SOURCE: "The Greenhouse Land," in Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1966, pp. 1-17.

[In the following essay, Malkoff provides an overview of Roethke's life and work, noting developmental influences, recurring themes, and his major publications.]

The "lost world" of childhood experience plays a crucial part in the work of many contemporary writers. This is particularly true in the case of Theodore Roethke, who derived much of his poetic power and originality from his attempt to interpret adult life in terms of a permanent symbolism established in childhood. Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan, on May 25, 1908. His father and uncle owned one of the largest and most famous floricultural establishments in the area at that time. There were twenty-five acres, most of them under glass, in the town itself; and beyond that, farther out in the country, the last stretch of virgin timber in the valley; and finally, a wild area of second-growth timber which the Roethkes converted into a small game preserve. As a child, Roethke would tag after his father as he made his rounds, or wander alone among shoots that dangled and drooped in the silo-rich dark of a root cellar, playing in a pulpy world of beetles, worms, and slugs. Growing older, his relation to the greenhouse world became more active; work and play were combined in hacking at black hairy roots under concrete benches, gathering moss in the swampy field at the edge of the forest, or triumphantly climbing to the roof of the fragile greenhouse. In short, all the joys and fears of growing up were experienced as part of this kingdom of dynamic plant life; and so, it is not surprising that in later years the greenhouse became for Roethke the focus of most childhood memories, his "symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth."

But although the womblike greenhouses were dark and protective, they must have had threatening aspects as well, for Roethke later revised this description in favor of greater complexity. "They were to me, I realize now, both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere German Americans turned their love of order and their terrifying efficiency into something truly beautiful."

Symbol of creation and the strict imposition of order upon chaos, on the one hand, of the protective, fertile womb, on the other, the dual nature of the greenhouse corresponds to Roethke's feelings toward his father and mother respectively. Otto Roethke, "a Prussian through and through," was strong and firm, the personification of Ordnung; but this strength was, for his son, a source of both admiration and fear, of comfort and restriction. His father's mixture of tenderness and brutality comes across clearly in Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz." There he describes how Otto, a bit drunk, would roughly waltz him around while his mother looked on disapprovingly, and he himself was both afraid and joyful. On another, soberer occasion, Theodore, who was seven years old at the time, saw his father bring two poachers to a halt with rifle bullets, and then, leaving his gun behind, walk over and slap them both across the face, these men who had broken the natural order.

Roethke's references to his father, no matter what emotional coloring they are given, have one thing in common: they always convey a sense of awesome, godlike power. This is the man who made the flowers grow, a rainbow at his thumb as he held the watering can; this is the man who established law and enforced it. In Roethke's case, the use of the father as symbol of God (as in "The Lost Son") is more than an artificially conceived literary image: it is charged with experience.

Roethke's mother, the former Helen Marie Huebner, appears less frequently, and in less specific terms, through the poet's work, than his father. She is, however, the central figure in one of Roethke's important series of contemplative poems, Meditations of an Old Woman. "The protagonist is modelled, in part, after my own mother, now dead, whose favorite reading was the Bible, Jane Austen, and Dostoevsky—in other words a gentle, highly articulate old lady believing in the glories of the world, yet fully conscious of its evils." Although this is not a childhood recollection, there is a definite sense of continuity between this quiet, literate old woman, and the young mother who, with the nurse, used to sing Theodore to sleep with nursery rhymes in English and German.

Praise to the End!, another of Roethke's sequences, in which he attempts to recapture his childhood world, is filled with representations of this young mother, but they are generalized and archetypal, rarely as individualized as those of the father. Conceivably, since the mother is shown at the apex of an Oedipal triangle, Roethke never learned to deal with the sexual connotations of specific memories. In any case, however simplified the image of the mother may be in Roethke's poetry, it is necessary to keep in mind that she was a complex figure to her son, and often usurped the father as an establisher of values. "My mother," wrote Roethke, "insisted upon two things—that I strive for perfection in whatever I did and that I always try to be a gentleman." And Roethke had also told friends "the story of a brutal fist fight from which he dragged himself home bruised and bleeding, and how it was his mother who refused to let him into the house, ordering him to go back and thrash the boy who had just thrashed him."

Roethke attended Arthur Hill High School. There he wrote a speech for the Junior Red Cross which became part of an international campaign and was translated into many languages. But in spite of the glow of this success, chief among many similar prize-winning achievements, he intensely disliked the high school, the town itself, and (with the exception, at times, of the land owned by his father and uncle) that entire area of Michigan. Like many adolescents, Roethke was very much disturbed by the hypocrisy of the adult world, by the venom of small-town gossip, its pettiness, its sugary destructiveness. Roethke ended by being convinced that the most "respectable" and "human" members of the community were the gangsters and bootleggers who operated out of Saginaw at that time. He would go to all lengths to have a drink with one of his idols; for Roethke, in spite of his genuine affection for the small and helpless of the world, had great, perhaps excessive, respect for power and for those who wielded it.

Roethke received his A.B. from the University of Michigan in 1929, and attended Michigan Law School and Harvard before finally earning his M.A. at Michigan in 1936. He seems to have disliked all of these schools impartially, but it was at Harvard that Roethke showed his poetry to Robert Hillyer, and received encouragement—"Any editor who wouldn't buy these is a damn fool!"—crucial to his career. It was at this point that he abandoned all ideas of a future in law or advertising. He was studying law, and had already written advertising copy which had been used in a national campaign—his first love, after all, had been prose. However, soon after the meeting with Hillyer, Roethke's poetic career was fully under way, and by the mid 1930s he was contributing regularly to numerous periodicals.

From 1931 until 1935, Roethke was an instructor at Lafayette College, and from 1936 to 1943 he was at Pennsylvania State College (becoming assistant professor in 1939). At both schools, he not only taught English, but coached the tennis teams as well. This should serve to remind us of another aspect of Roethke's personality. He wrote of flowers, of the delicate and small things of the world, he sang the spirit as he found it manifested in man and nature; but he himself was anything but delicate—he stood six feet three inches tall and weighed well over two hundred pounds—and he was very much aware of his own physicality. In tennis, or in any game, he was a fierce competitor, quite likely to sulk and storm if he lost. He was a big bear of a man. But that is only a partial truth; he was not slow, and, if he was not light-footed, neither was he totally clumsy. In later years, for example, when Roethke was at the University of Washington, there was once a fire in the waste basket in the English office that left everyone else flatfooted and gaping while Roethke ran for an extinguisher and put the fire out. If Roethke was a bear, he was a dancing bear, not only in physical movement, but in his life as a whole. By the alchemy of his poetry he transformed a gross and ugly material world into an image of the spirit; he created something graceful out of an awkward reality.

By the time Roethke was thirty, the pattern of his life as poet and teacher was set; but the real struggle had only begun. Throughout his adult life, Roethke was subject to periodic breakdowns within a broader cycle of manic-depressive behavior. His torment was compounded, at least for many years, by the need to cover up these breakdowns in order to survive in the academic community, and he suffered an acute sense of humiliation and defilement as a result of both the illness itself and the position in which it put him. However, he was ultimately able to make of this liability one of his chief assets.

Early poems treat the breakdowns from an objective point of view; they are talked about and intellectualized rather than directly experienced. In particular, Roethke says he is going to salvage what he can, and use the illness to move beyond himself, to a greater awareness of reality. Now these poems do not succeed as representations of Roethke's experience because they lack particularity, they are vague rather than universal; but Roethke is not here interested in exploring the nature of insanity itself, but rather the relation of periods of insanity to normal life. He has not yet learned to turn this concern into good poetry, but this point of view is at the heart of his later work. Insanity, for Roethke, is not a phenomenon divorced from life; it is rather incorporated into it. It is an aspect of experience from which one can perhaps learn a good deal more than from one's routine existence.

In later poems, such as "The Pure Fury," "The Renewal," and "The Exorcism," the mental anguish is not simply talked about, but is directly experienced. Roethke manages this with the aid of vastly improved techniques; but the great power of these poems is ultimately due to the vision of insanity as an integral part of life implicit in his earliest work. The anxiety experienced during a psychotic episode, the dissociation of personality, become in Roethke's hands not states of mind peculiar to the insane, but rather more intense perceptions of the human condition as it is experienced by any man.

There is an equally important corollary to this. If insanity involves more acute as well as distorted perceptions of reality, then, in certain areas, the insane man holds a privileged position; he is in the forefront of human consciousness partly by virtue of his insanity, and, if he can control the tools of language, he can write the poetry of prophecy, he can give to the rest of mankind the insight necessary to change one's life so that it will be more in accord with reality than our mind-dulling society allows. In his last years, Roethke was convinced that there was a close relationship between genius and insanity, and he saw himself in the company of those poets who turned their madness into verse. "What's madness," asked Roethke, in one of his final poems, "but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?" This nobility, according to Roethke, is a product of heightened awareness; it is the tragic vision of life which transforms a meaningless sequence of events into something greater than itself.

In 1941, Roethke's first volume of poems, Open House, was published. (The name, and the very existence, of the title poem were suggested by Roethke's close friend, Stanley Kunitz.) The forty-nine poems represented only a little more than half of the poet's published work. In later years, even most of these began to "creak," and Roethke preserved only seventeen of the poems of his first eleven years of writing in Words for the Wind. Nonetheless, the book was well received, and its apparent conventionality made possible the near universality of praise never accorded his more controversial later work. Roethke used traditional lyric forms, his content tended to be intellectual rather than sensuous; poets such as the metaphysicals, Auden, Léonie Adams, and Elinor Wylie loomed in the background as reasonably well assimilated influences. Although we can now look back on this work and trace the origins of what were to become Roethke's major themes (e.g., the tension between flesh and spirit, the exploration of the self as a search for identity), there was little indication to someone reading his poems at the time of what was to follow.

In 1943, Roethke started teaching at Bennington. Two of the circumstances of his stay there are of note: he no longer taught tennis; and one of his students was Beatrice Heath O'Connell, whom Roethke met again several years later and ultimately married.

In 1947, Roethke arrived at the University of Washington (where he taught until his death) as associate professor. The next year, he was made full professor; and his second book, The Lost Son and Other Poems, was published. It contained several lyrics in the mode of Open House, but the greenhouse poems at the beginning, and the four long developmental poems at the end, were startlingly new, for contemporary poetry as well as for Roethke. The notion that the world of plants might be used as an emblem of human growth was traditional, but not until the greenhouse poems had anyone—not even D. H. Lawrence—combined this with Roethke's concentrated sensuality of imagery and adept manipulation of a subterranean, Freudian universe. The long poems were even more original. Using a framework provided by Freud and Jung, Roethke presented the development of the individual not by means of rational discourse, but in terms of the imagery and symbolism of the natural world, of the world of myth and legend, and the prerational consciousness from which it springs.

In 1951, Roethke published Praise to the End!, a sequence of developmental poems built around the nucleus of the last four works of his previous volume. So successfully did Roethke achieve his goal of finding an adequate symbolism with which to communicate the process of individuation directly, that he found himself in the practically unique position of having instituted, perfected, and finally exhausted a genre. Grumbling critical voices were beginning to make themselves heard; but the disapproval came largely from England, which was busy lowering the reputation of other nondiscursive poets, such as T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. In general, acclaim was resounding.

One of the most important years of Roethke's life was 1953. He brought out The Waking, which received the Pulitzer Prize; he began the readings in philosophical and religious works which were to play so important a part in his later poetry; and, on January 3, he married Beatrice O'Connell.

The Waking included a selection of poems from Open House, almost all of The Lost Son, and the entire Praise to the End! There were also several new poems, in one of which Roethke announced a new source of inspiration: "I take this cadence from a man named Yeats; / I take it, and I give it back again …" Unquestionably, a certain Yeatsian influence was present in the stanzaic forms, the use of slant rhymes, the lyrical expression of public, philosophical themes. But while the critics were only too glad to believe that Roethke had borrowed something from Yeats, many were reluctant to admit that he had given anything back. The question of whether or not Yeats's influence was properly assimilated will be taken up later in this study. In any case, these reservations were not pronounced enough to prevent Roethke from receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. Awards were not new to Roethke; he had, for example, received from Poetry the Eunice Tietjiens Prize (1947) and the Levinson Award (1951). But this, his first recognition on a popular and national scale, was vastly important to a man whose competitive instincts were not limited to the tennis court, who had committed himself fully to the struggle for recognition, and who, only a few years before his death, was able to refer to himself sardonically as "the oldest younger poet in the U.S.A."

Roethke's marriage seems to have been for him a kind of joyous reawakening. His feelings toward his wife are represented in his poetry from the beautiful epithalamion, "Words for the Wind," written during the honeymoon visit to Auden's villa on an island off Naples, through the playful fear of Beatrice's anger in "Her Wrath"; but his final word was the moving "Wish for a Young Wife," his prayer that she live without hate or grief after his death.

The various other aspects of Roethke's life should not be allowed to overshadow the fact that he earned his living as a teacher. However, his concern with teaching went much further than that; he compared good teaching to the dance—a significant experience that cannot be recaptured—and was always concerned with ways of improving his own performance. "The Teaching Poet," an essay, clearly reveals the sympathetic, sensitive nature of his approach. But far more telling than this was the almost universal regard he received from his students: they considered him a great teacher.

As for the faculty, Roethke felt that it should contain more "screwballs"; he certainly seemed one himself, especially during his high periods, and he was not always an easy person to get along with. He could rage unnecessarily against a particular teacher in private. But he was immensely (and honestly) glad when someone had received recognition for achievement, and his public praise for the department as a whole was endless. He was, insists his chairman, more profoundly concerned about the department than most of those who look their "good citizenship" for granted.

Roethke's feelings toward those with whom he worked, and those with whom he competed, were, to say the least, ambivalent. Sometimes, his rage and hate would grow to intolerable levels; he finally came to publish wave after wave of invective in frenzied, Joycean prose, using the pseudonym Winterset Rothberg. In "Last Class," he attacked the members of "Hysteria College," the mindless, impenetrable students, the isolated, passionless faculty. "A Tirade Turning," published posthumously, contains a similar storm of language, directed this time against Roethke's peers: critics, teachers, and poets. But the significant fact is that the tirade does after all turn, the outburst of hate leads to love: "Behold, I'm a heart set free, for I have taken my hatred and eaten it." Identifying his present competitors with the cousins with whom he competed as a boy in Saginaw, Roethke dissipates his rage. It is poetry used as therapy. Possibly, as John Ciardi has suggested, this process is behind much of Roethke's good verse: "This is poetry as a medicine man's dance is poetry. The therapy by incantation. Roethke literally danced himself back from the edge of madness."

In this manner, then, a ranting, dancing bear, Theodore Roethke approached the last, great years of his career. Words for the Wind, which still must be considered his most important single volume, was published in England in 1957, and in this country the following year. It contained The Waking in its entirety, and an equally long selection of new poems. In Love Poems and Voices and Creatures, the psychological quest for the self is given new depth and meaning in philosophical and religious terms. Existentialist thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Buber, and Tillich, and both western and oriental mystics, become the starting points of frenzied metaphysical lyrics. The Dying Man is Roethke's most direct tribute to Yeats, a brilliant sequence of poems that seem to be in Yeats's style, and yet are unmistakably Roethke's; no man who was simply imitating could have written them.

The book concludes with five—four in the British edition—longer poems, collectively entitled Meditations of an Old Woman. These poems, avoiding rational discourse, like those of Praise to the End!, are organized psychologically, in terms of association of imagery, and musically, in terms of alternating themes. The Meditations are the search for the self with new implications, the search for an identity that transcends the temporal limits of the material world; like all of Roethke's more powerful work from this point on, they are pervaded by a growing awareness of imminent nonbeing, of the fact of approaching death. T. S. Eliot has often been cited as having influenced the structure, and, to some extent, the content of these poems. At this suggestion, Roethke was highly indignant (as he was not when Yeats was invoked). Perhaps he was protesting too much. But certainly with regard to content, the points of direct contact with Eliot seem to indicate, as we shall learn, a direct opposition rather than imitation.

There is, however, one sense in which Roethke would not have minded being compared to Eliot; he too had the "auditory imagination," and frequently insisted that his verse was above all meant to be heard. For some years, Roethke had been giving poetry readings whenever he could, and experimenting with recordings. The strain on him was enormous, but he always managed to put on a good show. His major recording, the only one widely available, is Words for the Wind, readings of a selection of poems from that book.

Words for the Wind earned for its author both the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize. It had even become the Christmas selection of the Poetry Book Society when it appeared in England, and Roethke was overjoyed at finally having been accorded that degree of recognition there. There was even more adverse criticism than before, most of it from English poets provoked by Roethke's larger exposure on that side of the Atlantic, and a number of cries of "pseudo-Yeats"; but both criticism and praise were louder than ever before, which itself gave weight to Roethke's claim to acceptance as a major poet. In addition, he was at the center of what Carolyn Kizer called the "School of the Pacific Northwest," a school united not so much by form or intellectual content as by "the feeling area" of their work and by a sense of artistic community. Yet, for a man like Roethke, the apparent security of his position could in an instant give way to limitless extremes of anxiety. Each new successful poem was viewed with terror as possibly the last of its kind. Each comment in which a contemporary was praised could be interpreted as a slight to his own stature. So the struggle did not cease; it barely paused. At times appearing so confident he would bully his friends and guests, at times filled with self-loathing and serf-depreciation, he danced on.

Some of his last years were spent at the house of Morris Graves, while Graves painted in Ireland; some were spent at the home the Roethkes later bought at nearby Puget Sound. There was another trip to Italy, which Roethke did not like, partly because of his inability to master Italian or any other foreign language, and a trip to Ireland which, because of his easy adaptability to the pubs, he liked to excess. It was at a neighbor's pool, near the house at Puget Sound, that Roethke died of a heart attack on August 1, 1963. He was only fifty-five years old, but he had been sick for some time. The film made shortly before his death, In a Dark Time (Poetry Society of San Francisco, 1964), shows him old beyond his age, and the poems of his last years are filled with premonitions of death.

The Far Field appeared posthumously in 1964, including most of the poet's serious verse since Words for the Wind. This volume, which received the National Book Award in 1965, is devoted to the perfection of old forms rather than to the development of new ones. North American Sequence is a series of long contemplative poems, in the mode of Meditations of an Old Woman, with the author this time using himself as persona. Psychological and religious imagery are interwoven in this final revery in search of the self, in search of transcendent identity. The Love Poems once again have a Yeatsian touch, but this lime in the vein of lyrics such as Words for Music Perhaps, rather than the more abstract philosophical poems. Mixed Sequence, for the most part less concentrated in its diction, provides an essential change of pace. And the last part, Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical, is the culmination of the volume, and of Roethke's career. The sequence begins by describing a mystic experience (in "In a Dark Time"), and then explores its implications for the poet's life. Psychology and theology, madness and mysticism, have drawn very close together in this last phase of Roethke's work. The sequence is similar in intent to Roethke's early explorations of the relation of a nervous breakdown to "ordinary" life. But that is the end of the similarity. In content, Roethke has passed from platitudes to a full awareness of the complexities of the human condition; and, in technique, which makes full use of the powerful and exact archetypal imagery of the meditative poems combined with the density of meaning achieved through expert manipulation of form, Roethke is completely equal to these complexities.

With the publication of his collected poems and selected prose, most of the essential materials upon which a fair estimation of Roeihke's poetic worth must be based have become available. Allan Seager is preparing a biography, and several full-length studies of Roethke, including a collection of essays edited by Arnold Stein, are published or underway. This present study is intended as a beginning of the detailed examination of the full scope of Roethke's serious verse necessary to its fair evaluation.