Theodore Roethke (4 page)
Born in the heart of the Saginaw Valley in Michigan on 25 May 1908, Roethke witnessed the decline of American wilderness and the growth of a small but vigorous town. The lumber boom, which began in the 1840s, had lured immigrants to this remote area of the frontier from all over Europe. An immense flow of capital from the Eastern seaboard had brought Saginaw into prosperity; even as the forests dwindled, the business potential of the area attracted newcomers, such as the poet's grandfather, Wilhelm Roethke, who came to Michigan from East Prussia in 1872 with his three sons: Emil, Charles, and Otto. In the old country Wilhelm had been the chief forester on the estate of Bismark's sister, the
Grafin
von Arnim. But in the new world, he would work for no one but himself and established the market garden which evolved into the greenhouse of his grandson's childhood. Otto Roethke eventually attained full control of the business, which he pursued with the same tenacity that his son lavished on
his
craft.
Inevitably, Roethke's intellectual and spiritual roots were deeply American. Recounting his interests and ambitions as an adolescent, he wrote:
I really wanted, at fifteen and sixteen, to write the “chiselled” prose as it was called in those days. There were books at home and I went to the local libraries (and very good ones they were for such a small town); read Stevenson, Pater, Newman, Tomlinson, and those maundering English charm boys known as familiar essayists. I bought my own editions of Emerson, Thoreau, and, as God's my witness, subscribed to the
Dial
when I was in the seventh grade. (
SP
, p. 16)
Apparently he was not encouraged by his father, who had no intellectual interests, but was by his mother, Helen Heubner Roethke: “[her] favorite reading was the Bible, Jane Austen, and Dostoyevsky” said her son (
SP
, p. 58). But Allan Seager warns that this later recollection of Mrs. Roethke may well have no factual basis.
2
As I have said, Roethke looked to Emerson as his first master: his personal copy of
Nature
, dog-eared and heavily underscored, has a comment scribbled inside the title page which hails Emerson as one of “the great optimists” who revealed “the possibilities of the human spirit.” It goes on: “One of the potencies of Emerson is that he appeals to your own initiative.”
3
This was crucial to the young man interested in the possibilities of the spirit; he learned that he could discover
himself in
the woods, the self which contains everything necessary for the full life. Roethke wrote at the end of
Nature
:
“After all, nature exists only for man, who is to be the master.” Like Blake and the other Romantics, he affirms the belief that “without man, nature is barren.” For him, nature becomes “a steady storm of correspondences” in which the world of the spirit unfolds, with “all shapes blazing unnatural light” (
CP
, p. 239).
A few years before his death, Roethke wrote to Ralph J. Mills, Jr., that “
early
, when it really matters, I read, and really read, Emerson (mostly prose), Thoreau, Whitman, Blake and Wordsworth.”
4
From these poets the young student derived his notions of what poetry was all about; but he did very little writing of his own until he entered the University of Michigan in 1925, and then his work was mostly prose. The college essays that have survived from this period in his life show that he already had a sensible, modest approach to the craft: “I write only about people and things that I know thoroughly. Perhaps I have become a mere reporter, not a writer. Yet I feel that this is all my present abilities permit. I will open my eyes in my youth and store this raw, living material. Age may bring the fire that moulds experience into artistry.” He tells of his feelings toward nature with a wonderful innocence, trying (unsuccessfully) to sound unaffected:
I have a genuine love of nature. It is not the least bit affected, but an integral and powerful part of my life. I know that Cooper is a fraudâthat he doesn't give a true sense of the sublimity of American scenery. I know that Muir and Thoreau and Burroughs speak the truth.
I can sense the moods of nature almost instinctively. Ever since I could walk, I have spent as much time as I could in the open. A perception of natureâno matter how delicate, subtle, how evanescent,âremains with me forever. (
SP
, p. 4)
His prose style, reminiscent of Emerson, is remarkably clear and forceful, and his predictions for himself stand up well under the harsh scrutiny of hindsight.
