Cultural Cohesion (15 page)

6

TWO ESSAYS ON
THEODORE ROETHKE

1.  On His
Collected Poems

When Theodore Roethke died five years ago his obituaries, very sympathetically written, tended to reveal by implication that the men who wrote them had doubts about the purity and weight of his achievement in poetry. Now that his collected poems have come out, the reviews, on this side of the water at least, strike the attentive reader as the same obituaries rewritten. Roethke was one of those men for whom poetic significance is claimed not only on the level of creativity but also on the level of being: if it is objected that the poems do not seem very individual, the objection can be headed off by saying that the man was a poet apart from his poems, embodying all the problems of writing poetry “in our time.” It is a shaky way to argue, and praise degenerates quickly to a kind of complicity when what is being praised is really only a man's ability to hold up against the pressures of his career. Criticism is not about careers.

From the small amount of information which has been let out publicly, and the large amount which circulates privately, it seems probable that Roethke had a difficult life, the difficulties being mainly of a psychic kind that intellectuals find it easy to identify with and perhaps understand too quickly. Roethke earned his bread by teaching in colleges and was rarely without a job in one. It is true that combining the creative and the academic lives sets up pressures, but really these pressures have been exaggerated, to the point where one would think that teaching a course in freshman English was as perilous to the creative faculties as sucking up to titled nobodies, running errands for Roman governors, cutting purses, grinding lenses, or getting shot at. If Roethke was in mental trouble, this should be either brought out into the open and diagnosed as well as it can be or else abandoned as a point: it is impermissible to murmur vaguely about the problems of being a poet in our time. Being a poet has always been a problem. If the point is kept up, the uninformed, unprejudiced reader will begin to wonder if perhaps Roethke lacked steel. The widening scope and increasing hospitality of academic life in this century, particularly in the United States, has lured many people into creativity who really have small business with it, since they need too much recognition and too many meals. Plainly Roethke was several cuts above this, but the words now being written in his praise are doing much to reduce him to it.

This collection is an important document in showing that originality is not a requirement in good poetry—merely a description of it. All the longer poems in the volume and most of the short ones are ruined by Roethke's inability to disguise his influences. In the few short poems where he succeeded in shutting them out, he achieved a firm, though blurred, originality of utterance: the real Roethke collection, when it appears, will be a ruthlessly chosen and quite slim volume some two hundred pages shorter than the one we now have, but it will stand a good chance of lasting, since its voice will be unique. In this respect, history is very kind: the poet may write only a few good poems in a thousand negligible ones, but those few poems, if they are picked out and properly stored, will be remembered as characteristic. The essential scholarly task with Roethke is to make this selection and defend it. It will need to be done by a first-rate man capable of seeing that the real Roethke wrote very seldom.

Of his first book,
Open House
(1941), a few poems which are not too much reminiscent of Frost will perhaps last. Poems like “Lull” (marked “November, 1939”) have little chance.

It is not assimilating tradition to so take over the rhythms of poetry recently written by another man, especially a man as famous as Auden. It is not even constructive plagiarism, just helpless mimicry. To a greater or lesser degree, from one model to the next, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Yeats and Eliot, Roethke displayed throughout his creative life a desperate unsureness of his own gift. In his second book,
The Lost Son
, published in 1948, the influence of Eliot, an influence which dogged him to the end, shows its first signs with savage clarity.

There are no eyes here, in this valley of dying stars. In his five-part poem
The Shape of the Fire
he shows that he has been reading
Four Quartets
, giving the game away by his trick—again characteristic—of reproducing his subject poet's most marked syntactical effects.

The content of this passage shows the pinpoint specificity of the references to nature which are everywhere in Roethke's poetry. But in nearly all cases it amounts to nature for the sake of nature: the general context meant to give all this detail spiritual force usually has an air of being thought up, and is too often just borrowed. In the volume
Praise to the End!
, which came out in 1951, a certain curly-haired Welsh voice rings loud and clear. It is easy to smile at this, but it should be remembered that a poet who can lapse into such mimicry is in the very worst kind of trouble.

In the next volume,
The Waking
(1953), his drive towards introspective significance—and a drive towards is not necessarily the same thing as possessing—tempts him into borrowing those effects of Eliot's which would be close to self-parody if it were not for the solidly intricate structuring of their context.

There it stands, like a stolen car hastily resprayed and dangerously retaining its original number-plates. His fascination with Yeats begins in this volume—

—and it, too, continues to the end. But whereas with Yeats his borrowings were mainly confined to syntactical sequences, with Eliot he took the disastrous step of appropriating major symbolism, symbolism which Eliot had himself appropriated from other centuries, other languages and other cultures. The results are distressingly weak, assertively unconvincing, and would serve just by themselves to demonstrate that a talent which has not learnt how to forget is bound to fragment.

Roethke's good poems are mostly love poems, and of those, most are to be found in the two volumes of 1958 and 1964,
Words for the Wind
and
The Far Field
. Some of his children's poems from
I Am! Says the Lamb
are also included, and there is a section of previously uncollected poems at the very end of the book including a healthy thunderbolt of loathing aimed at critics. Roethke achieved recognition late but when it came the critics treated him pretty well. Now that his troubled life is over, it is essential that critics who care for what is good in his work should condemn the rest before the whole lot disappears under an avalanche of kindly meant, but effectively cruel, interpretative scholarship.

