Theodore Roethke Read online

  THEODORE ROETHKE

  Jay Parini

  THEODORE ROETHKE

  An American Romantic

  University of Massachusetts Press Amherst, 1979

  Copyright © 1979 by

  The University of Massachusetts Press

  All rights reserved

  LC 79–4022

  ISBN 0–87023–270–3

  Printed in the United States of America

  Designed by Mary Mendell

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  appear on the last page of this book.

  For my mother and father, with love

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PART ONE. THE MAKING OF A POET

  1. American Romantic

  2. The Poet as Apprentice

  3. The Poetics of Expression

  4. In Language Strict and Pure

  PART TWO. THE RADICAL VISION

  5. The Broken Mirror of Perseus

  6. The Lesson of the Plants

  7. The Greenhouse Poems

  8. The Lost Son: Journey of a Hero

  9. From the Kingdom of Bang and Blab

  PART THREE. THE LONG JOURNEY OUT OF THE SELF

  10. The Lesson of the Mask

  11. Love’s Proper Exercise

  12. The Way of Illumination

  PART FOUR.

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Index

  PREFACE

  Since the publication of Open House in 1941, critics have been at work on Theodore Roethke, trying to come to terms with a poet of major standing in American literature. Among the earliest critics were W. H. Auden, Stanley Kunitz, and Kenneth Burke, and their pioneering essays are still useful. But it is only since the poet’s death in 1963 that we have had Roethke’s work before us, making it possible to find the larger patterns in his work. A clutch of introductory surveys and specialized studies has already appeared, and no doubt this is only the beginning. For no single reading of any good poet is final. Just as each new generation of poets modifies the view of the previous one, so critics participate in an ongoing critical act. The individual critic’s eye may be thought of as a lens that colors a particular text; of course, the better the critic, the lighter the tint, but absolute transparency remains a hypothetical ideal. Criticism is, at its practical best, collaborative; we are lucky in this regard, for a critical milieu has materialized around Roethke. I have used this situation to my advantage in this study, making clear my innumerable debts throughout. This is not simply an introduction to Roethke’s Collected Poems. It is an attempt to isolate major patterns in the work, to discover the poet’s mythos, and to relate his body of writing to the Romantic tradition, its proper context. Roethke was a remarkably self-conscious artist, fully aware of his predecessors and his relation to them. This relationship is complex, for Roethke was not merely an imitator of other poets; he carried on what amounts to an elaborate dialogue with his Romantic predecessors, and the exact nature of this dialogue is studied. In particular, Emerson is singled out throughout as a major influence, and one rarely discussed before this.

  The study begins with an overview of Roethke’s poetry in the context of American Romanticism, traced back to its source in Emerson. It defines the personal mythos and nature of Roethke’s personal symbol system, suggesting that the autobiographical myth of the greenhouse Eden is this poet’s subject, the central image in his work from beginning to end. This fact is easily blurred by the radical stylistic changes which occur at various stages in his career. These changes remain, it appears, superficial; the poet merely extends or refines his chosen subject. The second chapter focuses on the apprentice years, the decade preceding Open House, when Roethke discovered a poetics, a Romantic poetics, and learned about poetry-as-collaboration. He learned the art of creative imitation from his mentors, Rolfe Humphries, Louise Bogan, and Stanley Kunitz; this attitude would allow him throughout his career to be strongly influenced, but not overpowered, by other poets. The brief third chapter offers an abstract of Romanticism as Roethke himself saw it. This chapter is referred to throughout the study, which moves from it to a detailed reading of Roethke’s poetry as the most important contribution to the literature of American Romanticism since Wallace Stevens. The text proceeds chronologically through the Collected Poems, a method dictated by the organic shape of Roethke’s work, which unfolds with uncanny integrity as if inheriting its single possible form.

  I have drawn heavily throughout on unpublished material from the Roethke Collection in possession of the University of Washington’s Suzzallo Library, a cornucopia of manuscript drafts of poems, notebooks, letters, and teaching materials. I am grateful to Beatrice Roethke Lushington for permission to roam freely through this Roethkean harvest. While doing this primary research I benefited from discussion with three poets whom I wish especially to thank: David Wagoner, Richard Hugo, and Richard Blessing. Various eyes have passed over this book in its many drafts, but special thanks are due to the following friends for their sympathy and intelligent guidance: A. H. Ashe and A. F. Falconer of the University of St. Andrews, Philip Hobsbaum of Glasgow University, Thomas Vance, James A. W. Heffernan, David Wykes, and Philip Holland of Dartmouth College, Gordon Williams of Yale University, Richard Ellmann of Oxford University and Ralph J. Mills, Jr., of the University of Illinois. Portions of this book have appeared, in earlier form, in the following: Antaeus, The Texas Quarterly, The Ball State University Forum, and Blake and the Moderns, ed. Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt (Kent State University Press). I am grateful to Doubleday and Company for permission to quote from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (copyright © 1966 by Beatrice Roethke), and to Devon Jersild for help in preparation of the index.

  J. P.—Hanover, New Hampshire

  PART ONE THE MAKING OF A POET

  CHAPTER ONE AMERICAN ROMANTIC

  There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern or type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.

  G. K. Chesterton

  This book offers, in effect, a map of Theodore Roethke’s secret planet; it is an attempt to reconstruct his mental world, to discern the pattern at the back of his mind as it is revealed by his poems. Roethke was a great poet, the successor to Frost and Stevens in modern American poetry, and it is the measure of his greatness that his work repays detailed examination. Roethke saw himself as working within a great tradition, modifying and extending it after his own fashion. Specifically, Roethke was a Romantic. His work abounds in references to Blake, Wordsworth, and Yeats, especially, but my stress is upon the American quality of his Romanticism with Emerson and Whitman as primary ancestors, with Stevens as a strong contemporary influence. Without impugning his originality, one can read all Roethke’s work as a continuing conversation with his precursors; he was a poetic ventriloquist of sorts, able to speak through masks of those whom he called “the great dead.” Still, there is a voice at his core which is unmistakably his own. He has his special province, a landscape so personal and distinct that no amount of imitation or writinglike-somebody-else, as he called it, disturbs the integrity of his voice. His poetic world is self-contained and secure.

  As my epigraph suggests, the genius behind any imaginative work has something to do with imagery. Roethke’s verse from Open House (1941) to the posthumous The Far Field (1964) displays a consistent and vivid imagery found only in the greatest writing. His images derive from the dream world of his Michigan childhood, and one soon finds that a few key symbols operate throughout his work, most important the Father (who is alternately the poet’s biological father, Otto Roethke, or God), the greenhouse, and the open field (where illuminations generally occur). There are minor symbols in this cluster, too—the wind (spirit), the stone (associated with transcendental experiences) and the tree (selfhood). The image of Woman as mother, lover, or sister is present from the beginning, taking on greater significance in the middle and later periods. The central figure in all the poems is Roethke in his mythic projection as the “lost son.” Indeed, the “Lost Son” sequence, published between 1948 and 1953, represents this poet’s most permanent contribution to modern poetry. The later part of the sequence, called Praise to the End!, takes its title from Wordsworth’s consummate autobiographical poem, The Prelude; it was no doubt a conscious effort on Roethke’s part to identify himself with this primary Romantic mode. I explore these connections fully later in this study, for Roethke is a poet of the egotistical sublime (to use Keats’s description of Wordsworth). He appropriates for himself those parts of the world that make up the imagery or world picture at the back of his mind. These images became the signposts of his secret planet, and we can know Roethke best by knowing his entire work, by following his personal development from unrealized potential to self-discovery and, ultimately, self-transcendence.

  Roethke’s poetry will never be properly understood unless read within the context of Romanticism in its American manifestation. The work of recent critics has been invaluable in showing the breadth and continuity of the Romantic movement from its origins in eighteenth-century Germany to the present.1 What seems constant in this nearly intractable movement is the recognition that every man is cut off from nature; gi
ven this state of affairs, art becomes indispensable in the process of reconciliation between self and nature (subject and object). Every man has either to make his peace with nature or wage his own “war between the mind and sky” (as Stevens called it).

  If the European man of feeling considered himself alienated from nature, the American found his isolation all the more intense. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, and Hawthorne felt cut off from the old world culture; they were isolated men, forced to depend on their personal resources for inspiration and fulfillment. Even more so than English Romantics, the American Transcendentalists were dependent upon German idealism. As Emerson said: “What is properly called Transcendentalism among us: is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind has ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the sense, the second perceive that the senses are not final, and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell.”2 Emerson’s far-reaching influence on some later American poets has been demonstrated, but not for Roethke,3 although his tendency toward idealism in the later poetry can be traced directly back to Emerson’s essays. Nevertheless, Roethke’s attraction to the world of objects was undiminished by his belief, which he took from Emerson, that nature was the symbol of the spirit. Indeed, few poets have evoked the physical world in such concrete terms. In this, Roethke seems closer to Thoreau than Emerson, for Thoreau’s nature was at once sensuously concrete and spiritual. One critic of Thoreau has said: “As a man studies the details of nature he discovers himself; he learns the spiritual and natural laws that operate in him and give him hope and being. Thoreau was as assiduous as Jonathan Edwards in seeking out these correspondences, these images and shadows of human things…. His exhaustive and obsessive effort in his journals to catalogue botanical facts as they appeared in the course of the seasons was based on the premise that he might thereby discover natural, seasonal rhythms in the human unconscious.”4 Similar claims can be made for Roethke.

  Romantic poets share the concept of “nature as a living whole,” an organic unity that somehow points to a spiritual realm and relates to man.5 One can see how the doctrine of correspondences follows naturally from this conception. In The Prelude the growth of the poet’s mind parallels his increasing awareness of nature’s divine presence. The child, according to Wordsworth, has a special relationship with nature; its world suffers no radical division. Only with adulthood does the sense of isolation intervene; so the task for poetry becomes the process of recapturing lost time through the exploitation of memory. Both Yeats and Stevens in this century have seen the poet’s task in similar terms, Yeats in his lifelong quest for Unity of Being (in which the soul recovers what he called “radical innocence”) and Stevens in his search for “the supreme fiction” (after Baudelaire’s la plus haute fiction). Roethke was devoted to both Yeats and Stevens, acknowledging his debt to them many times. His quest for the greenhouse Eden, as Louis L. Martz called Roethke’s childhood dream world, imitates the quest patterns of the other great Romantics, although the greenhouse has more in common historically with Blake’s Beulah (where nature is threatened by chaos and darkness) than Yeats’s Byzantium or Stevens’s wholly fictive realm, where nature is left behind.6

  To long for a purity not available within nature or the natural processes is a common Romantic urge, and Roethke does not escape its pull. One critic7 points to the poem called “Snake,” where Roethke notices a young snake drawing away and says:

  I felt my slow blood warm.

  I longed to be that thing,

  The pure, sensuous form.

  And I may be, some time.8

  It would seem contradictory that this form could be both “pure” and “sensuous,” but Roethke wants to relinquish nothing. Like Stevens, he believes that “the greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world….”9 He seeks out “that anguish of concreteness”—a total immersion within nature. In the early poem “Epidermal Macabre,” Roethke, again, wishes the body away, but the spirit he longs for remains carnal:

  And willingly would I dispense

  With false accouterments of sense,

  To sleep immodestly, a most

  Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

  (CP, p. 19)

  Yeats makes a similar wish in The Tower, and Roethke is as much a Platonist as his Irish master. His one pure expression of the body-spirit dichotomy occurs in the late poem “Infirmity” where the gradual separation of these previously integrated elements is acknowledged: “How body from spirit slowly does unwind / Until we are pure spirit in the end” (CP, p. 244). But this unwinding comes only after the body ceases to provide joy, in either old age or sickness. For the most part, Roethke accepts his physical state as something worthy of celebration. The body is the source of all energy. It is part of the natural world and, in the highest state of consciousness, self and other intermingle. Self-possession becomes world possession, as in “The Long Waters”:

  I lose and find myself in the long water;

  I am gathered together once more;

  I embrace the world.

  (CP, p. 198)

  Like Wordsworth, Whitman, and Yeats, Roethke was writing the poetry of autobiography, working with the materials of his own life and shaping them into a personal myth or mythos in Northrop. Frye’s sense of the term as a general organizing principle of literary form. Coming well after the discovery of psychoanalysis, Roethke had available a vocabulary and technique for invading the unconscious dimension. When he became interested in psychoanalysis through Kenneth Burke, his colleague at Bennington in 1942, his poetry moved into the arena of greatness. But Open House did not suggest the beginning of a major career. With the advantage of hindsight, one can go back and find in it themes that flow into Roethke’s later vein, but at the time no one knew what was coming. Roethke himself was pessimistic about his talents. He later wrote: “It took me ten years to complete one little book, and now some of the things in it seem to creak. Still, I like about ten pieces in it.”10 Open House will be examined later, for it serves as a prelude to Roethke’s career, and the contrast between this apprentice volume and The Lost Son (1948) is startling. The question is what happened to the poet in the early and mid-forties to effect his transformation from minor versifier to major poet? How did the discovery of psychoanalysis work in the poet to release his imaginative energies?

  The answer involves Roethke’s relationship to the Romantic movement as it developed in America. An important clue is offered by Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death:

  If psychoanalysis must say that instincts, which at the level of animality are in a harmonious unity, are separated at the level of humanity and set into conflict with each other, and that mankind will not rest content until it is able to abolish these conflicts and restore harmony, but at the higher level of consciousness, then once again it appears that psychoanalysis completes the romantic movement and is understood only if interpreted in that light. It is one of the great romantic visions.11

  Indeed, what Roethke discovered in this crucial period of his career was exactly what Wordsworth seems to have realized at Alfoxden: the use of memory. Roethke nearly always kept a journal after 1929, first as a graduate student at Michigan and then at Harvard. In the thirties, these journals are really working notebooks; they contain rough drafts of poems, odd lines that came into his head which might possibly be useful for a poem one day—but nothing personal apart from the record of a few dreams. Not until he met Kenneth Burke and began to take psychoanalysis seriously did the journals come alive. Suddenly, the reader of these mostly unpublished pages finds a poet searching his memory, working his way back in time, confronting in a most brutal and direct fashion the primal imagery at the source of his deepest conflicts. Roethke explained: “To write about one’s past is not to escape but to understand the present.” And again: “I go back because I want to go forward.”12 Or in this beautiful line from another journal of the period: “All the present has fallen: I am only what I remember.”13 One cannot understand the original method of Roethke’s poems after 1948 without seeing how he adapted the techniques of analysis in a special way, relating them to Romantic poetics, to extend if not complete (as Brown suggests) the historical movement called Romanticism.