Theodore Roethke

 

THEODORE ROETHKE

 

University of Massachusetts Press Amherst, 1979

 

Copyright © 1979 by
The University of Massachusetts Press
All rights reserved
LC 79–4022
ISBN
0–87023–270–3
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Mary Mendell
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
appear on the last page of this book.

 

For my mother and father, with love

CONTENTS

Preface

PART ONE. THE MAKING OF A POET

1.   American Romantic

2.   The Poet as Apprentice

3.   The Poetics of Expression

4.   In Language Strict and Pure

PART TWO. THE RADICAL VISION

5.   The Broken Mirror of Perseus

6.   The Lesson of the Plants

7.   The Greenhouse Poems

8.   
The Lost Son:
Journey of a Hero

9.   From the Kingdom of Bang and Blab

PART THREE. THE LONG JOURNEY OUT OF THE SELF

10.   The Lesson of the Mask

11.   Love's Proper Exercise

12.   The Way of Illumination

PART FOUR.

Conclusion

Notes

Index

PREFACE

Since the publication of
Open House
in 1941, critics have been at work on Theodore Roethke, trying to come to terms with a poet of major standing in American literature. Among the earliest critics were W. H. Auden, Stanley Kunitz, and Kenneth Burke, and their pioneering essays are still useful. But it is only since the poet's death in 1963 that we have had Roethke's work before us, making it possible to find the larger patterns in his work. A clutch of introductory surveys and specialized studies has already appeared, and no doubt this is only the beginning. For no single reading of any good poet is final. Just as each new generation of poets modifies the view of the previous one, so critics participate in an ongoing critical act. The individual critic's eye may be thought of as a lens that colors a particular text; of course, the better the critic, the lighter the tint, but absolute transparency remains a hypothetical ideal. Criticism is, at its practical best, collaborative; we are lucky in this regard, for a critical milieu has materialized around Roethke. I have used this situation to my advantage in this study, making clear my innumerable debts throughout. This is not simply an introduction to Roethke's
Collected Poems
. It is an attempt to isolate major patterns in the work, to discover the poet's mythos, and to relate his body of writing to the Romantic tradition, its proper context. Roethke was a remarkably self-conscious artist, fully aware of his predecessors and his relation to them. This relationship is complex, for Roethke was not merely an imitator of other poets; he carried on what amounts to an elaborate dialogue
with his Romantic predecessors, and the exact nature of this dialogue is studied. In particular, Emerson is singled out throughout as a major influence, and one rarely discussed before this.

The study begins with an overview of Roethke's poetry in the context of American Romanticism, traced back to its source in Emerson. It defines the personal mythos and nature of Roethke's personal symbol system, suggesting that the autobiographical myth of the greenhouse Eden is this poet's subject, the central image in his work from beginning to end. This fact is easily blurred by the radical stylistic changes which occur at various stages in his career. These changes remain, it appears, superficial; the poet merely extends or refines his chosen subject. The second chapter focuses on the apprentice years, the decade preceding
Open House
, when Roethke discovered a poetics, a Romantic poetics, and learned about poetry-as-collaboration. He learned the art of creative imitation from his mentors, Rolfe Humphries, Louise Bogan, and Stanley Kunitz; this attitude would allow him throughout his career to be strongly influenced, but not overpowered, by other poets. The brief third chapter offers an abstract of Romanticism as Roethke himself saw it. This chapter is referred to throughout the study, which moves from it to a detailed reading of Roethke's poetry as the most important contribution to the literature of American Romanticism since Wallace Stevens. The text proceeds chronologically through the
Collected Poems
, a method dictated by the organic shape of Roethke's work, which unfolds with uncanny integrity as if inheriting its single possible form.

I have drawn heavily throughout on unpublished material from the Roethke Collection in possession of the University of Washington's Suzzallo Library, a cornucopia of manuscript drafts of poems, notebooks, letters, and teaching materials. I am grateful to Beatrice Roethke Lushington for permission to roam freely through this Roethkean harvest. While doing this primary research I benefited from discussion with three poets whom I wish especially to thank: David Wagoner, Richard Hugo, and Richard Blessing. Various eyes have passed over this book in its many drafts, but special thanks are due to the following friends for their sympathy and intelligent guidance: A. H. Ashe and A. F. Falconer of the University of St. Andrews, Philip Hobsbaum of Glasgow University, Thomas Vance, James A. W. Heffernan, David Wykes, and Philip Holland of Dartmouth College, Gordon Williams of Yale University, Richard Ellmann of Oxford University and Ralph J. Mills, Jr., of the University of Illinois. Portions of this book have appeared, in
earlier form, in the following:
Antaeus, The Texas Quarterly, The Ball State University Forum
, and
Blake and the Moderns
, ed. Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt (Kent State University Press). I am grateful to Doubleday and Company for permission to quote from
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
(copyright © 1966 by Beatrice Roethke), and to Devon Jersild for help in preparation of the index.

J. P.—
Hanover, New Hampshire

PART ONE THE MAKING OF A POET

CHAPTER ONE AMERICAN ROMANTIC

There is at the back of every artist's mind something like a pattern or type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied
.

