SOURCE: "Our First Contemporary," in Theodore Roethke's Far Fields: The Evolution of His Poetry, Louisiana State University, 1989, pp. 1-13.

[In the following essay, Balakian draws attention to Roethke's influence on modern American poetry, particularly his synthesis of autobiographical detail and transcendental consciousness reflected in the subsequent work of beat, confessional, and deep image poets.]

Poets' reputations rise and fall with the currents of aesthetic fashion, the prevailing winds of critical methodology, and the vicissitudes of religious and philosophical world views. Of course reputations are not always an indication of artistic achievement, and the complex cultural processes that canonize writers and cast others into oblivion are not always just or reliable. No artist is immune from the relativism of a historical moment, yet I believe that truly significant art of a previous era will continue to define a part of the present and in doing so will transcend the relativism of any historical moment.

The complex reasons for the present decline in Roethke's reputation as a poet are not my concern here. Yet I find it odd that the judgments of some of our most influential critics of twentieth-century poetry find him to be a poet of lesser importance and do not accord him the value a poetic harbinger deserves. No doubt the current trend toward critical methodologies based on linguistic theory and tied to a tradition of French rationalism has had something to do with a milieu that is not particularly sympathetic to the kind of poetry Roethke has written. His intuitive psychology, lyrical language, and suprarational view of the universe do not seem suitable for critics engaged in the rational methods of linguistic analysis. It may be true, too, that Roethke's shifts in style and idiom—what may appear to be a lack of external harmony within the body of his work—during the five decades in which he wrote have made him difficult for critics to categorize. Although I do not see Roethke through a hagiographer's lens, I do believe his rightful place is that of an innovative poet who has been a major source of influence on the poetry of our time.

One can argue forcefully, as I wish to, that no single book of poems is as important to the evolution of the idioms that have dominated American poetry in the four decades following World War II than is The Lost Son and Other Poems, published in 1948. Most of these poems were written and published in American magazines and journals in the early and mid-forties.

Hyatt H. Waggoner and James E. B. Breslin have portrayed accurately the shift in American poetry that became apparent by the mid-fifties and marked an end to the final phase of modernism that was waning by the late forties. Certainly Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956) and Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959) are landmarks in their rejection of the autotelic, symbolistic, and purportedly impersonal poetry of late modernism. Ginsberg and Lowell were concerned with breaking down the barriers between life and art and finding a representative identity that was more subjective and personal than that which T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, or Wallace Stevens had created. By the late fifties and early sixties Ginsberg, Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Denise Levertov, James Dickey, James Wright, and Robert Bly, to name several, were proceeding along new lines. They were writing poetry that was more openly autobiographical and personally emotional; their poems reflected a sense that poetic language was part of a life process; their language was more demotic and their diction more colloquial. As Breslin puts it, they sought "ways of ordering poetry that [would] not stifle consciousness" and "new ways of binding form and flux so that temporality will not seem to have been violated."

Not only did the subject of the poet's past become important, but also material of the poet's family became significant to this new poetry. In the way that inherited Western cultural myths, symbols, and history were crucial to the modernist poet's sense of the past, experience derived from personally inherited history—blood history—became central to the postmodern poet's idea of the past. The impact of World War II, the nightmare of the Holocaust, and the terror created by the atomic and now nuclear age, seem to have discredited for poets much of the meaning and viability accorded Western civilization. For example, the overarching Western myths and texts that stand behind "The Waste Land," "The Cantos," or "The Bridge" became far less meaningful and therefore less usable to American poets after World War II. And if it can be said, as I believe it can, that familial history has supplanted a good deal of cultural history for the poets of our time, then certainly Roethke's The Lost Son, Ginsberg's Kaddish, and Lowell's Life Studies emerge as the seminal family cycles of the era. Each book in its own way is groundbreaking, each uses autobiographical and inherited familial sources to shape a myth out of history, and thus each marks a break with the modernist idea of the past.

Breslin maintains that the evolution of American poetry after modernism can be best understood by dividing the period into five major groups: the beat, confessional, deep image, Black Mountain, and New York schools. In a broad sense, the poetry of these five groups, he argues, characterizes the major poetic reorientation of our period. Although such a paradigm may be too schematic, it gives a perspective on our age and helps make historical sense of Theodore Roethke. If we look at our era in terms of these five movements, which in sum can be said to give definition to the dominant trends, it becomes clear that Roethke in The Lost Son had anticipated many of these new directions. (Oddly enough, Breslin fails to discuss Roethke as a significant force in this historical evolution.) For no single book of poems, written at such an early date—a good decade before Lowell and Ginsberg had their breakthroughs—incorporates more of the innovative forms and poetic assumptions that have come to define the contemporary idiom in American poetry.

