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Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=13

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Theodore Roethke including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/roethke/roethke.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Theodore Roethke.

BIOGRAPHY

As a youth, Roethke grew up in the garden world of his parents' greenhouse business before becoming a student at Saginaw's Arthur Hill High School, where he showed early promise in a speech on the Junior Red Cross that was subsequently published in twenty-six languages. The poet's adolescent years were jarred, however, by the death of his father from cancer in 1923, a loss that would powerfully shape Roethke's psychic and creative lives. From 1925 to 1929 Roethke distinguished himself at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, graduating magna cum laude. Resisting family pressure to pursue a legal career, he quit law school after one semester and, from 1929 to 1931, took graduate courses at the University of Michigan and later Harvard Graduate School, where he worked closely with the poet Robert Hillyer. The hard economic times of the Great Depression forced Roethke to leave Harvard and to take up a teaching career at Lafayette College from 1931 to 1935. Here he met Rolfe Humphries, who introduced him to Louise Bogan; during these years Roethke also found a powerful supporter, colleague, and friend in the poet Stanley Kunitz. In the fall of 1935 Roethke assumed his second teaching post at Michigan State College at Lansing but was soon hospitalized for what would prove to be recurring bouts of mental illness. Throughout his subsequent career Roethke used these periodic incidents of depression for creative self-exploration. During the remainder of the decade Roethke enjoyed a growing reputation as a poet. He taught at Pennsylvania State University from 1936 to 1943, publishing in such prestigious journals as Poetry, the New Republic, the Saturday Review, and Sewanee Review. He brought out his first volume of verse, Open House, in 1941. The year after Open House was published Roethke was invited to deliver one of the prestigious Morris Gray lectures at Harvard College, and in 1943 he left Penn State to teach at Bennington College, where he joined such luminaries as Léonie Adams and Kenneth Burke. His collaboration with Burke, in particular, was crucial to the development of the second, and pivotal, volume of Roethke's career, The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948). The descent into the organic life of things themselves dramatized the theme of regression that is explored in psychoanalytic terms in the book's title piece. In his next volume, Praise to the End! (1951), Roethke's regressive aesthetic continued to explore the prerational experience of early childhood and sexual discoveries of adolescence. The volume's title, as an allusion to Wordsworth's The Prelude, signaled the work's romantic celebration of the child's unity of being in the natural world. Praise to the End! was composed after the poet's move to the University of Washington. The early 1950s augured Roethke's growing stature with the award of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1950), Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize (1951), and major grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1952. The following year Roethke married Beatrice O'Connell, whom he had met during his earlier stint at Bennington. The two spent the following spring at W H. Auden's villa at Ischia, off the coast of Italy, where Roethke edited the galley proofs for The Waking: Poems 1933-1953 (1953), a seminal volume that won the Pulitzer Prize the next year. Although thematically akin to Roethke's work of the late 1940s, this volume's title piece marked the poet's return to formalist verse, composed as it is in the complex villanelle pattern. Throughout 1955 and 1956 the Roethkes traveled in Italy, Europe, and England on a Fulbright grant. The following year he published a collection of works that included forty-three new poems entitled Words for the Wind (1957), which won the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, the Longview Foundation Award, and the Pacific Northwest Writer's Award. Now at the height of his popularity and fame, Roethke balanced his teaching career with reading tours in New York and Europe, underwritten by another Ford Foundation grant. While visiting with friends at Bainbridge Island, Washington, Roethke suffered a fatal heart attack in 1963. During the last years of his life be had composed the sixty-one new poems that were published posthumously in The Far Field (1964)—which received the National Book Award—and in The Collected Poems (1966).

SECONDARY SOURCES

Balakian, Peter. Theodore Roethke's Far Fields: The Evolution of his Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Bogan, Don. A Necessary Order: Theodore Roethke and the Writing Process. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991.

Bowers, Neal. Theodore Roethke, The Journey from I to Otherwise. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982.

Kalaidjian, Walter B. Understanding Theodore Roethke. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.

LaBelle, Jenijoy. The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Parini, Jay. Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.

Wolff, George. Theodore Roethke. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER