Theodore Roethke (10 page)

One other main tenet of Burke's poetics is the importance of synecdoche, which he calls the basic figure of speech. Art
is
artifice, of course, or illusion; Burke argues that there is nothing deceptive about this: “A tree, for instance, is an infinity of events—and among these our senses abstract certain recordings which ‘represent' the tree. Nor is there any ‘illusion' here. In so far as we see correctly, and do not mistake something else for a tree, our perceptions
do really
represent the tree.”
⁸
Relating this to his poetics, Burke speaks of “associational clusters” or systems of symbols. The poet evokes reality by naming a few parts of reality, by relying upon a few key words as triggers. I think Roethke understood the synecdochic function intuitively, for he began to rely on “associational clusters” more heavily after 1942. He used a few key words over and over, expecting them to trigger something in the unconscious. Like Yeats or Stevens, Roethke developed a private range of associations for his special words. The color white, for instance, always connects with the realm of spirit in his later poems. As in Stevens, the color blue often represents the imagination; green connotes literal reality. As with most great poets, one poem informs another in Roethke's corpus, and you have to read all of him to understand the parts.

Burke's hermeneutics included a useful map of “levels of symbolic action.” He discerns three levels: first, the bodily or biological level, which finds expression in kinesthetic imagery. Here the artist attempts to represent the rhythms of the organic life cycle, relying on sensory imagery to “symbolize” the pattern of “growth, decay, drought, fixity, ice, dessication, stability, etc.”
⁹
This
is the level upon which the greenhouse poems operate. Second, in Burke's system, comes the personal, intimate, or familiar level: the arena of human relations. Roethke moves up to this level in “The Lost Son” and later poems, confronting in turn his father, mother, sister, and lover. The third level is that of abstraction, of political or social discourse. As I have already said, Roethke rarely ventured into abstraction of this kind with success. He remained an introspective voyager, questing after personal salvation. In this sense, too, he is consummately Romantic.

Roethke took Burke's theories seriously; most important, he followed the advice to write about his personal history. In
Permanence and Change
we read: “Once a set of new meanings is permanently established, we can often note in art another kind of regression: the artist is suddenly prompted to review the memories of his youth because they combine at once the qualities of strangeness and intimacy.”
¹⁰
The belief that childhood is the special province of the artist had common acceptance among Romantic writers. Indeed, Roethke quotes Thomas DeQuincey in his notebooks in 1943: “The infant is one with God and one with everything in our immense universe through the medium of love…. The adult mind must regain this vision, this secure unity.”
¹¹

Freud refined this great Romantic belief in a primal state of unity with nature lost through maturation, and he invented psychoanalysis as a way to recover the past. In this sense Norman O. Brown is correct to suggest that psychoanalysis completes the Romantic revolution. He observes how the categories of primal unity, differentiation, and final harmony can be found in the Romantic poets. One recalls Wordsworth's classic summary of this view:

Nevertheless, says Brown, “these categories …remain in the Romantics arbitrary and mystical because they lack a foundation in psychology. The psychoanalytical theory of childhood completes the Romantic movement by filling this gap.”
¹³

One crucial aspect of Freud's theory, relevant to our understanding of Roethke's new poems, is the concept of regression. Freud develops this carefully in
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900):

Later in the same work Freud asserts: “In regression the structure of dream-thoughts breaks up into its raw materials.” Thus, in dreams one goes back to original perceptions, recovering primary sensations of light, sound, and so on. This partly explains the strangely perceptual quality dreams often possess. For dream-thinking, Freud claims, exploits the deepest regions of memory; it reactivates the infantile mind and reinhabits the past. He concludes

Kenneth Burke saw the importance of Freud's theories for literary studies. In his essay “Freud—and the Analysis of Poetry,” he begins with a confession: “The reading of Freud I find suggestive almost to the point of bewilderment.” It would be foolish, Burke remarks, to equate psychology and literature, the Freudian perspective having been developed “primarily to chart a psychiatric field rather than an aesthetic one.”
¹⁵
Yet the technique of art depends upon the workings of the unconscious, and the more a critic can learn about the psychology of literary invention, the better he will understand the literary product itself. As Lionel Trilling says in his essay on Freud in
The Liberal Imagination
:
“Freud discovered in the very organization of the mind those mechanisms by
which art makes its effects.”
¹⁶
And Burke attempts to outline the specific mechanisms that obtain in poetic composition.

To begin, Burke turns to Freud's speculations on sexual puns and double-entendres, predicting that close analysis of poetic language will bear out many of Freud's ideas. Much of the ostensibly incomprehensible gibberish of Roethke's “Lost Son” sequence can be explained in terms of what Freud called “dream-language,” a mode of expression which reaches into the unconscious and uses the inherent ambiguity of language to its fullest purpose. According to Freud—and Burke—art is a way of making the unconscious conscious. When hailed as “discoverer of the unconscious” late in life, Freud responded by saying that “the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method whereby the unconscious can be studied.”
¹⁷
Thus, Freud (and Freudian critics like Burke) established the close relation between art and the unconscious; this was attended by interest in wit, the element of play which bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious in language. Here, of course, the poet enters. He is first of all one who likes to “play with words,” much as a child does. The great enemy of the unconscious, Freud said, is reason (the reality-principle) which restricts the free associational process so crucial to invention. Freud explains: “Wit carries out its purpose in advancing the thought by magnifying it and by guarding it against reason. Here again it reveals its original nature in that it sets itself up against an inhibiting and restrictive power, or against the critical judgement.”
¹⁸
Seeing the importance of puns and double-entendres in poetry, Burke would often focus on patterns of word play in a text. And he succeeded in challenging his pupil, Roethke, who suddenly began to play with language in a daring way. The idea of a poem as the conscious reproduction of a dream state was new to Roethke, too, and it provides a key to some of the more difficult passages in
The Lost Son
. The difference between poetry and dreaming remains, of course, the element of conscious control. As Charles Lamb said long before Freudian criticism: “The poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but has dominion over it.”
¹⁹

Burke also took up the concept of regression, noticing with typical brilliance that “regression … is a function of progression.”
²⁰
This recalls Roethke's notebook entry of January 1944: “I go back because I want to go forward.” A year later Roethke quoted Kierkegaard in his notebooks: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it can only be lived forwards.”
²¹
Through Burke, Roethke came to understand the mechanics of regression which chart the tortuous return of the poet-protagonist into the hinterlands of memory.
Praise to the End!
takes the poet back once
again, even further, into the womb and beyond, pressing through into the eternity preceding existence, Blake's “Vale of Har.” But the regressive journey harrows the traveler. For, according to Freud and Burke, birth is the first jolt to anyone. Burke laments the “change at birth when the foetus, heretofore enjoying a larval existence in the womb, being fed on manna from the placenta, so outgrows this circle of confinement, whereat it must burst forth into a different kind of world—a world of locomotion, aggression, competition, hunt.” Burke continues: “In the private life of the individual there may be many subsequent jolts of a less purely biological nature, as with the death of some one person who had become pivotal to this individual's mental economy.”
²²
For Roethke, adolescence and the death of his father provided pivotal jolts from which he never fully recovered.

Regression, then, is the leitmotif of
The Lost Son
. The protagonist, seeking to restore unity, to be reborn, must dive into the past in order to cleanse himself and recover his identity. As Burke comments on this theme:

He stresses the role of psychoanalytical techniques in gaining access to this kind of literature: “In so far as art contains a surrealist ingredient (and all art contains some of this ingredient), psychoanalytic coordinates are required to explain the logic of its structure.” Thus he demands the fullest biographical data that can be gathered about a writer, insisting that “we can eliminate biography as a relevant fact about poetic organization only if we consider the work of art as if it were written neither by people nor for people.”
²³

The effect of Burke's general poetics on Roethke's notion of what a poem should do was profound. He abandoned the abstract, mechanical style of
Open House
and, in
The Lost Son
, began to chronicle a young man's regression into his own murky past, a mission of self-discovery. Burke's idea of a poem as “a symbolic proclaiming and formation of identity” describes the “Lost Son” poems accurately. And, wisely, Burke associates this kind of poem with Romanticism, adding that “the Romantic movement tended greatly to conceive of man's identity in nonsocial, purely naturalistic terms, specializing in such objective imagery as would most directly correspond in quality with subjective states.”
The poem, he continues, enacts a symbolic “slaying of the old self” which is “complemented by the emergence of a new self.”
²⁴
The shape of this second book suggests that Roethke was an attentive student, and Burke certainly may be regarded as the spiritual father of
The Lost Son
. We can see why Roethke always called him “Pa.”

Roethke's particular burden, the source of creative energy in
The Lost Son
, was his relationship with his father, Otto. He thought himself a failure in his father's eyes, long after his father had died. Otto wanted young Theodore to become a lawyer, and Roethke enrolled for one miserable term in the law school at the University of Michigan. He forsook law for poetry, and acquired an excess of guilt in the process. But this was only a small aspect of a larger guilt, one of mysterious origins, associated with his father's death. This guilt produced all manner of anxieties, including an obsession with death. It also was the source of Roethke's anxieties about God, who gradually replaces Otto in the poet's private pantheon. A highly selective anthology of entries taken from the poet's unpublished notebooks while he was working on the major part of
The Lost Son
opens a window into Roethke's mind: