which show the poet escaping from his former prison of the self
to engage the circumambient world and the being of other living
creatures. Just before the book appeared, he had married Beatrice
O'Connell, his student during the year at Bennington a decade
before. Seager believes that Roethke's marriage presently led
him to a decisive awareness of the Northwest surroundings. As
his capacity for feeling reached out to his young Beatrice, "hesitantly,
even reluctantly perhaps, he admitted her into those labyrinths
within himself where his father still lived, and he began to
love her, not in the same way that he loved his father but with
a true love nevertheless. And from this time forward, she participated
in his growth, encouraged and supported it. Then he could see
the mountains, the siskins, the madronas, and begin to use them."
Viewed in this regard, segments of the next book, Words for
the Wind (1958), and especially the "Love Poems," when
thoroughly studied for their passionate metaphors of wind and
seafoam, light and stones and rippling water as "spirit
and nature beat in one breastbone," reveal the true beginnings
of that distinctive Northwest sensibility which fully emerges
in Roethke's subsequent poems, gathered in the posthumous The
Far Field (1964).
The title poem of Roethke's final volume comes from the "North
American Sequence,"the great achievement of this last book and
Roethke's finest effort in the vein of literary regionalism.
In the years to come, the six interlaced long poems of the "North
American Sequence" may rank among the great ambitious poetic
works of the language. The genesis of the sequence may be traced,
in one fashion, to the summer of 1950. Roethke had bought his
first car and had driven it back to Seattle. The trip created
the stirrings of a "symbolical journey,"his own spiritual
version of a Northwest passage. It suggested "for next or
possibly later book . . . a happy journey westward"; but there
would be a uniquely Roethkean variation of this traditional passage–"in
a word, a symbolical journey in my cheap Buick Special toward
Alaska and, at least in a spiritual sense toward the east of
Russia and the Mongolian Plains whence came my own people, the
Prussians. . . ."
By the end of the decade, Roethke had modified this journey to
an exclusively North American and ultimately regional experience.
What he developed, in fact, is an intricate triple motif of outer-inner
journeys. First is the Northwest passage to the dark oceanic
"stretch in the face of death," and the periodic resolution
experienced at the Pacific Coast shoreline, a journey out to
the physical "edge" and metaphysical "beyond" and then
back to reconciliation "where sea and fresh water meet"
in the Northwest comer. The second passage or journey is a return
to his origins, a movement eastward to the Michigan of his father's
greenhouse and childhood years. Third is a "journey to the
interior," imaged in an inland American geography perhaps equivalent,
temporally, to the middle period of Roethke's initial breakdown
in what he once termed that "Siberian pitilessness, the
essential ruthlessness of the Middle West."
Of the three journeys, the Northwest passage is by far the richest
and most dominant in the six poems of the sequence. Roethke gathers
within it the shifting motifs of selfhood within the Northwest's
natural plenitude, identifications with birds, fish, trees, and
flowers (and occasionally as relief, with the stillness of rocks,
clam shells, driftwood, and nature's minimals); the imagery of
edges, abysses, and thresholds; the desire for convergence, resolution
and union with the natural scene of salt water, fresh water,
air, and earth; and on occasions, when blessedly aided by the
soft regional light and wind, a felt convergence, with shimmerings
of transcendence and
beatitude.
Roethke establishes these interwoven
journeys and themes and alternating rhythms in the first poem,
"The Longing," and then carries the reader forward to a
longed-for passage, finally with an American Indian vigor of
exploration, toward the threshold of full spiritual awareness.
The poem opens in bleak rain as the Northwest scene, natural
and manmade, fumes in its putrefaction. We are then launched
on one more characteristic Roethkean voyage of the mutilated
modern soul in its tormented quest for light and wholeness, but
this time through a heightened relationship with a western landscape
at once visible, personal, and charged with historical memory.
The speaker anticipates a version of the legendary Indian vision
quest, a rite of passage into the North American interior.
. . . the mouth of the night is still wide;
Does the aging spirit dare to go primitive?