The Review
, 1968

2.  On His
Selected Letters

Ralph J. Mills, Jr., has done a good, solid, scholarly job of selecting and editing Roethke's letters. He has picked the ones that “illustrate particularly his career as a poet”: not a bad brief for an editor to give himself at this stage. When a biography appears we should get the rest of the picture, including a straight account of Roethke's psychic upsets—an account which would be welcome, after all these years of innuendo, if it were not that having it available will almost certainly complete the work of elevating Roethke to emblematic status as a casualty of the age.

If this sounds rough, perhaps it is best to get the gloves off early. I don't like much of Roethke's poetry, and the little of it I do like I don't like intensely. I like this book of letters scarcely at all. A biography that spills all the beans could well tip the balance towards active loathing. Very little of such a negative tropism would be solely Roethke's fault—when we react against a reputation, it is rarely the fault of the reputed—but likewise very little of it would be unfounded. It would be a justifiable contempt directed against a reputation in which the man has got mixed up with the work. For at the centre of Roethke's reputation is the idea that the man has an artistic status away from his poems; that the weaknesses of the poems are to be attributed to the psychic damage inflicted on him as a consequence of practising his art in a hostile society; that these weaknesses, having such symbolic value, are perhaps strengths. Even if Roethke's poetry itself were very strong there would be good reasons for attacking such a line of thought, because really it is not a line of thought at all: it is a chain of error.

As it is, Roethke's poetry is quite weak even at its best—though I do not mean to say that it didn't cost him great effort, and perhaps his sanity, and perhaps even his life. But what you have here in this amalgam of Roethke the poet and Roethke the Sick Man is an art-surrogate: what is under consideration, indeed adulation, is a Career.

It is evident from these letters that Roethke himself was prone to think in careerist terms, but that much is an accident: it's probable that Mailer and Lowell and other important Americans do too, and go much further in regarding themselves as children of their time, victims of a culture and that kind of thing. The case would not be altered if Roethke had had no such idea in his head. What matters is the critical view taken. And it should be obvious by now that the general critical view of Roethke has not a great deal to do with poetry, and everything to do with his efforts (heroic efforts, considering what he went through: but heroism is a term of accentuation, not necessarily of approval) to get established as a poet, to Make It.

Roethke proved, like the visitor to Brigadoon who wished the village into existence on a day it was not scheduled to appear, that if you want something deeply enough anything is possible. What he wanted to be was a great artist, and by the end of his career there were one or two really great artists (certainly Auden) willing to concede that Roethke was of their company. But just as often as they are right in such judgements, real artists are wrong. Like anybody else, they tend to admire sincerity, dedication, industry, openness, intellectual generosity, a sense of fun—and like anybody else they have trouble, once they know him, in getting the man who possesses these attributes separated from his work. Which is as far as I want to pontificate along this particular line, except to say that it seems probable that in Roethke's case the general critical view has followed the lead of his fellow poets, who simply liked him, just as much as it has followed the lead of industrious scholarship, which finds his work such a luxuriant paradise of exfoliating symbols. In both cases what is now needed is some healthy scepticism, even at the cost of seeming harsh. The sceptical mind cannot long be totally impressed by opinions current within the freemasonry of poets: such opinions are often things of comfort. Still less can it be impressed by the academic discovery and canonization of a perfectly representative modernist: here a sharp nose ought to smell pastiche.

A straight read through Roethke's
Collected Poems
should convince even the moderately informed reader that Roethke's incipient individuality as a voice was successively broken down by a series of strong influences—from the close of the 1930s these were, roughly in order: Auden, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats and Eliot again. Estimations of Roethke's poetry which do not confront this problem can't really be of much use, since the question of originality, if it arises at all, can never be peripheral: originality is more than a requirement in good poetry, it is a description of it. Most critics dealing with Roethke are ready to admit the question but seem to believe that his tendencies towards pastiche were momentary weaknesses, instantly corrected when a true subject came up. The more perceptive among them might go on to admit that even Roethke's most admired poems, the ones felt to be uniquely his, are stained at the edges with the tinctures of other men's gifts. Very few, however, would admit that Roethke is
saturated
with these tinctures—that a “major” Roethke poem like
The Shape of the Fire
, for example, is soaked right through with the cadences, and therefore with the sensibility, of
Four Quartets
. From
Open House
(1941) through to
The Waking
(1953) it is almost as though he responded to each new challenge as it came up—or rather that he shadow-boxed in the style of each new champion. In
Open House
it was Auden. In
The Lost Son
it was Eliot. In
Praise to the End!
it was Dylan Thomas. In
The Waking
it was Yeats (arriving late) and Eliot (who had never been away). In the last two volumes,
Words for the Wind
and
The Far Field
, though the influences of Yeats and Eliot never wholly died, he hit a nice line of regret and wrote his best love poems. But all in all it's a sad story, and one that Mr. Mills (perhaps unintentionally) makes clearer by including a few unpublished poems along with the letters. One of these, “Suburban Lament,” enclosed with a letter to Stanley Kunitz in June 1940, tells you all you need to know about how hard Roethke was hit by Auden.