Theodore Roethke (9 page)

Fortunately, neither of these unhappy alternatives was realized. With ferocious energy, Roethke battled his way out of the corner where the aesthetics of
Open House
had left him, pushing his way at last into the open spaces of The
Lost Son
. Nobody, not even Roethke himself, could have guessed how good he would become, moving from style to style, dazzling his mentors. As he wrote in his notebooks: “The poem is a kind of death: it is finished, a complete, a comprehensive act. The better the poem, the more final the destruction.”
¹⁵

PART TWO THE RADICAL VISION

CHAPTER FIVE THE BROKEN MIRROR OF PERSEUS

The poem of the mind in the act of finding

What will suffice. It has not always had

To find: the scene was set; it repeated what

Was in the script
.

Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry”

Roethke took the advice offered in Auden's review of
Open House
:
he began to read widely outside of the narrow discipline of poetry, exploring psychology (especially Freud and Jung), anthropology and myth, Oriental religions and mysticism, and such theologians as Paul Tillich and Martin Buber. Leaving Penn State for Bennington College in 1943, he met the critic Kenneth Burke and found a new mentor. In
The Philosophy of Literary Form
(1941) Burke remarks that the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa can by analogy teach us something about the ways of poetry. He identifies the poet with Perseus, the Greek hero “who could not face the serpent-headed monster without being turned to stone, but was immune to this danger if he observed it by reflection in a mirror, enabling him to confront the risk, but by the protection of an indirect reflection.”
¹
Like Perseus, Roethke had numerous personal serpents to slay. But the art of
Open House
seems to have failed as a reflector; the classical notion of mimesis is less therapeutic than the Romantic poetics of expression. For the Romantic, poetry must not mirror reality so much as
embody
it. Wallace Stevens sheds some light on the process:

In other words, poetry at its best dissolves the medium by embracing reality and the imagination directly, achieving that “exquisite appositeness” beyond “verbality” or language.

The modern Romantic poet is “the new Perseus” described by Geoffrey Hartman in
The Unmediated Vision:

Hartman argues that the modern poet seeks to gain “pure representation” of experience by means of a direct, sensuous intuition of reality. “The eye and the senses are made to supply not merely the ornaments but the very plot of truth. Consciousness becomes, in its contact with the physical world, the source and often the end of cognition.” He suggests that not only the four poets examined in his study—Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry—but the majority of poets since the dawn of Romanticism have refused any but human and sensory intermediaries to knowledge. They seek what he calls “the Hellenic innocence of the senses,” and rely on no arbitrary or traditional text: “Nature, the body, and human consciousness—that is the only text.” This fact, the new priority of experience in the most personal sense, is another way of looking at the great Romantic effort to naturalize the supernatural. Yet a price must be paid for sacrificing the sacred texts. When the tension between sacred and profane reality is lost, the poet is driven back in upon himself, into a world where “symbols are only such by pretense, and the entirety of life is caught up in this pretense. Everything is
in potentia
equally sign and symbol.”
³
The poet must discover his own meanings, risking unintelligibility “in the act of finding / What will suffice.”
⁴

The alternative to risking everything, as far as Roethke was concerned, was silence—Rimbaud's choice. But language was a form of consciousness Roethke could not repress; he wrote in his notebooks,
quoting Hegel: “All consciousness is an appeal to more consciousness.” Thus, he set himself the task of moving beyond the limited aesthetics of
Open House
;
he decided to put down the mirror and become, in effect, the new Perseus, facing the Gorgon head of his past experience with a cold eye. The notebooks of this period (1943–1947) record the struggle for self-knowledge and a fresh language leading up to the publication of
The Lost Son
. The great personal myth of the greenhouse Eden evolved gradually as the poet looked into his past; his readings in psychology, guided by Kenneth Burke, presented him with a technique for tunneling into the unconscious. Roethke took experience for his text, experience filtered through the gauze of memory. He sought immediacy, “that anguish of concreteness,” above all else, recognizing that a poet's task is not simply to record experience but to re-create it. Invoking Whitman, he wrote in his notebooks: “The poet writes the history of his body.”
⁵
Taking “the body” in its widest possible meaning, Roethke began writing the history of his conscious life. This history unfolds in the three books to succeed
Open House
, and it is the subject of the next three chapters.

CHAPTER SIX THE LESSON OF THE PLANTS

Originally the ego includes everything; later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world
.

Freud
, Civilization and Its Discontents

A notion of centrality: there is a core to all things that even a child knows, yet it is one of those ancient thoughts that can never become a cliché
.

Roethke, “Notebooks” (July 1945
)

As noted earlier, the life cycle of an organism—birth, growth, maturity, decay, and death—offered the Romantics a paradigm for the human life cycle, and the organic process was seen to parallel the act of literary invention.
¹
Kant, Herder, and Schelling stress the plant metaphor, and Coleridge—adapting the concept of dynamic opposition between the subjective artist and the object contemplated from Schelling's
System of Transcendental Idealism
(1800)—explains creative genius in the same biological terms. “The poet,” says Coleridge, “… brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have appropriated the name of imagination.” The implicit biological metaphor in the word “synthetic” should be obvious. The poet, like the plant, unites disparate elements: light, water, minerals, and carbon dioxide. Images are taken
from the external world and transmogrified in the poet's mind, as Coleridge explains:

Emerson, a devout student of Coleridge, reformulates the same theory in “The Poet,” turning his master's idea inside out: “The Universe is the externization of the soul.” He plays with the plant metaphor constantly, saying in one classic phrase that a poem is “a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant … it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
³

These ideas, central to all Romantic theory, will help us to understand the organization of Roethke's greenhouse poems—his greatest achievement. In short, Roethke abandoned the mechanical structures which mar even the best poems in
Open House
, structures imposed from without. He began to think in terms of the plant metaphor, the organic process, allowing each poem to develop from within, assuming a shape unique to itself, adorning nature with a new thing. The fourteen poems that make up the greenhouse sequence appear at the outset to be merely descriptive pieces, but far more is involved. Roethke's plants take, on a strangely human aspect; they operate as symbols in a subtle way. As Coleridge demanded, the image of each flower is modified by the human life, the passion, transferred to it from the poet's own spirit. Many of the poems in this sequence approximate a particular psychological state. As the notebooks make clear, Roethke hunted the recesses of his mind for symbols adequate to his experience. He wrote in his notebooks, somewhat wearily, of “the long testing of the unconscious before one gets even a few symbols true to himself.”
⁴
This long testing lasted from 1942 until 1948, when
The Lost Son
was published. But the earliest greenhouse poems started to appear in magazines in the early forties, revealing a new Roethke. By the process of regression and near withdrawal from the public eye, he managed to discover his source and develop a style completely his own. Exactly how Roethke did this remains to be considered.

The move from Penn State to Bennington was crucial. The new environment helped, but the presence of Kenneth Burke was the most important
aspect of the change. By happy accident, Roethke moved into the same building with Burke, “Shingle Cottage.” Burke was at Bennington three days a week: just often enough for Roethke to see him when he needed. Burke exercised a profound influence over his younger friend; the notebooks from these years are studded with ideas taken straight from Burke's major books up to 1941:
Counter-Statement
(1931),
Permanence and Change
(1935),
Attitudes Towards History
(1937) and
The Philosophy of Literary Form
(1941).
⁵
Also, the extant letters between Roethke and Burke give evidence of their intimacy during these years. Burke had early access to the manuscript of
The Lost Son
and acted as editor-mentor in much the same way as Humphries, Bogan, and Kunitz had done earlier. Burke's natural disposition was pedagogical, and the correspondence between them shows that he never restrained himself with Roethke, who always distrusted his own abilities and sought reinforcement.

In
The Philosophy of Literary Form
Burke asserts: “Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situations in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers.” He thinks of poetry as proverbial medicine; a proverb, he says, offers a means of sizing up a situation. Proverbs are ameliorative, and so are poems. He asks:

Thus poetry becomes what Burke calls “symbolic action.” He emphasizes the
physical
nature of speech, referring to Sir Richard Paget's mimetic theory of “language as gesture.” He explains:

Burke's interest in the physical quality of words seems to have carried over into Roethke's new style; the language of the greenhouse poems, especially, is acutely physical, often mimetic. The style is entirely Roethke's own, though Hopkins—who had strong interests himself in the mimetic theory of language origins—comes to mind as a precursor. Roethke's notebooks from this period are full of Hopkins's poems copied out by hand, but this influence is indirect. Kenneth Burke was standing over Roethke in these years, literally and figuratively.

The idea that a poet should write about what concerned him most urgently, about his “burdens,” related to Burke's notion of the poem as strategy. For him, a poem is cathartic; it resolves a problem or, at least, brings into balance contending forces. There is nothing original about Burke's idea, of course; one recalls the famous advice given by Malcolm to Macduff: “Give sorrow words,” he urges, for “the grief that does not speak / Whispers the o'er fraught heart and bids it break.” But the Romantic poets fixed on the cathartic function of poetry, as Abrams has shown, outlining the parallels between Romantic theories of poetry and Freud, reinforcing the earlier observation (taken from Norman O. Brown) that psychoanalysis, in effect, completes the Romantic revolution.
⁷
As we shall see, Roethke combines poetry and analysis in an original way, writing—as Burke urged him to do—about his burdens, giving expression to hitherto repressed emotions.