In The Lost Son, Roethke is confessionally Freudian in the manner that would become important to poets like Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Sexton, and Ginsberg. Yet the psychic identity of his persona, the lost son, is based predominantly on Jungian psychology. And it is, of course, the Jungian idea of consciousness that would be embraced by the deep imagists like Bly and Wright and by other poets such as Gal way Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, and Charles Simic in their attention to the idea of collective mind. What Roethke described as his "telescopic" method of presentation contains several of the assumptions that lie behind the deep-image technique. And Roethke's protean experiments with form anticipate various elements of the dynamism of open-field form that would become important to the Black Mountain poets.

Roethke's confessional voice in The Lost Son grew from the painful experience of his private life. Unlike his modernist predecessors, he did not attempt to transform his personal suffering into a medium that was impersonally mythic or aesthetically self-contained. If emotional trauma and psychic pain are apparent in "Prufrock," "The Broken Tower," or "Sunday Morning," for example, the origins of Eliot's, Crane's, and Stevens' suffering and me private details that would uncover their unique personalities were not their poetic concerns. Conversely, Roethke's poems confront the intimate self and turn the bald sources of experience into grist for the poet's transforming power. Roethke's childhood in his father's greenhouse and his history of mental breakdowns are the central autobiographical events which inform the creation of the lost son.

His father's twenty-five acres of greenhouses in the Saginaw Valley and the hothouse world of peat moss, plant cuttings, carnations, roses, cyclamen, and compost organisms was the loamy place out of which he would shape his mind and delve into his psychic and familial past. The greenhouse became the glass womb in the mind where a lifetime's source of figurative language blossomed into a concept of self. Roethke lived much of his adult life in the throes and cycles of manic depression for which he was periodically hospitalized and on occasion given shock treatment. His battle with life at the mind's edge was a passageway for him into the wilderness of his psyche and soul. With Roethke one is forced to restate an old truth: his mental instability was a source and fuel for his art.

The Freudian kind of confessionalism in The Lost Son is realized, to a large degree, in Roethke's ability to make use of traumatic and ecstatic childhood experience and his need to probe his private dream world in order to release psychic tensions and relieve himself of past burdens and repressed guilt. By wrestling with his painful past, he sought a way to confront his father, the greenhouse keeper who haunted his imagination. Although Freudian notions were not unknown to modernists like Eliot and Crane, such a confessional psychology was at most only obliquely associated with the poet's personal life in the poems. By contrast Roethke's poetry of confession makes use of the details of autobiography in a way that is significantly different from the modernists.

The psychic life of his persona, the lost son, is defined by the family landscape of Roethke's greenhouse childhood: his father, Otto, whose untimely death left Roethke at age thirteen a lost son; those Old World employees, Max Laurisch, Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartz, who were horticulturists and extended kin in the poet's memory; and the greenhouse chores—like weed pulling, moss gathering, and transplanting—that as a boy Roethke performed ritualistically and assiduously for his father. The grounding of a poetic cycle in such highly personal concerns would become a common assumption for poets such as Plath, W. D. Snodgrass, Sexton, Lowell, Berryman, and Ginsberg by the late fifties and early sixties. Roethke—like Lowell with his New England Protestant family and Ginsberg and his politically radical Jewish family—is concerned with the mythic shape of his family past and with the archetypal and cultural significance of that past. This psychological and cultural way of transforming family history into confessional poetry also differs significantly from another kind of domestic poetry, often more simple (meditations on wives, husbands, sons, daughters, etc.), that is prevalent in Romantic and Victorian poetry and that has become popular again in the past decade. In short, much of what is innovative about The Lost Son stems from Roethke's pioneering this postmodern form of familial confessionalism, which contained at least part of the new era's "new confession," as Emerson once put it. Roethke wrote in a notebook entry:

               I was crazed
     Into meaning more profound than what my fathers heard,
     Those listening bearded men
     Who cut the ground with hoes; and made with hands
     An order out of muck and sand. Those Prussian men
     Who hated uniforms.

This new kind of confessionalism could be successful only if the unveiling of the private life could achieve universality. The naked self and the representative nature of that self must constantly overlap—sometimes fully merged and at other times in a necessarily uneasy tension. It has been well documented that Roethke had, especially during the forties, a deep interest in Jungian psychology, and this interest served his evolving poetics. In creating the lost son, he wished to unite a deeply personal consciousness (a Freudian concept of the mind) with an impersonal or collective idea of the psyche which was based largely on a Jungian concept of the unconscious. This unique merging of Freudian and Jungian psychology in The Lost Son anticipates both the Jungian proclivities of Robert Bly's deep imagism and the Freudian confessionalism of Lowell, Ginsberg, Berryman, Plath, and many others.

Numerous times during those years, Roethke recorded his feelings about the nature of the collective mind in the "lost son" poems. He came to believe that one could move forward spiritually only if one returned first to the origins of one's psychic life. He asserted that his new poems oozed out of an "older memory" and "dribbled out of the unconscious." A world of cosmogonic occurrences and a state of primal feeling defined the evolving personality of the lost son. And his wonderful depiction of his Jungian crow of chaos became a veritable emblem for his art:

     When I saw that clumsy crow
     Flap from a wasted tree,
     A shape in the mind rose up:
     Over the gulfs of dream
     Flew a tremendous bird
     Further and further away
     Into a moonless black,
     Deep in the brain, far back.
                                            ("Night Crow")

This peculiar blend of Freudian and Jungian concepts evolved out of Roethke's approach to the natural world. Nature became his objective correlative, that medium through which he could forge a confessional voice able to contain a personal self and a representative version of that self—something mythic. Given the realities of Roethke's childhood, nature would always be a vehicle of the evolving self and a container for the spirit's life and the mind's form.

For Roethke, nature was not only religion brought down to earth, a container of emblematic meanings and an embodiment of human consciousness as it was for Emerson; nature was the script of his life—myth and autobiography bound into one. The natural world was the reality in which his childhood was lived and his family's drama acted out. His Freudian relationship to his parents could not be separated from the stuff in the greenhouse. Because he invented his lost son—the myth of himself—out of the hothouse world his father created, nature became both an emblem of autobiography and the container of a universal soul. He referred to his greenhouse as a "womb, a heaven-on-earth."

This compelling and idiosyncratic relationship with nature was crucial to his ability to make of the lost son a confessional voice and a mythic mask—a poetic character with what one must term an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic identity. This myth making thus allowed him to turn the lost son into a character with an archetypal heritage whose identity resonates with that large cast of lost sons who have preceded him: Jesus, Job, Oedipus, Telemachus, Hamlet, Huck Finn, Ishmael, Quentin Compson, Stephen Dedalus, to name a few. In seeking his own father and his spiritual Father, the lost son is, in every sense, on a pilgrimage—on a passage at once out of the self and into its mucky interior.

Roethke's ability to create a phylogenetic identity for the lost son and to dramatize a "racial memory" derived to a large degree from his ability to "telescope image and symbol," as he put it. His acute awareness of this technique discloses the degree to which he felt he could penetrate the human psyche and face the mystery in things.

I believe that, in this kind of poem, the poet, in order to be true to what is most universal in himself, should not rely on allusion: should not comment or employ many judgment words; should not mediate (or maunder). He must scorn being "mysterious" or loosely oracular, but be willing to face up to the genuine mystery. His language must be compelling and immediate: he must create an actuality. He must be able to telescope image and symbol, if necessary, without relying on the obvious connectives: to speak in a kind of psychic shorthand when his protagonist is under great stress. He must be able to shift his rhythms rapidly, the "tension."

It is precisely through this "psychic shorthand" and "telescoping" that he created images "deep" enough to hold and express his protagonist's primordial identity. Delmore Schwartz addressed this quality of psychic depth in Roethke with great insight when he noted: "The reader who supposes that Roethke is really a primitive lyric poet loses or misses a great deal. Perhaps the best way to describe what is under the surface is to quote Valéry's remark that the nervous system is the greatest of all poems."