No, if subjected to the ruthless plains of the interior. Yes,
if sustained amid the inland waters.
"Meditation at Oyster River," the second
poem, begins at twilight on the east coast of Vancouver Island.
Roethke's explorer looks eastward to the "first tide-ripples,"
briefly immerses his feet in the water, and then partakes of
earth and air as well by ascending to a perch on the cliffside.
In the Northwest "twilight wind, light as a child's breath,"
the spirit quivers with alertness. A soundless pause has readied
the time for meditation after urgent longing in the previous
poem. The speaker takes us now on a backward motion toward the
source, to "the first trembling of a Michigan brook in April."
He feels the quickenings of a younger spirit which, like the
melting Tittebawasee in early spring, could awaken, expand, and
burst forward into a new season of becoming. The meditation returns
to Oyster River and closes with the harmonious resolution of
youth and age as he is "lulled into half-sleep" in a Whitman-like
sea-cradle. After his journey back to Michigan and forward once
more to the waters of the Northwest, he merges now in quiet joy
with the waves and the intrepid birds of the coastline.
Arrivals on the threshold of naturalistic grace are momentary
and precarious. In the third poem, "Journey to the Interior,"
the speaker returns to the yawning mouth of the night which awaited
him at the close of "The Longing." He now embarks on a second
American journey into the past, between Michigan beginnings and
Northwest consummations, which takes the form of an actual trip
westward through the North American interior. The second section
concludes as he advances through the western prairies and beyond
the Tetons. The past merges with the present, the random fluidity
of the land journey is abated, and "time folds / Into a
long moment" for the youth become, in the remembrance, confident
father of the troubled man. In the final section, he still feels
his "soul at a still-stand," but this time with a difference.
Reconciled to change and death, united with the soft elements
of his region, he can "breathe with the birds" while he
stands "unperplexed" looking out on the Pacific scene. All
extremes dissolve on that "other side of light," and
"The Long Waters" was apparently written after but appears
before "The Far Field." Presumably, Roethke felt the need
for a tranquil, sustained meditation piece to separate "Journey
to the Interior" from "The Far Field" (which was once titled
"Journeys"). "The Long Waters" occurs in a setting
closely resembling Oyster River. The poem moves quietly among
three Roethkean stages–retrogression (closing at times to
infantile regression), thresholds, and convergence. These movements
are experienced largely in Northwest images without the backward
journey motifs of the previous poems. Roethke creates, instead,
an alternating rhythm of gentle ebbing and flowing, action and
reaction, that climaxes when the undulant long waters attenuate
in the long poetic line and shape for the speaker a transformed
moment of union and renewal:
With "The Far Field," the journey becomes
an extended return to a timeless childhood, presumably in Michigan,
and to moments of immanence in that "far field, the windy
cliffs of forever, / The dying of time in the white light of
tomorrow." When he returns to the adult's present, the speaker
can sense "a weightless change, a moving forward." The poem
rises into gentle transcendence. The "finite things" which
in previous lines of the sequence recalled "a vulnerable
place" or a disturbing juxtaposition of death and life, now compose
a constellation of Northwest images that the tranquil mind discovers
to be the shape of "infinitude."
The final poem, "The Rose," sums up and completes the "North
American Sequence." All three of the American journey-motifs
are here, together with all of the inner stages of the soul and
their supporting images. More fully than any of the preceding
single poems, "The Rose" is Roethke's Northwest poetic creation
par excellence. He begins at the Northwest seacoast:
He then draws the bountiful natural life into this ultimate song of himself. In the next
fifteen lines, he describes some dozen Northwest birds and at
the same time, predictably, he unites them to air, earth, and
water. He no longer requires the agonizing interior journey through
and out of the perplexed self. He can "sway outside myself
/ Into the darkening currents" with the quiet grace of the intrepid
hawks he has just described.