The atmosphere in Ann Arbor in the mid-twenties was too provincial for Roethke, who wanted to break into the larger world of letters. So, after an abortive semester at Michigan Law School, followed by a semester of graduate studies in the English department there, he left his native state for Harvard, ostensibly to study with the critic I. A. Richards. He entered Harvard Graduate School in 1930 with hopes of gaining a Ph.D., but the depression squashed this plan and Roethke was forced to place himself in the precarious job market. He found a teaching position at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and finally had the chance to get his poetic apprenticeship under way.
Rolfe Humphries (1894â1969), a poet and translator of Latin verse, lived not very far away in Belvidere, New Jersey. He was Roethke's senior by fourteen years and already a solid figure in the literary establishment; more important, he was a craftsman of the first order (as his translations of Ovid, Lucretius, and Virgil demonstrate). Allan Seager writes: “Humphries was the first poet of ability with whom Ted could have a continuing association.”
5
Roethke's own later testimony to his first mentor's helpfulness appears in his essay “Verse in Rehearsal,” where he quotes from one of Humphries's letters offering detailed critical commentary on an early draft of the poem “Genesis,” which eventually was published in
Open House
:
This elemental force
Was wrested from the sun;
A river's leaping source
Is locked in narrow bone.
The love is lusty mirth
That shakes eternal sky,
The agony of birth.
The fiercest will to die.
The fever-heat of mind
Within prehensile brute;
A seed that swells the rind
Of strange, impalpable fruit.
This faith surviving shock,
This smouldering desire,
Will split its way through
rock Like subterranean fire.
Humphries's comments are restrained yet exacting. He forces Roethke to weigh every word carefully and to control his tone and argument with precision:
It is certainly in the historical and traditional manner but you can make more use of the manner, and exploit it to better advantage than you do here. If the editors have any intelligent reason for rejecting the poem, it may be that they are fighting shy of it on the ground of its conventional rhymes: desire-fire; shock-rock; mirth-birth; sky-die. It just misses breath-death, as it were, and is pretty triteâ¦. And personally I am a little bothered by your monogamous adjective-noun combinations: six such combinations in the first eight lines, while each may be used advisedly, is a good deal to ask the reader to endure; or, if he can achieve such endurance, you condition him to a frame of mind which he has to throw off with a most violent wrench when he comes to “strange, impalpable fruit.” (
SP
, p. 33)
The correspondence between Roethke and Humphries in the thirties is touching; Roethke was shy, unsure of his own talent, eager for approval and genuinely constructive advice; Humphries was fatherly, meticulous in his criticism, always encouraging. He became the first in a long line of surrogate fathers which would include Kenneth Burke and Robert Heilman, and one of the many whom the poet would call “Pa.” One can see how Humphries candidly felt about his young friend in a 1935 letter to Ann Winslow, who was planning an anthology of younger poets and had questioned him about Roethke:
As to Roethke in particular, I think what he writes is unusually sensitive, delicate, tentative, rather shy stuff. I could not, at this point, utter 300â500 profitable words about his writing unless I were to criticize his poems in the item rather than in the massâ¦. I should think it obvious that Roethke is nobody's damn fool; what is less obvious is his capacity for full-toned and robust expression. That metaphysical-personal-Elizabethan vein cannot yield ore in-exhaustively. Techniquely, Roethke has a good deal to learn, and I suppose he knows it. If I am allowed to take down his pants in public, I might say, for one thing, that he should try to get along without adjectives for a while; for anotherâthis seems to contradict the firstâthat it wouldn't hurt, for practice, to play up the sensuous at the expense of the intellectual, and to show more concern with sound and less with image. And there is a trick of sustaining the energy of a poem; he hasn't quite got this, always; sometimes condensation is needed, sometimes expansion.
