SOURCE: "Theodore Roethke as a Northwest Poet," in Northwest Perspectives: Essays on the Culture of the Pacific Northwest, compiled and edited by Edwin R. Bingham and Glen A. Love, University of Washington Press, 1979, pp. 186-216.

[In the following essay, Vanderbilt examines Roethke's regional self-identity and distinct American voice, particularly as influenced by his Midwestern origins and later years in Seattle.]

To explore the relationship between Theodore Roethke and the Northwest is very satisfying for several personal reasons. I was Roethke's colleague in his late years at the University of Washington. He knew I admired his poetry, but I was somehow unable to accord him the repeated and fulsome praise I knew that he deserved and almost insatiably required. I now intend to give proper homage to Roethke and make amends for the perversity of my earlier restraint. I shall also atone for my failure in never having shared with Roethke the regional impulse in his later poetry. After his posthumous The Far Field appeared in 1964, I began to discover how important the Northwest was to Roethke. Since then, I have followed the steady flow of critical analyses, revaluations, and rising estimates of his lyrical virtuosity and dynamic vision. (How the insecure Roethke would have savored this belated recognition!) Still absent in this criticism is the importance for Roethke of what D. H. Lawrence termed "the spirit of place."

The neglect is understandable. Testimony abounds that Roethke was in no sense to be mistaken for a regional poet. The evidence is formidable enough that I want to assemble it rather fully at once. I shall then argue the positive case for Roethke as a man and poet whose total career can be understood as a growing possession of his American geography and selfhood. Finally, I want to offer a few comments about Roethke in the light of standard conclusions which so often appear in discussions of literary regionalism, at least since recognition of Faulkner. I mean the pro forma consideration of regionalism as initial response. The writer of major talent then dissolves, transforms, and transcends this regionalism and moves outward to the national, international, and cosmic reaches of his sensibility. That a literary region in American might claim a healthy autonomy through its own shaping myths and archetypes, a unique reason for being that is fully realized in its own necessary form—this possibility has seldom been entertained seriously by our literary historians and critics. Allen Tate observed in 1929, for example, that American regionalists like Lindsay, Sandburg, and Masters, let alone the would-be epic poet like Hart Crane, suffered from the absence of a truly national literature, a "homogeneous body of beliefs and feelings into which the poet may be educated." In particular, "the spiritual well-being of the West," said Tate, "depends upon its success in assimilating the cultural tradition of the older sections." But Tate then hoped that future writers in the "provinces" could help somehow to solve the problem of a national literature by releasing local wellsprings and creating ancillary pipelines into an eventual mainstream culture (my imagery, not Tate's). Only recently, one of our best poetry critics, Fred Moramarco, reviewed a collection of dubiously "Western" poetry and then went on to advance the companion, or universal, theory of regional offerings. The best author will select his local materials with an eye and ear responsive to significant universals. Unlike Tate, Moramarco does not foresee a vital literary regionalism in the future from which larger "verities" can emerge, for he doubts that the distinctive region itself any longer exists. Instead, we live in "post-McLuhan media saturated global village uniformity." The sad result is that "the idea of a regional literature in any meaningful sense died in this country with the passing of Frost, Faulkner, Jeffers and a few other major literary talents who were able to isolate regional qualities and discover the universal verities within them." Compulsively echoed and rephrased by lesser critics over the past fifty years, these demands for significant national and universal expression have encouraged a fair amount of misdirected ambition in the careers of American authors who might otherwise have been content to embrace and vitalize the particular history, folklore, and landscape of their region. Among the victims of this confused purpose, I am afraid, was our poet Theodore Roethke.

I.

No interpreter of Roethke, biographer or critic, has discovered that in his life or poetry Roethke drew either a strong identity or consistent nourishment from his locale. He was above all, we are told, a private, meditative, hermetic sort of man and poet. He derived from his natural surroundings a stream of correspondences to express the agonized progress of the lonely self in its mysterious and sometimes wondrous drive toward transcendence and beatitude.

Biographer Allan Seager writes, for example, that for Roethke, "It was himself he had to sing, not the circumambient world. He only used that." And Seager confirms his judgment with the testimony of Stanley Kunitz, whose friendship dated from Roethke's first teaching job at Lafayette College in the early thirties: "Stanley Kunitz says [Roethke] was not a really close observer, and, of course, he did not need to be since everything around him was useful to him only as signatures of himself." When Roethke traveled, he was interested in meeting a few interesting people rather than touring the monuments or natural wonder of historic places. Many of his friends and colleagues—from Lafayette to Michigan State to Pennsylvania State to Bennington and (after 1947) the University of Washington—would probably concur with Denis Donoghue that Roethke was the autonomous poet who never attached himself to an ideology or a geographical region: "He never set up shop as a Left Wing poet or a Right Wing poet or a Catholic poet or a New England poet or a Southern poet or a California poet; he never claimed privilege in any region of feeling."

Donoghue's regional list was casual. We may inquire into his two prominent omissions—the Michigan Saginaw Valley of Roethke's childhood and the Pacific Northwest of his final sixteen years. Ample data suggests that Roethke felt no spirit of place in the environs of Saginaw. Seager puts it this way:

There is no memory of Roethke hanging around the old folks listening, like Faulkner, and his old folks were German, anyway. Their stories would have led him back to the Old Country which never interested him. He also ignores all the vivid racy tales of the lumber boom, tales that expressed courage, will, and cunning that might have engaged another man. Unlike Allen Tate or Robert Lowell, he ignores in his poetry the events of his region's history. He must have been aware of the Indians, for he collected a shoebox full of flint arrowheads in his rambles along the riverbanks. But, of course, many boys did that.

Years after, during the first mental breakdown in late 1935 that terminated his brief teaching stint at Michigan State University, Roethke recorded the following insight about himself in a long medical questionnaire: "Afraid of being localized in space, i.e. a particular place like W. E. Leonard in Madison. Question: What is the name of this? Hate some rooms in that sense, a victim of claustrophobia (sp)? Wasn't Dillinger a victim of this? Aren't many of the criminal leader types of this sort [sic]." The illuminating reference to Dillinger connects with Roethke's poetic self-image as the outsider and points to his regional alienation even earlier. In one of his college essays at the University of Michigan, Roethke had discussed "the poet as criminal," the instance being François Villon. Early on in Michigan, then, Roethke felt himself a lonely poet and species of outrageous free spirit. Or as Seager provocatively sees it, Roethke "may have begun to suspect that poetry, having no voice in the community where he lived, was antisocial…. Poetry was akin to crime. Strange and unwelcome in middle-class America, the poet was a criminal." Though he admired Whitman, the young Roethke would not emulate the people's bard and camarado. He was, instead, the tough-guy poet. "I may look like a beer salesman, but I'm a poet," he announced defensively by way of introduction to the president of Bennington College at a job interview in New York early in the forties. Even through the fifties and into his final years, he continued to fashion and embroider the fiction of the gangster element in his life. He would relate how he had once been on close terms with the Detroit underworld and that the notorious Purple Gang had once "offered to bump my Aunt Margaret off for me. As a favor, you understand." The cadences here might have been lifted directly out of one of the fabrications of Jay Gatsby.

Seager effectively discounts these "memories" of regional outlawry. "In the Thirties, Ted was not near Detroit long enough to ingratiate himself with the gang lords." Excepting the one year in Michigan during the mid-thirties, he was successively at Harvard, Lafayette, and Penn State, safely out of touch with Michigan and its urban underworld.

His first two books of poetry firmly support the thesis that Roethke was never a midwestern regionalist, either by sympathetic identity or literary example. Before Open House appeared in 1941, ten of the poems were anthologized in a volume titled New Michigan Verse (1940). Hungry for a reputation, Roethke was delighted to be published but, says Seager, "he had a few misgivings also because he did not want to be known as a regional poet." Roethke rather explicitly denies, also, any regional impulse in the Saginaw greenhouse poems which create the celebrated breakthrough in the mid-forties and dominate his second book, The Lost Son (1948). When he comments on this work in progress to Kenneth Burke, Roethke stresses not the significance of local place but rather the intention to "show the full erotic and even religious significance that I sense in a big greenhouse: a kind of man-made Avalon, Eden, or paradise." The inspiration and metaphor of the organic greenhouse world appeared to be mythic and not regional. Outside the childhood greenhouse, to be sure, were a community and a region, but the growing youth came to feel this area as annihilating space, either a claustrophobic "particular place" or a pitiless waste land. In a vivid notebook jotting later in the fifties, Roethke remembered "the Siberian pitilessness, the essential ruthless-ness of the Middle West as I knew it."

Roethke came to the Northwest in 1947 to join the English faculty at the University of Washington, and it remained his academic address until his death in the summer of 1963. Yet some colleagues who were closest to him there have told me that he was never a chamber of commerce spokesman for the Northwest. Even before he took up residence in Seattle, Roethke in the East expressed "misgivings about going even further into the provinces" than ever before. When he arrived in mid-September of 1947, he mentioned his initial fears to Kenneth Burke: "I'm afraid I'm going to be overwhelmed by nice people: it's a kind of vast Scarsdale, it would seem. Bright, active women, with blue hair, and well-barbered males. The arts and the 'East' seem to cow them." Neither pub life nor cafe society had much of a chance in this Northwest outpost. "I found, to my horror," Roethke continued, "that you have to go a mile from the campus even to get beer, and there are no bars for anything except beer and light wines in the whole of Seattle, except in private clubs. And there are no decent restaurants, either, as far as I can find out."

Several months later, he wrote again to Burke. Living in the Northwest, it was now clear, amounted to a sort of physical and spiritual exile. "I tell you, Kenneth," he wrote, "this far in the provinces you get a little nutty and hysterical: there's the feeling that all life is going on but you're not there." Within the year, he had reverted to the earlier self-image of the poet as at best an outlaw celebrity in his tame middle-class community. "As the only serious poet within 1,000 miles of Seattle," he wrote another friend in the East, "I find I have something of the status of a bank robber in Oklahoma or a congressman in the deep south."

In 1951 he moved out of the University district to North Edmonds, where the house offered a splendid view of Puget Sound. "But oddly enough," he wrote to Babette Deutsch, "it's lonely and I resent the 30 minutes drive each way." After his marriage in 1953 he lived in Bellevue on Lake Washington and finally bought a house across the lake nearer to the University in 1957. But one should not easily conclude that Roethke had slowly become a loyal Northwesterner. Throughout his tenure at the University of Washington, he was inquiring into jobs elsewhere or applying for Fulbrights and other grants that might bring him relief or delivery from the scene at Seattle and the University.

This alienation was caused, in part, by what to him was a depressing climate in the Northwest. In his first or second year, he entered the following verses in a notebook.

      What eats us here? Is this infinity too close,
      These mountains and these clouds? On clearing days
      We act like something else; a race arrived
      From caves … [sic]
      Bearlike, come stumbling into the sun, avoid that shade
      Still lingering in patches, spotting the green ground.

Writing to Princess Marguerite Caetani (founder and editor of Botteghe Oscure), he ruefully exclaimed in 1954, "Such a stupid letter!—even worse than usual. But it's partly the weather, I think—the sun hardly ever gets out in these parts. (San Francisco and Berkeley were wonderfully warm & non-foggy the week I was there.)" The climate affected not only his disposition. His physical health also deteriorated. Seager writes: "His arthritis grew worse and became more painful in Seattle's damp climate. (He kept trying to get a job in California for the winter terms where he could be in the sun. He liked the sun.) He seemed to have a permanent bursitis in his elbow, and what he called 'spurs' in his shoulder for which he often got cortisone injections."

Small wonder, then, if Roethke in his later poetry appears not to celebrate the Northwest but, instead, meditates upon death and the Roethkean soul's "drive toward God." Frederick Hoffman recalled that in the summer of 1957, Roethke confided "that he was much concerned with the mysteries and paradoxes of death, and that his new poetry reflected these concerns. It did just that…." Even in the "North American Sequence," William Snodgrass eloquently dismisses the native and regional note and hears instead a predominant urge to regression and death. The "burden" of such poems as "Meditation at Oyster River" and "The Long Waters," says Snodgrass, is "a desire to escape all form and shape, to lose all awareness of otherness … through re-entrance into eternity conceived as womb, into water as woman, into earth as goddess-mother."

Other critics have echoed this conclusion, and some have gone on to remark that Roethke in the Northwest years scarcely seems to have acknowledged the ordinary human life of his community and region, let alone the political and social crises of the nation and world. Perhaps the capacity to respond to a regional ethos in America is linked to the capacity to respond to a national ethos—to feel the pulsebeat of the nation in the whole and in its distinguishing parts. The people of Washington State after the War were affected not only by the Canwell Committee political witchhunts, or logging and aircraft prosperity, but more broadly by Little Rock, McCarthyism, Eisenhower and Nixon, and a standardized civilization exploding with machines, gas pumps, and supermarkets. Where does this life appear in the poetry of Roethke? Simply, it is not there. But in recent years we have glimpsed, in the published notebooks, a Roethke to some degree conscious of both the humdrum and "provincial" and also the national temper of Cold War life in the Eisenhower fifties. But he appears through it all a man tormented by his incapacity to absorb this life, either concretely or abstractly, into his imagination, to ventilate his airtight broodings of self with poems ranging from his Seattle A & P to the shoddy goings-on of Joseph McCarthy and Richard M. Nixon. Being aware of a regional America, he muses, is to be sensitive to the lonely limits of the "provincial" experience lived simultaneously within an American civilization of major shortcomings and meager returns. In short, he cannot go the poetic route of a Hart Crane, Williams, Lowell, or Ginsberg. The following prose excerpts from the published notebooks reveal something of the distinguishing tone of the postwar decade—from Seattle to the nation's capital—which a lonely Roethke heard and felt but was unable to convert into his poetry.

Me, if I'm depressed, I go down to the A & P and admire the lemons and bananas, the meat and milk.

Crane's assumption: the machine is important; we must put it in our lives, make it part of our imaginative life. Answer: the hell it is. An ode to an icebox is possible, since it contains fruit and meat.

Perhaps our only important invention is the concept of the good-guy.

After Mr. Richard M. Nixon, I feel that sincerity is no longer possible as a public attitude.

… there are intense spiritual men in America as well as the trimmers, time-servers, cliché-masters, high-grade mediocrities.

Democracy: where the semi-literate make laws and the illiterate enforce them.

Was it my time for writing poems about McCarthy or my time for sending out fresh salmon or the time of playing happy telephone or my time for dictating memoranda about what's wrong with America?… or my time for crying.

I think no one has ever spoken upon the peculiar, the absolute—can I say—cultural loneliness of the American provincial creative intellectual. I don't mention this as something to be sighed over, worried about, written about—simply say it is simple fact that the American is alone in space and time—history is not with him, he has no one to talk to—Well, the British do.

As a provincial, an American, no fool, I hope, but an ignoramus, I believe we need Europe—more than she needs us: the Europe of Char, of Perse, of Malraux, of Michaux, those living men with their sense of history, of what a freeman is.

An argument can be fashioned, nevertheless, that despite his poetic escape from the ordinary or critical affairs of his fellow earthlings, Roethke in Seattle was, in the most expressive and traditional manner, the poet of his place and time. In his dark confessional pages he spoke powerfully of the poet's spiritual despairs and searchings. Were they not shared, however diffusely, by Northwest folk and in fact, by all addled Americans whose lives were without ties and ballasts in the new global chaos of the mid-twentieth century? Another vivid notebook entry, presumably self-descriptive, supports this view of Roethke's American career and might aptly serve as the poet's own modern epitaph:

      The grandeurs of the crazy man alone,
      Himself the middle of a roaring world.

II.

Other Roethkes insistently emerge from the biographical pages. They blur together to suggest the man and poet who related himself positively to a place of birth, a region of his formative youth, a native land, and finally, a second region of his mature years. Allan Seager underplays this opposite story. The temptation is familiar to all who have conceived or labored to write the coherent biography of a complicated human being. Roethke's shifting masks and identities were varied and complex. He was a man of fierce, self-rending ambivalences. In addition to the previous examples of disaffection from region and country, leading to final escape into the metaphysical, one discovers also Roethke's embracement variously of the communal, the regional, and the national.

Though I am in search of a Northwest Roethke, I should briefly touch the earlier years for the evidence that he felt a certain positive spirit of place and attachment in America before 1947. In the early forties when Roethke arrived at rich and presumably sophisticated Bennington, Seager was struck by his new colleague's "ambiguous fear and admiration of the rich, his ambiguous fear and admiration of the East" which seemed to stir "all sorts of atavistic and Middle Western antagonisms" in the man. Seager did not know then that this Midwest identity had recently become a central concern for Roethke. He had applied for a Guggenheim grant just before. The poetry would advance beyond the private rejection and anger he had earlier expressed in regard to provincial Michigan and the "hideous" life of his youth. "A series of poems about the America I knew in my middle-western childhood," he wrote, "has been on my mind for some time; no flag-waving or hoopla, but poems about people in a particular suburbia." Though he failed to receive the grant, Roethke persisted, and in his successful Guggenheim application three years later he described two of his three projects to be the writing of a distinctly regional verse:

(1) a dramatic-narrative piece in prose and verse about Michigan and Wisconsin, past and present, which would center around the return of Paul Bunyan as a kind of enlightened and worldly folk-hero.

(2) a series of lyrics about the Michigan countryside which have symbolical values. I have already begun these. They are not mere description, but have at least two levels of reference.

To William Carlos Williams, who would understand this regional programme, Roethke worried over "the Paul Bunyan idea. The more I think about it, the less I like it. But I've got to get some device to organize some of my ideas & feelings about Michigan, etc.—not too solemn or God bless America or Steve Benétish. Maybe it's worth trying, anyway." When The Lost Son appeared in 1948, readers would find that Roethke had organized his "ideas & feelings about Michigan" not within the Bunyan myth but rather in a primordial myth of the child's Edenic greenhouse world. In the "Michigan" poetry, Roethke did not fulfill his intensely regional undertaking after all. Nor did the outer vegetal life register on the inner Roethke except largely as a human metaphor, to be equated, shaped, verbalized. But the urge to regional description and symbolization, as well as to natural immersion and union, had begun. It remained a part of his creative impulse which he would continue to explore and ultimately frame and express in the Northwest.

In a 1953 appearance on BBC's "The Third Programme," Roethke introduced himself as a poet of unmistakably regional origins. "Everyone knows that America is a continent," he said, "but few Europeans realize the various and diverse parts of this land." He then described his own Saginaw Valley and termed it "a wonderful place for a child to grow up in and around."

Again in an interview shortly before his death, Roethke fondly reminisced about Michigan scenes of his childhood which "still remained in his mind" to influence his poems. Other testimony is now at hand to support this version of Roethke who clearly felt a decisive part of his identity as a man and sensibility as a poet had received salutary strength from the region of his earliest years. It remained as a residue of positive and cherished memory to sustain the maturing poet and enrich the strong poems in his last book which I shall turn to in a moment.

Sometime in his early development, as Roethke understood himself to be an Upper-Midwesterner, he also sensed another part of his identity which should be noted before we enter the Northwest phase. He came to feel his roots as an American. The process is too subtle to trace with absolute certainty. After he became assured of a reputation, Roethke almost emphatically portrayed himself as having been, early on, a national poet in the American grain. Though he was an avid reader of the English poets and dramatists, he recalled first of all his American masters whom, he said, "early, when it really matters, I read, and really read, Emerson (prose mostly), Thoreau, Whitman." And to a degree his memory is corroborated by student documents. His notes from a college course in American literature at Michigan in the late twenties include these releaving comments on Whitman:

What are we to say of Whitman as poet? Selection? Defied rules. Can art be formless NO!

1) An undying energy of life—a tang—vitalizing something.

2) A certain largeness—deals with deep things in life on a large scale.

3) Most great poetry is primal?

In a composition for his rhetoric class, Roethke's theme was his strong response to nature. Again are the hints of a developing American consciousness: "I know that Cooper is a fraud—that he doesn't give a true sense of the sublimity of American scenery. I know that Muir and Thoreau and Burroughs speak the truth." One can scarcely detect these "American" influences in the deeply private poetry that would soon come from Roethke's pen in the early post-college years. No doubt he had to discover other aspects of selfhood—his personal, sexual, and family identity—before he possessed any version of a representative Roethke, Mid-westerner or American.

Soon after Open House appeared in 1941, Roethke seems to have felt a new growth away from the tight limits of this early poetic form and experience as well as, so we may infer, a movement toward a larger, a more inclusive identity. "My first book was much too wary," he wrote Kenneth Burke a few years later, "much too gingerly in its approach to experience; rather dry in tone and restricted in rhythm." And in a pair of anecdotes to Allan Seager in the mid-forties, Roethke illuminates the early making of a self-consciously national poet. The first is a letter after he arrived at Bennington: "It seems I was hired because, according to the president, Lewis Jones, I'm 'a grass roots American with classic tastes.' So, simple fellow that I am, I'm to teach a course in American literature (just people that interest me) next year." Though he is amused by this American version of himself, the man and poet with an as yet plastic and uncertain self-image regarded the comment revealing enough to remember and repeat.

The other occurrence, however, made him belligerently nationalistic. In July, 1946, a less amusing version of the American Roethke had arrived from England. The London Horizon had returned his new greenhouse poems. "It seemed to us that your poetry was in a way very American," the rejection letter announced, "in that it just lacked that inspiration, inevitability or quintessence of writing and feeling that distinguishes good poetry from verse." Seager comments that "this letter made him wrathy and he was still fulminating against the 'god-damned limeys' when I saw him later in the summer."

The sting of this criticism may still have festered when Roethke presently wrote an introductory comment on The Lost Son poems to be included in John Ciardi's Mid-Century American Poets (1950). He now insisted that this poetry was very American and possessed a strong inspiration, inevitability or quintessence of feeling.

Some of these pieces, then, begin in the mire; as if man is no more than a shape writhing from the old rock. This may be due, in part, to the Michigan from which I come. Sometimes one gets the feeling that not even the animals have been there before; but the marsh, the mire, the Void, is always there, immediate and terrifying. It is a splendid place for schooling the spirit. It is America.

So much for American beginnings. In his Northwest years, when Roethke was bidding for and finally winning the cherished poetry prizes against his native competition, we can recognize a highly attuned "American" poet. Indeed, the competitiveness in the old tennis coach (incredibly, one of his duties at Lafayette and Penn State) had fully surfaced in the poetry career the year before the Seattle period began, when the leading influence on American poets was England's top seed, T. S. Eliot. Roethke had sent a manuscript copy of his poem "The Lost Son" to Eliot's current archenemy, William Carlos Williams. Roethke included the following comment: "It's written … for the ear, not the eye…. And if you don't think it's got the accent of native American speech, your name ain't W. C. Williams, I say belligerently." But Roethke's adversary was not Williams; it was the influential exile in England who irritated both men. "In a sense ["The Lost Son" is] your poem, yours and K. Burke's," he continued to Williams, "with the mood or the action on the page, not talked about, not the meditative T. S. Eliot kind of thing. (By the way, if you have an extra copy of your last blast against T.S.E., do send it to me. I can't seem to get a hold of it anywhere.)" Roethke clearly understood that the Eliot cult must be discredited in America before the judges could hear and consider Roethke's (and Williams') native accents. By 1949 he was encouraged. He wrote to Kenneth Burke of new signs that "the zeit-geist, ear-to-the-ground boys in England" were coming over to his side and now calling it Roethke over Eliot: "[They] think I'm the only bard at present operating in the U.S. of A., that everybody is tired of Tiresome Tom, the Cautious Cardinal."

One of Roethke's gratifying intimations of a growing reputation in Eliot's country came in 1950 when John Malcolm Brinnin told him that Dylan Thomas, on his first American tour, wanted especially to meet America's Theodore Roethke. Roethke was very proud of that and enjoyed Thomas immensely. Here was an authentic "roaring boy," a British admirer, and no rival for the American prizes. Finally in 1954 Roethke won his first big award, the Pulitzer, for The Waking. (But he remained envious when Aiken, not Roethke, won the National Book Award that year.) The following year, Roethke was Fulbright lecturer in Florence. Like many American writers before him, he now comprehended his native land more keenly from the vantage point of Europe. His concern, predictably, centered not on the characteristic travails of political democracy in an election year, but rather on the state of American letters. He sized up once again the relative strengths of modern American poets:

Sometimes I think the fates brought me here for my own development: to see my contemporaries, and elders, in their true perspective. And some of the American biggies have dwindled a good deal in my sight. For instance, Hart Crane, whom I once thought had elements of greatness. Except for the early poems, he now seems hysterical, diffuse—a deficient language sense at work. Williams, for the most part, has become curiously thin, self-indulgent, unable to write a poem, most of the time, that is a coherent whole. (This last saddened me a good deal, since I'm really fond of Bill.) Etc. People who have held up are Bogan, Auden, and of course old Willie Yeats, whom I'm not lecturing on; and Tate, for instance, looks better all the time, as opposed to Winters, whose work is often dead, rhythmically, and so limited in range of subject-matter and feeling.

After Words for the Wind (1958) won him most of the major prizes in America he had not yet claimed, including the National Book Award, Roethke was clearly preparing now to beat the world. He was ready to go, finally, after the big one, "to bring the Nobel in poetry to America," as he said with a veneer of patriotism. But the egotism was not far behind. He wrote his editor at Doubleday, "Certainly I'm a vastly better poet than Quasimodo, and this French man [Perse] is good but does the same thing over and over. I think Wystan Auden should be next, then Pablo Neruda, then me…." He had arrived at this "cold, considered objective judgment" of his native genius after a final repudiation of "the Pound-Eliot cult and the Yeats cult." As he told critic Ralph Mills, neither "Willie" Yeats nor "Tiresome Tom" Eliot was ever Roethke's master:

In both instances, I was animated in considerable part by arrogance: I thought: I can take this god damned high style of W.B.Y. or this Whitmanesque meditative thing of T.S.E. and use it for other ends, use it as well or better. Sure, a tough assignment. But while Yeats' historical lyrics seem beyond me at the moment, I'm damned if I haven't outdone him in the more personal or love lyric…. Not only is Eliot tired, he's a [expletive deleted by editor] fraud as a mystic—all his moments in the rose-garden and the wind up his ass in the draughty-smoke-fall-church yard.

The next year, in a London interview, Roethke named the American poets he most admired: Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Stanley Kunitz. The last two certainly were no threat to his ambitious climb to the top of the heap. And Auden might be seen not only as a poet ambiguously American, but also a leader of the Roethke cheering section. The year before, as Roethke recalled, Auden had passed along to a mutual acquaintance the compliment that "at one point he was worried that I was getting too close to Yeats, but now he no longer did because I had out-done him, surpassed him, gone beyond him."

One formidable American remained to challenge Roethke in the poetry sweepstakes. This was Robert Lowell, whom Roethke met in summer of 1947 at Yaddo Writers Colony. He had grimly vanquished Lowell in all the recreational contests. "I was croquet, tennis, ping-pong and eating champion," he reported at the end of the summer. Seager writes perceptively here of the distinctly American myth of success and ardor for combat that lay within Roethke's hunger for greatness: "He was like Hemingway. To view literature as a contest to be won is a Saginaw Valley, Middle-Western, American set of mind, and throughout Ted's career he saw Lowell loom larger and larger as his chief opponent." In this contest with Lowell, Roethke received the most punishing defeat publicly in July of 1963 shortly before his death. An admirer of Lowell, the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella, was in Seattle at Roethke's invitation, staying as Roethke's houseguest until later in the week when he gave a poetry reading. Seager recreates the harrowing climax of that evening:

Ted sat in the front row. The reading was well-received and afterward Kinsella permitted a question-and-answer period. Someone asked, "Mr. Kinsella, who do you consider the greatest living American poet?" With Ted in the front row at the high tide of his renown, this was not, in a way, a genuine question but a solicitation of a compliment.

But Kinsella, helplessly candid, hypnotized into tactlessness by his honest opinion, said, "Robert Lowell."

Ted did not explode, but at the party he and Beatrice were giving for Kinsella later that evening, he grumped to his other guests, "That bastard, damn him. Did you hear what he said?" until Beatrice told him it would look better if he just shut up, and, oddly enough, he did. Later, calmer, more sober, Ted realized that Kinsella had a right to his opinion, forgave him and they parted friends.

Perhaps one can rightly infer that the competitive Roethke traced Lowell's national success to his impressive roots in his American region. If so, the challenge to the leading younger poet of the Northeast might come in one manner, then, if Roethke could square off as the leading poet of the Northwest. But aside from the national ambition, Roethke for a number of years had been discovering the natural—and poetic—resources of the Northwest with that "obsessive quality of emotional ownership" that Richard Hugo looks for in the authentic regional poet.

I have recorded earlier Roethke's negative reactions to the environs of Seattle. Once more, the response to place in the mercurial Roethke has a dynamic, positive side as well. One of his first references to a possible academic residence in the Far West comes in a letter of late 1946 when he was on his first Guggenheim Fellowship and afraid that Bennington would not invite him to return (he was technically still on leave from Penn State). He admitted that he had been "brooding about the West Coast." Shortly after, he wrote to George Lundberg, sociology professor at the University of Washington whom he had known at Bennington. Lundberg recommended him to the English department chairman, Joseph Harrison. After some of his characteristic haggling about salary, Roethke arrived in Seattle in September 1947 to become associate professor of English at $5,004.

The Northwest had one salutary effect on him at once. Some eleven years before, a bookless Roethke in Michigan had lamented to Louise Bogan on his twenty-eighth birthday, "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." An ounce of rationalization in the frustrated poet may be present here. By contrast, however, he exploded with ideas and poems after he arrived in Seattle. Seager speculates on the causes: "Whether it was the stimulation of a new setting, the West Coast with its opulence of natural life in its almost English climate, or whether he felt that he had been idle too long (and 'idle' meant not that he had not been writing but that he had gone too long without publishing a book) … he filled more notebooks and more loose sheets with poetry in these two years than in any period of his life." He moved out to Edmonds after several years of residence in the University district, finding it "more Northwestern." And for all his restless applying for grants or other jobs to take him away from the University of Washington, Roethke in spring of 1957 did buy the Seattle house on Lake Washington, an act which most money-conscious Americans make when they confirm a place as their home. Roethke was assuredly money conscious.

He was also, by then, the reigning poet of Seattle. I met him not long afterward, and can attest to the fertile results of his presence. He was no longer the only serious practicing poet for one thousand miles around. Poetry readings seemed to be happening almost nonstop-usually on the second floor of Hartman's Bookstore in the District or on campus in the Walker Ames Room of Parrington Hall. Roethke's local students were appearing, while ex-students were returning to Seattle to read from their work. I recall the reading appearances of such visitors as Marianne Moore, Snodgrass, Merwin, Kunitz, Wright, Langland, Ginsberg, Bogan, and Leonie Adams—all of them come to Seattle or detoured there en route down or up the coast because Roethke had made the Northwest a vital corner of American poetry. Roethke himself, not to be outdone, made his own flamboyant public performances, now legendary in Seattle, appearing as the Northwest bard and declaiming his verses to his fellow townspeople, from savants to bourgeoisie, with an effect that would have cheered and amazed the bardic Whitman himself.

A "Northwest Renaissance" in poetry was proclaimed by Seattle poet Nelson Bentley, one of the Roethke faithful. During 1963 in San Diego, where I had gone to teach in a somewhat sunnier climate, I asked John Ciardi when he came through, "Are you conscious in the East of a 'Northwest Renaissance'?" He replied, "I don't know about any Northwest movement, but we all know that one poet named Theodore Roethke is out there."

How intensely Roethke was engaged in his private Northwest movement, a love-hate affair with a locale in which the critical citizen helped to form the integrity of feeling in the poet, we can now begin to gauge in the published notebooks. I mentioned earlier the entries where he comments on the isolation of a "provincial creative intellectual" in America and records the sterile, prosy observations of a frustrated citizen in Seattle. The notebooks also reveal the exhilarating process of a poet exploring his adopted Northwest landscape and converting it into usable tropes and images. But I leave this examination of the notebooks, a fruitful subject, to future students of Roethke and regionalism and turn instead to the published poetry itself.

III.

Roethke's first book of poems in the Northwest appeared in 1951. Praise to the End!, his "tensed-up" version of Wordsworth's Prelude, carried nine new poems which can be read, in one sense, as Roethke's completing the "lean to beginnings" in the previous Lost Son collection. Once more he tracked his voyage of the mind's return to the dream logic, Mother Goose rhythms, and purposeful gibberish of childhood, and then back again to the varieties of rebirth after these mythic descents. He will return to this early Michigan in the late Northwest poems, but the goblin fears of childhood are no longer present. To a degree, then, he was ready, after Praise to the End!, to experiment with a new stage of poetic expression that had lain in embryo within the first Northwest notebooks.

A promise of the regional poems to come begins to appear in the new verses of his next book, The Waking: Poems: 1933–53 (1953). "A Light Breather," to select one, reveals a joyous dynamism of the spirit, "small" and "tethered" as before but now "unafraid" and "singing." Together with the unhurried grace of the title poem, these lines point to the dearly earned resolutions shaped in the Northwest settings of his final long poems. Symptomatic of a new phase, too, are poems like "Elegy for Jane," which Seager calls "the first of his poems to have its whole origin on the West Coast" (though one will discover "a sidelong pickerel smile" in Roethke's 1938 notebook). Finally are the more ambitious efforts of the 1953 volume which show a Roethke who is escaping from his prison of the self to engage the ambient world and the being of other living creatures. "Old Lady's Winter Words" is one instance, and Roethke will enlarge this empathy in the "Meditations of an Old Woman" sequence of his next book. Of equal significance in 1953 is the first great sequence of metaphysical love poems, "Four for Sir John Davies." Here Roethke at last is able to reach outside the dance of the solitary self, merge with a partner, and experience a quasi-Dantean transcendence into mature love, the "rise from flesh to spirit." Not surprisingly, these love poems forecast an imminent involvement for Seattle's forty-four-year-old bachelor-poet. Any colleague at the University who read these poems in earlier journal publication might have advised Roethke that he was beginning to sound increasingly vulnerable to the presence of any marriageable woman. On a December evening in 1952 on his way to a reading in New York City, he inadvertently met along the street a former Bennington student, Beatrice O'Connell. He courted her every day thereafter, and at the end of a month they were married. Allan Seager believes that Roethke's marriage presently led him to a heightened awareness of the Northwest world. As his capacity of feeling reached out to his young Beatrice, "hesitantly, even reluctantly perhaps, he admitted her into those labyrinths within himself where his father still lived, and he began to love her, not in the same way that he loved his father but with a true love nevertheless. And from this lime forward, she participated in his growth, encouraged and supported it. Then he could see the mountains, the siskins, the madronas, and begin to use them."

Viewed in this regard, the "Love Poems" segment of the next book. Words for the Wind: Collected Verse (1958), is considerably more than occasions for Roethke to range through his varieties of lecherous punning, metaphysical wit, and Dantean love of a modern Beatrice. The love poems, thoroughly studied for their passionate metaphors of wind and seafoam, light and stones and rippling water as "spirit and nature beat in one breastbone," will perhaps reveal the true beginnings of that distinctive Northwest sensibility which fully emerges in Roethke's last book. Useful also to that end, although for other reasons, are the final three sections of Words for the Wind, with their natural stream of correspondences tallying the movements of the soul, downward to the spiritual DTs and harrowing plunges and upward to the ascensions and harmonious resolutions with an "agency outside me. / Unprayed-for, / And final."

And so we arrive at The Far Field (1964), the final volume which Roethke, almost providentially it now seems, had lived to write. At this zenith came his death. There would be no descent, no failing of creative energy. The Far Field becomes the logical culmination of Roethke's poetic and American sojourn out of the Midwest and through his native land to maturity and reconciliation in the Northwest.

The year before his death, Roethke wrote to Ralph Mills, Jr.: "I am still fiddling with the order and composition of certain final poems." Only weeks before his death, he settled on a structure of The Far Field in four parts: "North American Sequence," "Love Poems," "Mixed Sequence," and "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical." The first, or "North American," sequence of six poems includes the title poem, "The Far Field." (An original title for the book, "Dance On, Dance On, Dance On," had come from the final poem.) Perhaps I am swayed unduly to believe that in changing the book's title, Roethke was signalling the reader that the opening section with "The Far Field" would carry the crucial burden of the entire volume. In any event, the "North American Sequence" has become the great achievement in Roethke's last book. It might properly be called the "Northwest Sequence" for reasons I hope will be apparent in fairly short order. The genesis of this sequence may be traced, in one fashion, to the summer of 1950. Roethke had bought his first car and had driven it back to Seattle. The trip created the stirrings of a "symbolical journey," his own spiritual version of a Northwest passage. It suggested "for next or possibly later book … a happy journey westward"; but there would be a uniquely Roethkean variation of this traditional passage—"in a word, a symbolical journey in my cheap Buick Special toward Alaska and, at least in a spiritual sense toward the east of Russia and the Mongolian Plains whence came my own people, the Prussians, those poop-arse aristocrats, my father called them, who fed their families into the army or managed the hunt for Bismarck and Bismarck's sister—all this in Stettin in East Prussia, now held by the Poles."

By the end of the decade, Roethke had modified this journey. It was now an exclusively North American and ultimately regional experience. He told Zulfikar Ghose in an interview in London in 1960, during his Ford Foundation fellowship, about his shifting conception and emphasis: "My imagery is coming more out of the Northwest rather than the whole of America." The nature of the journey had changed. In Ghose's words, it was "not like driving a car across America, but an exploration of the North-West."

He had, in fact, developed a triple motif of outer-inner journeys. First is the Northwest passage to the dark oceanic "stretch in the face of death," and the periodic resolution experienced at the Pacific Coast shoreline, a journey out to the physical "edge" and metaphysical "beyond" and then back to reconciliation "where sea and fresh water meet" in the Northwest comer. The second passage or journey is a return to his origins, a movement eastward to the Michigan of his father's greenhouse and Roethke's childhood. Gone in this experience, as I hinted earlier, are "the muck and welter, the dark, the dreck" which burden the poems in The Lost Son and Praise to the End! Third is a "journey to the interior," imaged in an inland American geography perhaps equivalent, temporally, to the middle period of Roethke's initial breakdown in that "Siberian pitilessness, the essential ruthlessness of the Middle West." Here he moves beyond the child's insulation from time and death and forward to the mature man's encounter with the voids and abysses and multiplicity of challenges to his spiritual growth. But he does not attain to the outer thresholds of vision, the achieved moments of outer-and-inner union and transcendence that belong to the Northwest passage. Ranging forward and back across the American landscape in the "North American Sequence," then, Roethke's speaker can understandably admit in "The Far Field": "I dream of journeys repeatedly."

Of the three journeys, the Northwest passage is by far the richest and most dominant in the six poems of the sequence. Roethke gathers within it the shifting motifs of selfhood within the Northwest's natural plenitude, identifications with birds, fish, trees, and flowers (and occasionally as relief, with the stillness of rocks, clam shells, driftwood, and nature's minimals); the imagery of edges, abysses, and thresholds; the desire for convergence, resolution and union with the natural scene of salt water, fresh water, air, and earth; and on occasion, when blessedly aided by the soft regional light and wind, the speaker feels the shimmerings of immanence which create a felt convergence, a moment of transcendence and beatitude. By entering upon the other two journeys inland from time to time, he enriches and paces the sequence in alternating rhythms of charged meditation and dynamic movement across American space. The speaker, classically a migratory American, travels inward and outward across the North American terrain in pursuit of his total selfhood. But he returns always to the Northwest shoreline for an ultimate synthesis.

These interlacing journeys and themes and alternating rhythms are sounded in the first poem, "The Longing," and then are centered on a longed-for passage, finally with an American Indian vigor of exploration, to the threshold of full spiritual awareness. Just as this initial poem becomes, musically, a prelude, almost an overture, to the entire sequence, the final poem, "The Rose," will climax and recapitulate the sequence.

"The Longing" opens "In a bleak time, when a week of rain is a year." (We can assume the speaker is in Seattle.) But this is not life-giving rain. The speaker's spirit is in a slump amid the reigning "stinks and sighs, / Fetor of cockroaches, dead fish, petroleum" and the pointless angst of nightclub crooners and their self-pitying, lust-fatigued audience, an unsavory scene of

     Saliva dripping from warm microphones,
     Agony of crucifixion on barstools.

In a regressive aside, he associates pure joy only with children, dogs, and saints. The Roethkean interrupting question focuses the list and impels the poem onward: "How to transcend this sensual emptiness?" The Northwest scene, natural and manmade, fumes in its putrefaction. In bleak contrast to the free-soaring gull we remember at the onset of Hart Crane's The Bridge, Roethke's Northwest seagulls "wheel over their singular garbage." Images which later will foreshadow immanence—the regional light and wind—are invoked in this spiritual torpor to deepen our sense of their absence.

     The great trees no longer shimmer;
     Not even the soot dances.

The spirit, slug-like, recoils. But it retains the hunger for a new start, like "a loose worm / Ready for any crevice, / An eyeless starer."

So the sequence begins in one of the bleak rainy spells with which Roethke in Seattle was all too familiar. In the two remaining sections of "The Longing," we follow the Roethkean voyage of the modern soul in its tormented quest for light and wholeness. He conducts this soul-search initially by going back to the beginnings of elemental life. The clues of the way toward transcendence are sensed in the spareness of the natural world.

     The rose exceeds, the rose exceeds us all.
     Who'd think the moon could pare itself so thin?

A sign is also received in the unnatural light that cries out of the "sunless sea" in the same measures of longing.

     I'd be beyond; I'd be beyond the moon,
     Bare as a bud, and naked as a worm.

Roethke captions this retrogression and desire in the final lines of the section: "Out of these nothings /—All beginnings come."

The conclusion is introduced with a Whitman catalog of the speaker's longing for identification and convergence with the plenitude and beneficence he now feels he may possess in the world, by contrast with the opening section and the ascetic vacuity that followed upon it. In the poems to follow, the desire to pace his spiritual growth in harmony with his natural surroundings will be, at the same time, an esthetic search for a shaping, concrete language that will also express the inexpressible: "I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form." But as of now, the speaker has received only the intimation of future thresholds. He anticipates, meanwhile, a rite of passage through the North American interior.

          … the mouth of the night is still wide;
     On the Bullhead, in the Dakotas, where the eagles eat well,
     In the country of few lakes, in the tall buffalo grass at
               the base of the clay buttes …

Does the aging spirit dare to go primitive? No, if subjected to the ruthless plains of the interior. Yes, if sustained amid the inland waters.

      Old men should be explorers?
      I'll be an Indian.
      Ogalala?
      Iroquois.

"Meditation at Oyster River," the second poem of the "North American Sequence," begins at twilight on the east coast of Vancouver Island. Roethke's explorer looks eastward to the "first tide-ripples," briefly immerses his feet in the water, and then partakes of earth and air as well by ascending to a perch on the cliffside. In the Northwest "twilight wind, light as a child's breath," the spirit quivers with alertness. A soundless pause has readied the time for meditation after urgent longing in the previous poem.

Section two finds the speaker half in love with easeful death, persisting "like a dying star, / In sleep afraid." He yearns for escape from the lonely self, for oneness with the deer, the young snake, the hummingbird—the shy and alert creatures of land and air. "With these I would be. / And with water." At this threshold of poised awareness, "In this first heaven of knowing," Roethke takes us, in section three, on a backward motion toward the source, to "the first trembling of a Michigan brook in April." He feels the old quickenings of a younger spirit which, like the melting Tittebawasee in early spring, could awaken, expand, and burst forward into a new season of becoming.

The meditation finally returns to Oyster River and closes with the harmonious resolution of youth and age as he is "lulled into half-sleep" in a Whitman-like sea-cradle. After his journey back to Michigan and forward once more to the waters of the Northwest, he merges now in quiet joy with the waves and the intrepid shorebirds. The poem closes in a radiant, although not fully composed, vision:

     In the first of the moon,
     All's a scattering,
     A shining.

Arrivals on the threshold of naturalistic grace are momentary and precarious. In the third poem, "Journey to the Interior," the speaker returns to the yawning mouth of the night which awaited him at the close of "The Longing." He now embarks on that second American journey into the past, between Michigan beginnings and Northwest consummations.

As in "The Longing," he begins in dislocation, though not, this time, in spiritual dullness. Roethke initially presents "the long journey out of the self" in a vague, geographical metaphor: to pass through the perplexed inner workings and torments of the emerging self is like steering a lurching automobile through detours, mud slides, dangerous turns, flash floods, and swamps "alive with quicksand." Finally, the way narrows to a standstill, "blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree, / The thickets darkening, / The ravines ugly."

From this introductory standstill, he sets forth on anew soul's journey. In section two, this exploration takes the form of an actual trip westward through the North American interior. The explorer, appropriately, is neither child nor man now but a reckless youth careering over gravel at full throttle, scorning to "hug close" like the fear-ridden older motorist he would become in the previous stanza. With the arrogant confidence of youth, he courts danger and death on the American roadway head-on: "A chance? Perhaps. But the road was part of me, and its ditches, / And the dust lay thick on eyelids,—Who ever wore goggles?" (Roethke is here falling back on his own self-made legend that he had been once the extroverted American roaring boy. In fact, the hypersensitive youth from Saginaw had grown beyond forty before he owned a car and made this western journey through the interior. For an emerging identity, however, Roethke knew well that fantasy is as powerful and "true" as fact.) The second section concludes as the trip advances through the western prairies and beyond the Tetons. The past merges with the present, the random fluidity of the land journey is abated, and "time folds / Into a long moment" for the youth become, in the remembrance, confident father of the troubled man.

In the final section, the speaker can still feel his "soul at a still-stand," but this time with a difference. Thanks to the remembered journey through the American interior which has intervened, he again moves to the edge of water in the Northwest. Reconciled to change and death, united with the soft elements of his region, he can "breathe with the birds" while he stands "unperplexed" looking out on the Pacific scene. All extremes dissolve on that "other side of light," and

     The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessing,
     And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.

"The Long Waters" was apparently written after but appears before "The Far Field." Presumably, Roethke felt the need for a tranquil, sustained meditation piece to separate "Journey to the Interior" from "The Far Field" (which was originally titled "Journeys"). "The Long Waters" occurs in a setting closely resembling Oyster River. The poem moves quietly among three Roethkean stages—retrogression (closing at times to infantile regression), thresholds, and convergence. These movements are experienced largely in Northwest images without the backward journey motifs of the previous poems. Roethke creates, instead, an alternating rhythm of gentle ebbing and flowing, action and reaction. In a transparent outline modeled and elaborated after Roethke's own example, we may see the internal structure of the five sections to develop this way:

1. Initial retrogression (II. 1-12). The speaker celebrates the joyous minimals of earth, water, and air—the worms, minnows, and butterflies. He confesses his childlike "foolishness"—his "desire for the peaks, the black ravines, the rolling mists," but also the opposite need for security amid "unsinging fields where no lungs breathe, / Where light is stone."

Threshold to convergence approached (II. 13-19). He returns to a firecharred "edge of the sea … Where the fresh and salt waters meet, / And the sea-winds move through the pine trees" in near-concert with the burnt-yellow grass and peeling logs.

2. Retrogression again (II. 20-32). He invokes protection of a Blakean mythic mother against the quietly distressing motions of the worm and butterfly and the "dubious sea-change" but he knows that change and death are also the mothers of pleasure and beauty.

3. Convergence approaches unawares (II. 33-48). The abundant varieties of Northwest coastal images—the leaping fish, the ivy rooting in saw-dust alongside the uprooted trees, the casual osprey and dawdling fisherman, and a sea surface full of imagined flowers both alive and dead—bring the casual speaker almost to a reconcilement of extremes, to feelings of beatitude and immanence.

     I have come here without courting silence,
     Blessed by the lips of a low wind,
     To a rich desolation of wind and water,
     To a landlocked bay, where the salt water is freshened
     By small streams running down under fallen fir trees.

4. Threshold reappears (II. 49-53). "In the vaporous grey of early morning /…. A single wave comes in."

Retrogression once more (II. 54-59). But when the wave reaches "a tree lying flat, its crown half broken," the speaker, vaguely troubled, recalls "a stone breaking the eddying current / … in the dead middle way, / … A vulnerable place."

5. Convergence followed by a light transcendence is briefly achieved (II. 60-78). His receptive "body shimmers with a light flame" in the sea wind as the "advancing and retreating" sea, which images the risings and fallings of the poem, now yields up a visionary "shape" of "the eternal one." The undulant long waters attenuate in the long poetic line, shaping for the speaker a transformed moment of union and renewal.

     My eyes extend beyond the farthest bloom of the waves;
     I lose and find myself in the long water;
     I am gathered together once more;
     I embrace the world.

With "The Far Field" the sequence now returns to the opening of "Journey to the Interior"—the metaphorically "narrowing" trip by automobile to a final stalling "in a hopeless sand-rut." (One glimpses in the images the American affliction of Poe and the late Mark Twain.) From this still-stand of the spirit, Roethke again searches the way out by going back. The journey in this case will not be to the interior but an extended return to a timeless childhood, to moments of immanence in that "far field, the windy cliffs of forever, / The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow." In that field, "one learned of the eternal" in the child's world of dead rats and cats, of life-nestings in the field's far corner. For nature's casualties, his young "grief was not excessive." The warblers always heralded Maytime renewal and nature's plenitude. With similar ease, the child could ponder the evolution of mindless shells or indulge his innocent fancies of reincarnation.

Returning to the adult's present, the speaker, no longer constricted, can sense "a weightless change, a moving forward." The earlier narrowing of section one is repeated, but in an image of release, "As of water quickening before a narrowing channel / When banks converge." He emerges to face outward to sea. Like the philosopher's man of Wallace Stevens, he is able to confront an ultimate Protean reality, with more insouciance, even, than the wondering child he once was.

     The murmur of the absolute, the why
     Of being born fails on his naked ears.
     His spirit moves like monumental wind
     That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.

The poem rises into gentle transcendence. The "finite things" which in previous lines of the sequence recalled "a vulnerable place" or a disturbing juxtaposition of death and life, now compose in a constellation of Northwest images that the tranquil mind discovers to be the shape of "infinitude":

     The mountain with its singular bright shade
                           .....
     The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
                           .....
     Silence of water above a sunken tree:
     The pure serene of memory in one man,—
     A ripple widening from a single stone
     Winding around the waters of the world.

The final poem, "The Rose," sums up and completes the "North American Sequence." All three of the American journey-motifs are here, together with all of the inner stages of the soul and their supporting images. More fully than any of the preceding single poems, "The Rose" is Roethke's Northwest poetic creation par excellence. It appeared in The New Yorker the month before his death. The thorough critic of Roethke's poetry would want more than a score of pages to explicate this beautiful poem and account for it within the entire sequence. I shall try to manage a fraction of the assignment in a few pages.

Appropriately with these verses that close the sequence, Roethke can begin with near-feelings of convergence that by now have been earned. We understand his opening assertion about the Northwest seacoast:

     There are those to whom place is unimportant,
     But this place, where sea and fresh water meet,
     Is important—

He then draws the bountiful natural life into this ultimate song of himself. In the next fifteen lines, he describes some dozen Northwest birds and at the same time, predictably, he unites them to air, earth, and water. He no longer requires the agonizing interior journey through and out of the perplexed self. He can "sway outside myself / Into the darkening currents" with the quiet grace of the intrepid hawks he has just described (lines 4-5).

Section two advances the easy motions of grace onto a pacific ocean "As when a ship sails with a light wind—/ … dipping like a child's boat in a pond." Still, in its apparently buoyant ease of passage, his spirit feels obscurely troubled, somehow adrift and incomplete. The realization he is seeking now approaches on the Northwest shoreline before his feet. His guide to this knowledge, both fact and symbol, is the single "rose in the sea-wind," the transcendent rose he had briefly invoked in "The Longing." Its own excuse for being, the wild rose silently instructs by a dynamic staying "in its true place," by "flowering out of the dark," widening in noonday light, and stubbornly resisting encroachment upon its solitary life. The meditation upon the individualized wild rose leads the speaker associatively to one final journey to the greenhouse world of his childhood. In the reminiscence, the aged man repossesses the glories he had known when "those flowerheads seemed to flow toward me, to beckon me, only a child, out of myself." The child had merged with the roses and both had flourished in the bountiful Eden created by his sufficient, protective father;

     What need for heaven, then,
     With that man, and those roses?

The childhood memory then triggers the other, or later, journey into the past. Section three first echoes the early morning "sound and silence" of the Northwest scene in the opening lines of the poem. We are then taken on a last journey into the "interior," to gather up and catalog the inland "American sounds in this silence"—a Whitman excursion among industrial noises, the bravuras of birds, "the ticking of snow around oil drums in the Dakotas, / The thin whine of telephone wires in the wind of a Michigan winter," and more. His second journey eastward into the past completed, the old explorer has reached the final definition of himself. His longing for "the imperishable quiet at the heart of form" had first occurred within the fluid Whitman catalog of the first poem. He now hears the imperishable quiet in the "single sound" that issues in the Northwest setting of "The Rose" at the heart of this Whitman free form. Phrased another way, his question in "The Longing" had been "How to transcend this sensual emptiness?" He has discovered the answer: the sensual emptiness has been transcended in the sensual fullness of the Whitman-Roethke gatherings of American plenitude, as in these fluid interior "American sounds in this silence." And this possession, be it noted, has occurred within a primary context of the regional. After extended longing, he has found the place of his desire. It is glimpsed, significantly enough, not as an ultimate paradiso or a child's insular garden of flowers, but as a transcendent landscape of earth composed both of languid shimmerings and Roethkean edges. The moment then dissolves in the precarious balance of a rapt instant of earthly beauty. The closing lines of the penultimate section of "The Rose" suspend an image of life wakening into, or indistinguishable from, death.

     And a drop of rain water hangs at the tip of a leaf
     Shifting in the wakening sunlight
     Like the eye of a new-caught fish.

The speaker emerges from the vision to explain himself in the final section. Thanks to the final journeys of private and native—and esthetic—self-realization that were stimulated by the rose's expansive self-containment, he has again embraced his present world, his Northwest, and can accept even

                the rocks, their weeds,
     Their filmy fringes of green, their harsh
     Edges, their holes
     Cut by the sea-slime …

Like the space-time curvature of this journey poem, the poet's spirit matching the condition of the rose in the sea-wind, he has "swayed out … / And yet was still." He can also rejoice equally with the bird, the lilac, and the dolphin in the calm and change which they accept in air, land, and water. In the lovely closing lines, he absorbs in his controlling solitary symbol the diversity of experience and imagery in this climactic poem.

     [I rejoiced] in this rose, this rose in the sea-wind,
     Rooted in stone, keeping the whole of light,
     Gathering to itself sound and silence—
     Mine and the sea-wind's.

So ends an intensive drive toward definition of the many Roethkean selves, of the perplexed American in his country and his region. The "North American Sequence" can be read as Roethke's final portrait, not unlike those late photographs of the poet in a Northwest landscape, his face variously lined with what Robert Heilman read as "suffering endured, dreaded, inescapable, and yet survived and, in an ever maturing art, surmounted." Even Roethke's "drive toward God" was climaxed in the ultimate landscape of the Sequence. The northern coast and oceanic far field of his adopted region served him perfectly to frame and extend his religious journeys in and out of time and space and even to resolve them in fleeting moments of joyous, tranquil union.

Finally, this sequence enabled Roethke the poet to assimilate those American peers who meant the most to him without permitting the national echoes to disturb or overpower the regional tonalities. The mastery of this casual plagiarism offers one of the surest signs of the major poet coming into possession of his own definable voice. Merely the final lines of "The Rose," which echo the close of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," show how well Roethke had learned his poetic orchestration from Whitman. The larger motifs of the sequence—the passages through nature and America and beyond to a total selfhood—are indebted similarly to Whitman, especially the "Song of Myself," "Out of the Cradle," and "Passage to India." Echoes of the symbolical American journeys of Hart Crane, likewise a transplanted Midwesterner, and William Carlos Williams's immersion in a local America also abound, as do the parallels and instructive differences with the experimental Eliot of The Waste Land and the Tiresome Tom of the Four Quartets. Clearly important to Roethke, too, are the sensual Stevens of "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" and the more philosophical Stevens of "Sunday Morning," "Asides on the Oboe," and "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." And we hear the Emily Dickinson of seasonal thresholds, nuances of light, and the edges of death. Sounding clearly, also, are the American nature notes of Emerson's "Rhodora" and Frost's "West-Running Brook," as well as the correspondences of New England coast and self in Robert Lowell—less transcendental but historically richer than Roethke's. But enough. An annotated "North American Sequence," obviously, would extend the references almost endlessly. Astonishing, then, for all Roethke's allusive and emotional range and intensity in this late sequence is the account from his biographer that these culminating long poems "came easily with an unwonted confidence—he knew what he wanted to say and he was sure of his means."

Roethke's American debts for this regional achievement lead naturally, in turn, to the question of his own possible influence on the younger practicing poets of the region. Richard Hugo, William Stafford, Carolyn Kizer, and David Wagoner have carefully evaded the idea of any Roethke "school" in the Northwest while they praise his brilliant example of the verbal pressures and cutting edges possible in a highly disciplined poetry. Surely this is a healthy and necessary spirit of poetic autonomy. The "school" with its intimidating master voice has more often curbed than liberated vital literary expression, regional and otherwise. I suspect, however, that Roethke's regional experience at the end had been fashioned too powerfully not to have become a part of the consciousness of poets writing today in the Northwest. If so, this need not be totally bad. The Roethke idiom has generated intimations, if you will, of a receivable and emerging heritage. But the nature of Roethke's contribution to a Northwest poetry will obviously not be known for some time to come, just as anything nearing a definitive notion of a Northwest ethos awaits the regional intuitions of individual poets, novelists, scholars, and memorializers to come.

IV.

Had he lived, would Roethke have continued to mine the Northwest vein of his "North American Sequence"? Elsewhere, the final volume only clouds a possible answer. He had gone on to include more of the torments, the voids, and the self-disintegrations of the past. The best of these metaphysical lyrics include "The Abyss," "In a Dark Time," and "In Evening Air." He did extend himself, however, in the rare sequence of final love poems. With the same daring that led him earlier to create the feminine voice of his "Meditations of an Old Woman" (feminists today might call the effort ill-advised) he aimed in his final love poems to express the perhaps more difficult voice of a sensitive young woman in love. But in previous years he seemed always too restless, too experimental and ambitious to repeat many of his successful innovations. He would throw most of them out the window, as James Dickey once said, and then start anew. In his continuing art as in his religious meditations, Roethke would probably have strained again to "go beyond," "to be more," to outdo himself. The new love lyrics or the "North American Sequence," then, had been tried and completed. Perhaps it would be time, once again, to move on.

One exciting possibility remains on record to point a way that Roethke might have taken had he lived. His wife reported that when Roethke once visited the grave of Chief Seattle, "he knelt in the grass and [crossed himself] seriously." The gesture may tell how soberly he had assumed his late ambition to write an epic of the North American Indian. His structural device would be, once more, a passage across the nation's heartland. The speaker would stop to commemorate the scenes of tragic undoing which various tribes suffered at the hands of the while marauders and military. In this epic drama, which Roethke hoped to create, he said, "through suggestive and highly charged symbolical language," the heroic figures, indicated in his notes, were to include the Nez Perce's Chief Joseph, the Oglala's Black Elk and Crazy Horse, as well as white adversaries like Generals Custer and Crook. The theme would be "the guilts we as Americans feel as a people for our mistakes and misdeeds in history and in time. I believe, in other words, that it behooves us to be humble before the eye of history."

Such a culminating work, as I suggested at the beginning, would have been utterly de rigueur in the eyes of literary critics and Nobel committees—the regional writer impressively widening his range to become the national epic poet and, even more, an American conscience in the world's history. The Nobel-haunted Roethke was all too aware of the required pattern. A passage he entered in the late notebooks almost completely mirrors his anguish. He defiantly justifies his major work as faithfully "American" despite, or even because of, its being "provincial" (he continues to use, somewhat wryly, this pejorative term for the regional). Implicitly and belligerently he is advising the Nobel people to stuff their award.

There's another typical stance: only I hear it. Then just listen: hump, schlump, bump—half the time: a real—did I say real?—I mean unreal, unnatural—thumping away in stupid staves, an arbitrary lopping of lines, rhythms, areas of experience, a turning away from much of life, an exalting of a few limited areas of human consciousness. All right, I say, make like that, and die in your own way: in other words limited, provincial, classical in a distorted and—I use the word carefully—degraded sense; "American" in the sense American means eccentric, warped, and confined.

But we can set aside this too-obvious concern over obligatory soarings upward and outward to national epic, universal archetype, and the larger "areas of human consciousness" and indulge our pride in the native poet whose versatile powers and range of vision expanded within the Northwest landscape and seascape. Immersion in the local and the "confining," the "exalting" of the solitary self in our own "true place," the poet Roethke is saying at last, brings us intermittently to experience in the only way that knowing is finally possible—that is, privately in the desire of the heart—those deep responses and truths that others may wish to elevate with the abstract labels "American" or "Universal." This distinctive regional expression, which he bled for and slowly earned over the years, is what we have overlooked or undervalued in Roethke. By The Far Field, he was virtually creating the Northwest as a regional source of poetic truth. Inevitably with Roethke, expressing the spirit of place also had to mean a revealing of his mature identity as a man and poet. In the transcendental vision of the important last poems, Roethke and his Northwest had finally come to One.