Still, in its apparently buoyant ease of passage, his spirit
feels obscurely troubled, somehow adrift and incomplete. The
realization he is seeking now approaches on the Northwest shoreline
before his feet. His guide to final union and grace is the single
"rose in the sea-wind," the transcendent rose he had briefly
invoked in "The Longing." Its own excuse for being, the
wild rose silently instructs by a dynamic staying "in its
true place," by "flowering out of the dark," widening in
noonday light, and stubbornly resisting encroachment upon its
solitary life. The meditation upon the individualized wild rose
leads the speaker associatively to one final journey to the greenhouse
world of his childhood. In the reminiscence, the aged man repossesses
the glories he had known when "those flowerheads seemed
to flow toward me, to beckon me, only a child, out of myself."
The child had merged with the roses and both had flourished in
the bountiful Eden created by his sufficient, protective father.
The childhood memory then triggers the other, or later, journey
into the past. Section three first echoes the early morning "sound
and silence" of the Northwest scene in the opening lines of the
poem. We are then taken on a last journey into the "interior,"
to gather up and catalog the inland "American sounds in
this silence"–a Whitmanian excursion among industrial noises,
the bravuras of birds, "the ticking of snow around oil drums
in the Dakotas, / The thin whine of telephone wires in the wind
of a Michigan winter," and more. His second journey eastward
into the past completed, the old explorer has reached the final
definition of himself. His question in "The Longing" had
been "How to transcend this sensual emptiness?" He has discovered
the answer: the sensual emptiness has been transcended in the
sensual fullness of the Whitman-Roethke gatherings of American
plenitude, as in these fluid interior "American sounds in
this silence." And this possession, be it noted, has occurred
within a primary context of the regional. Thanks to the final
journeys of private and native–and esthetic–self-realization
that were stimulated by the rose's expansive self-containment,
he has again embraced his present world, his Northwest, and can
rejoice equally with the bird, the lilac, and the dolphin in
the calm and change which they accept in air, land, and water.
In the lovely closing lines, he absorbs in his controlling solitary
symbol the diversity of experience and imagery in this climactic
poem.
And so ends an intensive drive toward definition
of the many Roethkean selves, of the perplexed American in his
country and his region. Even Roethke's "drive toward God"
was climaxed in the ultimate landscape of the "Sequence."
The northern coast and oceanic far field of his adopted region
served him perfectly to frame and extend his religious journeys
in and out of time and space and even to resolve them in fleeting
moments of joyous, tranquil union.
"The Rose" appeared in a magazine
one month before Roethke died of a heart attack while swimming
in a private pool on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Returned
to the physical regimen of earlier years, the restless, hard-driving
poet was seriously charting in his notebook a new approach to
western experience, this time through an epic poem on the North
American Indian. His structural device would be, once more, a
passage across the nation's heartland. The speaker would stop
to commemorate the scenes of tragic undoing which various tribes
suffered at the hands of the white marauders and military. In
this epic drama, which he hoped to create "through suggestive
and highly charged symbolical language," the heroic figures,
indicated in his notes, were to include the Nez Percé's
Chief Joseph, the Oglala's Black Elk and Crazy Horse, as well
as white adversaries like Generals Custer and Crook. Six large
notebook pages are all that remain among his papers to suggest
the mood, landscape, and action of his projected saga. Conceived
at the full maturity of his powers, the poem may well have exceeded
in imaginative range even the regional poems of The Far Field.
At his death, Roethke had only begun to open the way to a
new enrichment of western American literature. The extraordinary
verses of his final book, however, remain an invaluable legacy
for regional writers of the future to build upon as they embark
on their own poetic journeys toward discovery and definition
of a Northwest ethos.
KERMIT VANDERBILT, San Dego State University
1. Poetry (in chronological order)
Open House. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941.
2. Prose
On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke. Edited with an introduction by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965.
Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke. Edited with an introduction by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.
Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943–63. Selected and arranged by David Wagoner. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972.
3. Unpublished Sources
Special collections and repositories around the country are listed in McLeod's Bibliography and Manuscript Checklist (see below). The Theodore Roethke Papers, University of Washington Libraries, is the largest collection
of documents. It includes correspondence (1928–70), notebooks
(1930–63), literary manuscripts, teaching
notes, clippings, annotated books, and recordings of public readings.