Thus Bly's insistence that deep images unlock the unconscious mind was a discovery Roethke had made in the mid forties in the first four "lost son" poems. During the late fifties and early sixties, Bly would advocate a poetry that transcended the constraints of the human ego and allowed man to participate with nature and be at home in the universe. Calling for an alternative to the cerebrally oriented and rationally enclosed literature characteristic of writers like Lowell, Arthur Miller, and Saul Bellow, Bly singled out only Walt Whitman and Roethke as American poets who have brought us "news of the universe." Bly's belief that deep images lead us back to the primary connections between the human self and the animistic world was in some way an emanation of Roethke's poetics of two decades earlier. For Roethke had created a sacred and numinous nature and an archetypal mind that embodied what Bly later called a "poetry that reaches out in waves over everything that is alive." Bly was advocating what Roethke had accomplished in The Lost Son: a poetry that was aesthetically and ontologically organic—free of a dualistic human identity. Perhaps no protagonist in American poetry learns to overcome the dualisms of the Western rational mind with more happy passion than the lost son, who cries at the closing of "A Field of Light":

     My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
     The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
     There were clouds making a rout of shapes crossing a windbreak of
     cedars,
     And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle.
     The worms were delighted as wrens.
     And I walked, I walked through the light air;
     I moved with the morning.

Roethke is not a projectivist in the post-Poundian way that Charles Olson lays out in his famous "Projectivist Verse" essay. Roethke's sense of form and intent is different from that of poets like Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov. However, his kinetic language, his bardic feeling about the spoken quality of the poem, and his organic and dynamic concept of consciousness dovetail with the forms of inclusive openness that Olson and the Black Mountain poets would be practicing and preaching by the early fifties. Roethke, who was older than Olson, shared one major source of influence with him—William Carlos Williams. The impact of Williams on Roethke accounts for some of the kinetic language and protean form in the "lost son" poems, and several of the poetic principles that Olson would advocate in his 1950 projectivist verse manifesto had, in the "lost son" sequence, already become second nature for Roethke, who wrote with both the compulsive containment of a metaphysical and the discursive openness of a Poundian.

Many of the essential ideas in Olson's projectivist essay indicate the degree to which Roethke's experiments intersect with the Black Mountain orientation. Olson calls for a "revolution of the ear" and "the kinetics of the thing." "The poem itself must," he says, "at all points, be a high energy construct," for "it is from the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born." For Olson, the poem has to unite linguistic rhythms with physiological rhythms, and he insists that "verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath."

Olson's idea of organic free verse form leads him to think of the poem as a field in which the words that embody objects create a "necessary series of tensions." In this dynamic idea of form it is essential that the poet not dissipate his linguistic energy in any way. "The descriptive functions generally have to be watched, every second, in projective verse, because of their easiness, and thus their drain on the energy which composition by field allows into a poem. Any slackness takes off attention, that crucial thing, from the job at hand." The kinetic field, Olson believes, is shaped to a large degree by the relationship between linguistic sound and the movement of the poet's consciousness. Thus the poet can, "without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech." And the success of such an effort rests largely with the ear—"the ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the ear, which is so close to the mind that it is the mind's, that it has the mind's speed." This dynamic kind of poetic language, Olson believes, could carry the kind of energy poetry has not "carried in our language since the Elizabethans."

Roethke's own breakthrough to the principles of organic form occurred, of course, in the forties when he began working on The Lost Son. In a letter he wrote to Williams while he was at work on the poem "The Lost Son," he proclaims an idea of dynamic poetic speech that sounds a good bit like Olson. He has written a poem, he says, "for the ear and not the eye … with the mood or the action on the page, not talked about, not the meditative, T. S. Eliot kind of thing." This letter and the others Roethke exchanged with Williams in the forties reveal his enthusiasm for Williams' idea of organic form. Thus, in a historical sense Williams becomes a common source for Roethke and Olson.

A comic aphorism Roethke recorded in a notebook of the mid-forties indicates how deeply he felt about the importance of the ear: "All ear and no brain / Makes Teddy inane." Like Olson, Roethke has no use for slackness or lack of linguistic pressure. His notebook entries of the mid-forties stress his commitment to a dynamic and organic free verse, and, like Olson, he complains that "so much of modern verse seems tensionless." Although Roethke was not a theorist as Olson was, his belief that if the poet "can't make the words move, he has nothing," is similar to Olson's advocacy of dynamic language in an open field. In discussing the influences on the "lost son" poems, Roethke points to "German and English folk literature, particularly Mother Goose; Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, especially the songs and rants." Oddly enough, but not coincidentally, we find Roethke and Olson both appealing to the dynamism of Elizabethan English in their desire to reclaim some original energy for contemporary free verse.

In his desire to write "a poem that is the shape of the psyche under great stress," Roethke created an organic form that flexed its syntax. The protean shape of the lost son's mind is, to a large degree, generated in the euphonic qualities of Roethke's ear which in turn shape the kinetic force of the line. The dimensions of the lost son's psychic experience create—in the most organic way—the stresses in the lines and the nature of the lines that constitute the stanzas in the four lost son poems. Like Olson, Roethke disdains artificial syntactic connectives and the use of traditional metaphor and simile. His goal is to create a language that embodies in every aspect of its form the content of the mind. That moment of manic frenzy in section 3 of "The Lost Son"—which is followed by the two lines made up of "money" and "water" that disclose the matter-spirit duality in the protagonist—exemplifies this kind of protean organicism.

    All the windows are burning! What's left of my life?
    I want the old rage, the lash of primordial milk!
    Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going,
    I have married my hands to perpetual agitation,
    I run, I run to the whistle of money.
    Money money money
    water water water

A poet of consequence to the evolving direction of his art is naturally a beneficiary of a given moment in history. As a poet coming to maturity in the waning phase of modernism, Roethke was able to have a perspective on that great generation. He could make selective use of the innovations of the period and absorb what he had to of writers like Eliot, Stevens, Williams, James Joyce, and William Faulkner—to name several who influenced him. Unlike poets of the generation to follow him, who often felt antagonistic about the modernist masters, Roethke felt both connected to and yet, I think, shrewdly distanced from the age of Eliot and Pound.

Roethke's maturation during the middle decade of the century gave him a healthy and creative perspective on modernism as well as a broad cultural vantage point. For as a mid-century American poet, he was able to bring together—to synthesize in his idiosyncratic way—dominant post-Christian intellectual movements: Romanticism, Darwinism, and modern psychology (Freudian and Jungian). Roethke had enough historical distance from these intellectual world views to be able to create out of them a set of assumptions and ultimately an aesthetic myth from which his language and poetic concerns could evolve.

Critics have examined at length the importance of British Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, and Freudian and Jungian psychology in Roethke's work. But Roethke's organic aestheticism is also, at least in part, an emanation of Darwinism. He is, of course, in no way a Darwinist; in the obvious sense, he is neither secular nor deterministic. Rather, proceeding from certain Darwinian assumptions, he extends his own version of what can be called post-Darwinian myth. Darwin's organic conception of life, growth, and evolution, and his idea of an organic architecture unifying the entire scheme of plant and animal life, had immense meaning for Roethke. His ability to identify with the subhuman world of plants, stones, and microorganisms in The Lost Son and Praise To The End!, his assertion in "The Waking" that "the lowly worm climbs up a winding stair," and his sense of phylogenetic origins in "The Far Field," where we find him "Fingering a shell, / Thinking; / Once I was something like this, mindless, / Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar," exemplify how thoroughly he absorbed a vision of the Darwinian cosmos.

Viewing Roethke from the vantage point of the century's final decade, one might say that he pioneered our first important postmodernist poems. In creating a mythic autobiography out of his vision of certain intersecting intellectual forces that shaped America at mid-century, he was able to find a relationship between an idea of the transcendent, a modern notion of the natural world, and a concept of the contemporary human self. In forming a new script from the intellectual realms his imagination filtered to the supple language of his rhetoric, the greenhouse keeper's son and the spiritually driven manic-depressive poet forged our first contemporary confessional persona.

It is important to keep in mind that behind these three modern intellectual trends lies Roethke's idiosyncratic but deep commitment to a Judeo-Christian tradition. The more orthodox idea of God that he presents in his final group of poems, "A Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical," discloses a persistent sense of otherness—a pre-Romantic sense of the separateness that exists between man and God—which is evident at various points in various forms throughout Roethke's poetry. His interest in Christian mysticism, his use of mystical ideas and tropes, and his thorough reading of Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism underscore this dimension in Roethke's work. Numerous notebook entries reveal Roethke's spiritual zeal, among them "Those damned old mystics have got me despising myself," and "If God does not exist, neither do we." Finally, this Judeo-Christian aspect of Roethke's art in no way contradicts or adds confusion to the modern sensibility he created out of Romanticism, Darwinism, modern psychology, and literary modernism. That his Judeo-Christian strain could be also an integral part of his vision is a testimony not only to his genius but to the largeness of his poetry and the permanence of the myth he made for our time—a myth he created out of both his personal past and our cultural past.