6
Looking back, we can see that Roethke learned several things from Humphries that would determine the later course of his work; if his first attempts at verse were overly intellectual, unmusical, and sluggish, his mature work shows none of these deficiencies. Indeed, as Blessing puts it: “In his great poems Roethke's âmeaning' ⦠is always a celebration of the dance of being, the energy of life.”
7
Apart from friendship and sensible criticism, the best thing Humphries gave to Roethke was an introduction to Louise Bogan, whose poems the younger poet had loved for several years. She was to become his most personal counselor, extending her solicitude from his poems to his life in general. Much less formal than Humphries, her letters are variously scathing, witty, or affectionate, but always full of highly specific commentary on his work. One especially good letter of 1935 contains her critique of an early draft of “Open House,” the title poem of his first book. Examining the final version of the poem, it is possible to see how Roethke utilized Bogan's advice to turn a hackneyed, dull poem into an nearly perfect lyric of its kind:
Now to tackle your last lines:
In language strict and pure
I stop the lying mouth
is perfect, really fine. But I don't like
lyric cry
:
it's a cliche, as old Malcolm would say. And it seems to me what you need in the last line is a synonym for
open
or
apparent
, as opposed to the tongueless idea. A fine sounding word meaning
apparent
would, to my mind, bring the intensity of the last stanza to a practically unbearable point of crisis, and that, my dear, is as you know, the great triumph of the short lyric: that it can be brought up, at the end, into a sound that tears the heart in twain. Of course, you could have it, as you suggested: This is my (something) cry, and then, My rage, my agony. That is what you were working toward, I think. Or you could delete the colon after mouth, and say, I stop the lying mouth,
With
something or other. I like the colon after that swell line, however. I leave the job of writing the penultimate line to youânice of me, isn't itâand I go back to a word meaning
apparent
that could be clapped in front of
agony
, to make the last line. And here are all the words the thesaurus gives: conspicuous, manifest, definite, explicit, apparent, notable, notorious, start-staring, literal, plain-spoken, producible, and above board. (I don't
really
think above board would do, but some of the others might!) Now go ahead, my dove. It's your poem, after all.
8
Young poets rarely win such lavish attention from their elders, or such concrete advice. Suggestions of a more general nature occur in a subsequent, unpublished letter of 3 March 1936; as usual, Bogan is responding to a previous letter of Roethke's which contained new poems offered up for commentary: “I like your pieces, but I wish you had loosened up in them a little more: been more Theodore in them. Loosen them up, somewhat, if you haven't already sent them off. Forget the necessity of pure prose and let go.”
9
If one recalls the rich expansiveness of Roethke's later poetry, which everywhere brims with “Theodore,” it is clear that he was a most attentive student.
Louise Bogan also warned her apprentice against the enemy of all beginning poets: abstract diction. The following extract comes from a letter dated 14 December 1937: “The latest poem was what Edmund [Wilson] always calls âvery well written,' but it
was
too full of abstractions, and the form is too full of Yeats. And that long form, with short lines, needs some actual objects in it, to come off. You know how full of objects the poem about the man going up to cast flies in the stream, where the stones are dark under froth, is. That's what your poem needsâ¦.”
10
Actual objects
, of course, become the focus of Roethke's poetry in the forties, when the greenhouse world of childhood rushes into his consciousness with all “that anguish of concreteness.” This redirection of vision toward the concrete
fact
is the beginning of Romantic poetics, for as Emerson said: “To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry.” Abstract knowledge is equivalent to what Plato, in the
Republic
, calls the level of
dianoia
or knowledge
about
things; the poet achieves direct apprehension of the concrete fact, the level of
nous
, where subject-object separations disappear.
The young poet has to listen to advice, as I have been suggesting, but there is the obvious danger of mistaken advice; after a certain point, any poet finds himself on his own. In a letter of 3 August 1937, Bogan praises Roethke for eliminating some abstractions. In the unpublished extract from the letter which follows, Bogan also calls Roethke's attention to the matter of sound and silence in poetry: