Theodore Roethke (1908-196З). Biography and Creativity

Theodore Roethke, one of the most famous poets of mid-century America, was born in Saginaw, Michigan, on May 25, 1908, to Otto and Helen Roethke. Roethke’s father owned a greenhouse; the family’s business would figure largely in Roethke’s poetic development. The familial ties to flora extended back even further than Otto. Wilhelm Roethke, Otto’s father, had owned a flower shop in Berlin in the 1870s. Otto himself seemed to have been a lover of the outdoors and was known around Saginaw as an avid hunter.

Theodore Roethke was a poet of prodigious power and vision, and he is especially known for his emphasis on rhythm and for his focus on the natural world and how human beings can or should seek a connection with it. He grew up in and around the greenhouses in which his father kept the plants on which the family livelihood depended. Roethke’s relationship with the natural world seems generally to have been more comfortable and soothing to him than his relationship with his father, which was complex. Otto Roethke did not seem to be a particularly demonstrative man, and young Theodore seems to have longed for his approval. Roethke’s biographer Allan Seager, citing an essay that Roethke wrote at college, states that Roethke seemed to have thought of his father “as a stern, short-tempered man whose love he doubted” (26).

In 1921, Roethke entered high school, where he occasionally ran track and read voraciously. As a high school student, he read widely, from Pater to Stevenson, and owned his own copies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He also wrote short pieces for the high school paper and was a good, if not outstanding student. Soon, however, Roethke’s domestic life began to unravel. In 1922, Otto and Charlie Roethke, Otto’s brother, had a falling out over how the family greenhouse business was being run, and the argument ultimately escalated to a point that, in October of that year, Charlie bought out Otto’s interest in the greenhouse.

Charles Roethke, who by all accounts had never been the most emotionally stable individual, committed suicide in February 1923. At about this same time, Otto was diagnosed with cancer, and he died just two months after Charlie, in April 1923. Theodore apparently bore the latter death in silence, but, as one might expect, it had a profound effect on him, as confirmed by the presence of his father in many of his poems, including one titled simply “Otto.”

After high school, Roethke attended college at the University of Michigan from 1925 to 1929. There he came into his own as a scholar, graduating magna cum laude. The family pressured him to attend law school, but Roethke, dissatisfied with that career path, dropped out after only one semester. He decided, in lieu of law school, to attend graduate classes at the University of Michigan and, significantly, at Harvard University, where he encountered his first true mentor, the poet Robert Hillyer. Because of financial difficulties exacerbated by the Great Depression, Roethke was compelled to leave Harvard and taught for four years (1931-35) at Lafayette College, in Easton, Pennsylvania, where they still hold a biannual Roethke Humanities Festival in his honor.

The next few years would play a significant role in Roethke’s development as a writer. In fall 1935, Roethke took his second full-time teaching job, at Michigan State College (later Michigan State University) in Lansing. There he formed a circle of friends and colleagues who would encourage and aid him in his development as an artist. At Michigan State College he met Stanley Kunitz, his friend and ardent supporter, and a poet of an already growing reputation in his own right. Most important, however, may be that he met Rolfe Humphries, who was a renowned critic and translator (known for his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid) as well as a poet. Humphries encouraged Roethke’s writing and also introduced him to Louise Bogan, the brilliant, though sometimes emotionally unstable, poet.

While these people were to have a profound influence on Roethke, it was during this time that he began having bouts of depression severe enough for him to be hospitalized. These episodes, too, influenced him, and it is reported by more than one biographer that Roethke actually used the time during these periods to explore more deeply his inner self. During the decade of the 1930s Roethke began to garner a reputation as a poet. From 1936 to 1943, he taught at Penn State University, and it was during this time that his reputation as a poet began to flourish.

In 1941, his first volume of poems, Open House, was published and was favorably reviewed in some of the most prestigious publications of the day, including the New Yorker and the Kenyon Review. Before the book had even been published, Roethke had had individual poems appear in literary journals such as Poetry and the Sewanee Review. As a book of poetry, Open House contains more than the fruits of Roethke’s labors. It is also a record of Roethke’s early influences, with clear links evident between Roethke’s verse and the work of contemporary poets like Kunitz and Bogan, but also earlier poets, such as John Donne.

After the success of Open House, Roethke became widely recognized as a writer of merit. In 1943, he left Penn State and began teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. Each of Roethke’s destinations seems to have provided him with nurturing friends and colleagues. At Bennington, he befriended Leonie Adams and Kenneth Burke, two influential and talented writers. During his time at Bennington he wrote the poems that would compose his second volume, The Lost Son and Other Poems. This book contains the so-called greenhouse poems, a series of short lyrics that describe and reflect upon the youthful days Roethke spent among the greenhouses of his father’s business.

The youthful feel of the book may have something to do with the poetic rhythms Roethke employed. According to his biographer Allan Seager, Roethke had borrowed from Seager a copy of the Rhymes of Mother Goose and apparently spent a great deal of time reading and memorizing many of the verses. Partly because of Roethke’s facility with rhythm and meter, The Lost Son garnered a great deal of praise from reviewers. Babette Deutsch, in the New York Herald-Tribune, remarked that Roethke’s lyrics “have a delicate music, and . . . a tenderness that is quite clean of sentimentality.”

Roethke again changed teaching positions in August 1947, when he left Bennington to take an associate professor position at the University of Washington, where he founded one of the most prominent creative writing programs in the country. Conditions were not always wonderful for Roethke, however, despite his literary successes. In fall 1949 he was admitted to Fairfax Hospital and diagnosed with “hyperactivity and disorganized behavior,” probably a manic episode. Despite such setbacks, of which there were more than one, Roethke continued writing, and in 1951 Praise to the Lamb was published.

The book contained longer poems than his previous volumes and is evidence that Roethke never ceased trying to expand his poetic repertoire, even in the face of substantial life changes. In January 1953 he married Beatrice O’Connell, a former student of his at Bennington, and in February 1954 Helen, his mother, died of a heart attack. Just a few short weeks after her death, Roethke was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his volume The Waking: Poems 1933-1953.

Having achieved a greater literary fame than he had had previously, Roethke applied for and won a Fulbright award in 1955. This award allowed him and Beatrice to travel throughout Europe and provided time in which to write. During the Fulbright year, he completed the manuscript for his next collection of poems, titled Words for the Wind, which was published in 1957. This volume garnered perhaps the greatest acclaim; for this work, Roethke was awarded the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, among others.

He was a poet at the height of his power, and he was able to parlay his fame into reading tours in New York and Europe. He therefore taught rather intermittently at the University of Washington, considering his absences because of both illness and funded lecture and reading tours. Nonetheless, he made his mark there, as evidenced by the fact that each year the university continues to hold the Roethke Memorial Reading. He also did a great deal to publicize poetry as a literary art; therefore, his sudden death by heart attack in 1963 was a great loss to the field. His last poems, written in the final year of his life, were published in The Far Field, which won the National Book Award in 1964.

As a poet, Roethke left a lasting legacy, a body of work that exemplifies the power and vigor of American mid-century poetry. In particular, the attention he paid to rhythm and sound distinguishes him among his contemporaries, even those like James Wright, who also wrote more formal verse. The reasons his work continues to be popular are his dedication to the craft of poetry, to making poems sound wonderful, and the universal themes of his poetry. The open, honest, and lyrical way he writes of lost childhood, of people he knew, and of the importance of nature continues to fire the imaginations of his readers. Roethke’s poems are a lasting record of a sensitive, intelligent individual’s reaction to both the world without and the world within.