Theodore Roethke (5 page)
As for your poems, my pet: certainly the nonabstract words tightened and bettered the whole tone. I don't like
Wisdom of the Bold
for a title, however. And I wish you'd do some more realistic pieces, outside of your own gizzardâthe automobile one was so good.
Against Disaster
I should shorten. If it were mine (and, of course, it isn't), I'd omit the last stanza and transpose the third and fourth, and leave it at that. In that way, there's room enough left for reverberation: the idea isn't beaten out flat, and you can hear it all better, in the silence made by the abrupt close.
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Roethke listened, and he learned how to manipulate the silent beats of a poem, something many lesser poets never think about. Roethke's best lyrics have a resonance
after
the close which reinforces the meaning of the final line or stanza, so that the reader, like the bemused passerby of Wordsworth's “Solitary Reaper,” continues to hear the haunting music “long after it was heard no more.”
The thirties was a decade when political activism was of principal concern to artists; writers like Auden, Spender, Orwell, Lorca, and Malraux had the center stage. So it was natural that Roethke should attempt a kind of
engage
writing. But this was never his mode; he was, say his friends, comically uninformed on political matters, especially in the late thirties. He was only vaguely aware of the international catastrophe that had been gathering wind over Europe for a decade, though he made some attempts at political poetry. With great wisdom, Louise Bogan wrote on 28 June 1939 to warn him against writing poetry with any overt political interest. She makes overly generous remarks about his mediocre poem “Ballad of a Clairvoyant Widow,” which appeared in
Open House
, then comes to her real point:
The Clairvoyant Widow is good, too. One of the lenses of the telescope is on the Auden side, but not too much so. And I wish the Widowâwho is a really evocative and strange conceptionâdidn't go Simplified Left in the end. After two years of studying the proletariat at first hand, I should say that they don't resemble those New Masses pictures of Everyone Holding Chained Hands Up Toward the Heights, in the least. They are all differentâlike any class. Don't get too simplified. Life isn't like that. Don't let the Zeitgeist get you.
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Bogan liked to mother Roethke, and it seems clear enough from the younger poet's letters that he needed someone to do this. One moving example of his role playing is this little note of 25 May 1936:
Dear Louise: It's three o'clock in the morning, and I've just finished reading, of all things, âTime Out of Mind' by Rachel Field.
Just twenty-eight years ago today little Theodore came into the world. Touching, isn't it? I've never thought much about the passage of time over my flesh, but this time it really gets me down. Twenty-eight years, and what have I done? No volume out and I can't seem to write anything. You can say what you want, but
place
does have a lot to do with productivity Hell, I don't care what happens to me,âwhether I go nuts or my entrails hang out; but I can't stand being so mindless and barren as I've beenâ¦. (
SL
, pp. 36â37)
He was asking to be knocked over the head, sympathetically; and Bogan liked doing this.
In the forties Roethke became such an accomplished craftsman that the advice Humphries and Bogan had been giving him was no longer so urgent. Still, the persona of moral counselor to Roethke appealed to Bogan, and Roethke didn't object, so the letters went on. Here is a brief sample from an undated letter of 1942 in which Bogan characteristically admonished Roethke for being adolescent:
Auden respects and likes you thoroughly, I should say. He wrote that review, you must realize, against all his decisions not to review contemporaries. He thinks you are a good poet, a good teacher, and a fine person generally; but we agreed that you should
grow up
, and stop pretending that your childish side is melancholy,
which it isn't
. Now, worry over that one!
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Roethke was thirty-four at this time and had been hospitalized for manic-depression, an illness that would plague him throughout his life. It seems that Louise Bogan either didn't understand Roethke's psychological problems or thought that by making light of them she could jolt him out of his melancholy states.
A third mentor of great importance to young Roethke was Stanley Kunitz. Kunitz was only three years his senior, but he had already established himself as a recognized poet; he had published one book,
Intellectual Things
(1930), a book Roethke had liked immensely even before he met its author. Typically, it was Roethke who actively sought out the person he thought could help him write better poems; the fact that Kunitz was so young did not seem to matter; the craft, as ever, came first. Kunitz later recollected their meeting:
More than a third of a century has passed since he [Roethke] blew into my life like the “big wind” of one of his poems. I was living in the Delaware Valley then. He came, unannounced, downriver from Lafayette College, where he was instructor in English andâmore satisfying to his prideâtennis coach. My recollection is of a traditionally battered jalopy from which a perfectly tremendous raccoon coat emerged, with my first book of poems tucked under its left paw. The introductory mumble that followed could be construed as a compliment. Then he stood, embarrassed and inarticulate, in my doorway, waiting to gauge the extent of my hospitality. The image that never left me was of a blond, smooth shambling giant, irrevocably Teutonic, with a cold pudding of a face, somehow contradicted by the sullen downturn of the mouth and the pale,
furious eyes: a countenance ready to be touched by time, waiting to be transfigured, with a few subtle lines, into a tragic mask. He had come to talk about poetry, and talk we did over a jug grandly and vehemently all through the night. There were occasions in the years that followed when I could swear that I hadn't been to bed since.
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Kunitz was delighted that a poet not much younger that he was (and one who had already published a number of poems in good magazines) sought out his criticism. The two got on very well, as their letters show, but during the thirties Kunitz retained the upper hand; the tone of his letters was affectionately stern, big-brotherly. The following letter of 31 January 1936 is among the best, a moving document; it was written shortly after one of Roethke's earliest breakdowns:
I'm terribly sorry to learn of your illness. Being flat on one's back, I know, isn't a pleasant experienceâhow much longer will it be?âbut it's a nice opportunity for meditation, dedication, and the gathering of peace to the heart. Your poem has more strength of spirit, more
will
, than anything of yours I've seen. That consciousness of your own value and direction is something to take with you out of the sickroom.
I think you've let yourself be bothered too much by the venomous little pedants, sneerers, and fops that seem to crawl out of the floorboards and plumbing of the academies. They bite the creative because it is human. Save a drop of pity for them, but no more. The artist needs to respect life.
Really, the world is not a hopeless place, despite all the crimes of power, stupidity, and avarice. The imagination of the race, however starved and terrorized, stubbornly continues to build its commonwealth, where a man can be decent, happy, and useful. That is why weâI mean the poetsâare worthy: because we have preserved that possibility, defended the mind from our tongue and our strength, to help in the organization and inspiration of men of good will. That is why we must go beyond Eliotism and defeatism and the unplumbed, salt, estranging metaphysical sea, and identify ourselves with the movement of history, the mainstream of energy in our time. I see all kinds of exciting poems, speculations, and seeds ahead. Let me know how you think and feelâ¦.
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This letter had straightforward designs on Roethke's flagging spirits, and he desperately needed this encouragement. Normally, the letters from Kunitz make few sweeping statements; they focus on specific problems
in Roethke's newest poems with immense accuracy and sensitivity. Sometimes Roethke was very sensitive to this intense criticism, which often found echoes of other poets in his work. This letter of 30 October 1935 seems to have upset him:
“My secrets cry aloud” (“Open House”) is all of a piece, and a good piece, too. The change in the next-to-the-last line is for the better. I think, however, that in your second stanza you've caught an echo from one of the poems in my last poetry group. I don't mind in the leastâbut since you or some reviewer mayâI'll take the chance now of offending you. Don't bother discussing this business, unless you feel I'm mistaken.
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There is no mistake on Kunitz's part, for “Open House” resembles his “The Guilty Man,” in which he writes: “I stand within myself, myself my shield.” Roethke followed with: “I'm naked to the bone, / With nakedness my shield.” The theme of both is much the same: the need for openness, for relinquishing defense mechanisms that make it difficult to be true to oneself; but the linguistic parallels are more striking. Roethke always picked up rhythms, rhetorical gestures, and tropes from the poets he read and liked; for him, “writing poetry was like making love: it was an activity requiring a partner. All of his poems are literary love children, the issue of a union between Roethke's own vision and the work of other poets whom he admired.”
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This critic overstates the case, but not by much. Roethke, of course, would have denied all this vehemently. He wanted to be his own man, and he wrote to Kunitz full of regret that he had caught this echo from his friend. In a letter written in November 1935 Kunitz reassured him; here he is at his very best as mentor, full of benevolence and graceful wit:
Don't be a damned fool.
The poem is your own
. Nobody else wrote it or could have written it. Furthermore, it's a good poemâthe best one I've read in months, I think. I do want you to publish it and to forget about this nonsensical “fake business.” Now I curse myself for having mentioned the matter at all. I did it, believe me, in no accusing spirit and wholly without malice, as one might dissect a moth to find, among its pulp and sap, the buried engine of its tropic life.
As for the passage in question, I believe I got the idea and some of the phraseology from a paragraph in Thoreau. Rilke expressed the same sentiment, variously, at least a dozen times. I could not, therefore, lay claim to either the substance or the expression. All of us take what we can from the mother speech, who is a bitch.
You persecute yourself too much. The poet's only fidelity is to the poem. One must know what one is doing, but one must not use that knowledge against oneself! That is the death of the will.
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Such a letter can only have bolstered the younger man's confidence; he certainly kept the poem. But the problem of “influence” obsessed him throughout his life, especially since critics liked to point out his affinity with Yeats. Once in December 1937, he asked Kunitz to arbitrate on a poem, possibly “The Summons,” which seemed to fall under the Yeatsean shadow to an inordinate degree:
Curse me if you will, Stanley, but here is one more poem. I won't send or show you another until I see you, I promise. I've been making a desperate effort to turn away from negation and “hatred” and this is the result. The shadow of Yeats is on the page, but is it too heavy? In other words, is it my poem or a series of echoes? I believe it mine for I had to fight through much to get even this on the page. God knows what I say isn't new, but is it worth saying in this way? I mean with this many abstractions?
Oh hell, never mind
all
the questions. What's troubling me is the “influence” business. It's so easy to say: “Yeats: (1) three foot alternate rhymes (2) enumerations.”
Be patient with my frantic questioning. (
SL
, pp. 56â57)
With help from Kunitz, Roethke learned that at all costs the poet must remain faithful to the poem, aware of himself as only an element, albeit the crucial one, in the creative process; he realized that a poet must be conscious of the tradition he writes from and appreciate the conventions he shares with his fellow-speakersâwhat Kunitz calls “the mother speech.”
Although Roethke would turn increasingly to Kenneth Burke and others for advice in the forties, Stanley Kunitz remained an irreplaceable friend. Their relationship stands as one of the more fruitful “literary friendships” in modern poetry. It is a testimonial to Kunitz, Humphries, and Bogan that their common apprentice should have become the most significant poet of his generation. Without them, he may never have reached the level of technical accomplishment so evident in
Open House
. He may never have felt so free to experiment with the breaking of forms in
The Lost Son
and later volumes had he not first mastered them. The example of Roethke as poet-apprentice should speak to a new generation of writers who wonder how a poet like Roethke accomplished, even in free verse styles, the sense of
achieved
form. Each of his lines opens out like a leaf, as if inheriting the one possible shape it could have.
We should thank his mentors for the counsel they made available when he was a talented beginner with much to learn before he could write anything like great poetry. Roethke went to these older poets as young Renaissance painters had gone to the studios of older masters; like them, he in time was able to fashion an unmistakable style of his own. In so doing, he went beyond anything Humphries, Bogan, or Kunitz might have guessed.
CHAPTER THREE THE POETICS OF EXPRESSION
Why this endless self-exhortation, this savage introspection? Am I a Dostoevsky? Must I go through something terrible before I can become articulate?