G. K. Chesterton

This book offers, in effect, a map of Theodore Roethke's secret planet; it is an attempt to reconstruct his mental world, to discern the pattern at the back of his mind as it is revealed by his poems. Roethke was a great poet, the successor to Frost and Stevens in modern American poetry, and it is the measure of his greatness that his work repays detailed examination. Roethke saw himself as working within a great tradition, modifying and extending it after his own fashion. Specifically, Roethke was a Romantic. His work abounds in references to Blake, Wordsworth, and Yeats, especially, but my stress is upon the American quality of his Romanticism with Emerson and Whitman as primary ancestors, with Stevens as a strong contemporary influence. Without impugning his originality, one can read all Roethke's work as a continuing conversation with his precursors; he was a poetic ventriloquist of sorts, able to speak through masks of those whom he called “the great dead.” Still, there is a voice at his core which is unmistakably his own. He has his special province, a landscape so personal and distinct that no amount of imitation or writinglike-somebody-else, as he called it, disturbs the
integrity of his voice. His poetic world is self-contained and secure.

As my epigraph suggests, the genius behind any imaginative work has something to do with imagery. Roethke's verse from
Open House
(1941) to the posthumous
The Far Field
(1964) displays a consistent and vivid imagery found only in the greatest writing. His images derive from the dream world of his Michigan childhood, and one soon finds that a few key symbols operate throughout his work, most important the Father (who is alternately the poet's biological father, Otto Roethke, or God), the greenhouse, and the open field (where illuminations generally occur). There are minor symbols in this cluster, too—the wind (spirit), the stone (associated with transcendental experiences) and the tree (selfhood). The image of Woman as mother, lover, or sister is present from the beginning, taking on greater significance in the middle and later periods. The central figure in all the poems is Roethke in his mythic projection as the “lost son.” Indeed, the “Lost Son” sequence, published between 1948 and 1953, represents this poet's most permanent contribution to modern poetry. The later part of the sequence, called
Praise to the End!
, takes its title from Wordsworth's consummate autobiographical poem,
The Prelude;
it was no doubt a conscious effort on Roethke's part to identify himself with this primary Romantic mode. I explore these connections fully later in this study, for Roethke is a poet of the egotistical sublime (to use Keats's description of Wordsworth). He appropriates for himself those parts of the world that make up the imagery or world picture at the back of his mind. These images became the signposts of his secret planet, and we can know Roethke best by knowing his entire work, by following his personal development from unrealized potential to self-discovery and, ultimately, self-transcendence.

Roethke's poetry will never be properly understood unless read within the context of Romanticism in its American manifestation. The work of recent critics has been invaluable in showing the breadth and continuity of the Romantic movement from its origins in eighteenth-century Germany to the present.
¹
What seems constant in this nearly intractable movement is the recognition that every man is cut off from nature; given this state of affairs, art becomes indispensable in the process of reconciliation between self and nature (subject and object). Every man has either to make his peace with nature or wage his own “war between the mind and sky” (as Stevens called it).

If the European man of feeling considered himself alienated from nature, the American found his isolation all the more intense. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, and Hawthorne felt cut off from the old world culture; they were isolated men, forced to depend on their personal resources for inspiration and fulfillment. Even more so than English
Romantics, the American Transcendentalists were dependent upon German idealism. As Emerson said: “What is properly called Transcendentalism among us: is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind has ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the sense, the second perceive that the senses are not final, and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell.”
²
Emerson's far-reaching influence on some later American poets has been demonstrated, but not for Roethke,
³
although his tendency toward idealism in the later poetry can be traced directly back to Emerson's essays. Nevertheless, Roethke's attraction to the world of objects was undiminished by his belief, which he took from Emerson, that nature was the symbol of the spirit. Indeed, few poets have evoked the physical world in such concrete terms. In this, Roethke seems closer to Thoreau than Emerson, for Thoreau's nature was at once sensuously concrete
and
spiritual. One critic of Thoreau has said: “As a man studies the details of nature he discovers himself; he learns the spiritual and natural laws that operate in him and give him hope and being. Thoreau was as assiduous as Jonathan Edwards in seeking out these correspondences, these images and shadows of human things…. His exhaustive and obsessive effort in his journals to catalogue botanical facts as they appeared in the course of the seasons was based on the premise that he might thereby discover natural, seasonal rhythms in the human unconscious.”
⁴
Similar claims can be made for Roethke.

Romantic poets share the concept of “nature as a living whole,” an organic unity that somehow points to a spiritual realm and relates to man.
⁵
One can see how the doctrine of correspondences follows naturally from this conception. In
The Prelude
the growth of the poet's mind parallels his increasing awareness of nature's divine presence. The child, according to Wordsworth, has a special relationship with nature; its world suffers no radical division. Only with adulthood does the sense of isolation intervene; so the task for poetry becomes the process of recapturing lost time through the exploitation of memory. Both Yeats and Stevens in this century have seen the poet's task in similar terms, Yeats in his lifelong quest for Unity of Being (in which the soul recovers what he called “radical innocence”) and Stevens in his search for “the supreme fiction” (after Baudelaire's
la plus haute fiction
). Roethke was devoted to both Yeats and Stevens, acknowledging his debt to them many times. His quest for the greenhouse Eden, as Louis L. Martz called Roethke's childhood dream world, imitates the quest patterns of the other great Romantics, although the greenhouse has more in common historically
with Blake's Beulah (where nature is threatened by chaos and darkness) than Yeats's Byzantium or Stevens's wholly fictive realm, where nature is left behind.
⁶