Criticism and Biography
Blessing, Richard A. Theodore Roethke's Dynamic Vision. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974. The best study of Roethke's style in the service
of his developing vision.
Bowers, Neal. Theodore Roethke:
The Journey from I to Otherwise. Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1982. Roethke's "manic-depressiveness" is
seen as beneficial to the poet's intensive search for identity
and mystical union in all of his books.
LaBelle, Jenijoy. The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1976. Interpretive study of Roethke's borrowings, mainly
from English and American poets.
Malkoff, Karl. Theodore Roethke:
An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1966. Explication of the works, in chronological order,
against the background of Roethke's evolving poetic style.
Mills, Ralph J., Jr. Theodore Roethke. University of Minnesota
Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 30. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1963. The first comprehensive essay on Roethke's
career.
Parini, Jay. Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. Emphasis
on development of romantic influences and characteristics that
highlight the Edenic-greenhouse center of Roethke's best work.
Seager, Allan. The Glass House:
The Life of Theodore Roethke. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
The authorized biography, it is hampered by failure to receive
permission to quote from the poems.
Sullivan, Rosemary. Theodore
Roethke: The Garden Master. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1975. Relates the poems to nature, mysticism, psychology,
paternal influence, and other poets.
Vanderbilt, Kermit. "Theodore
Roethke as a Northwest Poet." In Northwest Perspectives: Essays
on the Culture of the Pacific Northwest, edited by Edwin
R. Bingham and Glen A. Love. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1979. Greatly expands the treatment of Roethke and regionalism
in the present literary history.
Williams, Harry. "The Edge
Is What I Have": Theodore Roethke and After. Lewisburg,
Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1977. Attempts to define Roethke's
characteristic mode and his influence on several modern poets.
Concordance and Bibliographies
Lane, Gary, ed. A Concordance of the Poems
of Theodore Roethke. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972.
McLeod, James R. Theodore Roethke:
A Bibliography. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press,
1973. Divided into works and materials by and about Roethke.
Extensive and helpful, it lists reviews of the poetry volumes.
Moul, Keith R. Theodore Roethke's Career:
An Annotated Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Writings
by and about Roethke from 1922 to 1973. The criticism is annotated.
Robbins, Albert, and James Woodress,
eds. American Literary Scholarship: An Annual. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963–present. Includes annual
comment on the foremost articles and books on Roethke.
On the Bullhead, in the Dakotas, where the eagles eat well,
In the country of few lakes, in the tall buffalo grass at the base of the clay buttes . . .
Old men should be explorers?
I'll be an Indian.
Ogalala?
Iroquois.
The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessing,
And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.
My eyes extend beyond the farthest bloom of the waves;
I lose and find myself in the long water;
I am gathered together once more.
I embrace the world.
There are those to whom place is unimportant,
But this place, where sea and fresh water meet,
Is important–
[I rejoiced] in this rose, this rose in the sea-wind,
Rooted in stone, keeping the whole of light,
Gathering to itself sound and silence–
Mine and the sea-wind's.
The Lost Son and Other Poems. Garden City, N. Y. : Doubleday, 1948; London: John Lehmann, 1949.
Praise to the End! Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1951.
The Waking: Poems 1933–1953. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953.
Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse of Theodore Roethke. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1957; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961.
I Am! Says the Lamb. Garden City, N. Y. : Doubleday, 1961.
Party at the Zoo. New York and London: Crowell-Collier Press, 1963.
Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical. Iowa City: The Stonewall Press, 1963.
The Far Field. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964.
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966; London: Faber and Faber, 1968.
Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems. Selected by Beatrice Roethke. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.
Dirty Dinkey and Other Creatures: Poems for Children. Edited by Beatrice Roethke and Stephen Lushington. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973.
. Theodore Roethke:
A Manuscript Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University
Press, 1971. Lists manuscripts of the works, correspondence,
and notebooks held in nineteen repositories in the United States
and one in Canada.
© Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.