My first book was much too wary, much too gingerly in its approach to experience; rather dry in tone and constricted in rhythm. I am trying to loosen up, to rite poems of greater intensity and symbolical depth. [Theodore Roethke, Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke, edited by Ralph J. Mills, Jr., 1968. Subsequent correspondences cited in this essay are reprinted in this volume.]

By the mid-1940s, Theodore Roethke had become aware of the limitations of his first volume and had immersed himself in new work of a significantly different order. The seven-year period between the publication of Open House in 1941 and The Lost Son and Other Poems in 1948 is considered pivotal by many critics. [In Theodore Roethke, 1963] Ralph J. Mills, Jr. refers to the "imaginative leap" Roethke made during this time, and [in "The Objective Ego," in Theodore Roethke: Essays on the Poetry, edited by Arnold Stein, 1965] Stephen Spender describes the poet's work after this "leap" as that which is "most uniquely Roethke." [In "Cult of the Breakthrough," New Republic, September 21, 1968] Kenneth Burke sees the period in which Roethke was working on his second volume as one centered on the poet's "most important breakthrough," citing Roethke's greenhouse poems in Part I of The Lost Son as the embodiment of the change. As Burke and others note, this break-through was not only stylistic but also psychological. Characterized by the development of what Mills calls an "intensely subjective vision," Roethke's less "wary" "approach to experience" after the breakthrough reflected a new relation between his writing and his sense of self. In this essay I want to discuss the nature of this change in Roethke's work by examining developments in the way he went about writing. The Theodore Roethke Papers at the University of Washington, an extensive collection of unpublished drafts, notebooks, letters, and other material, are the basis of the essay. My focus is primarily on the composition of three poems: "Genesis," a representative example of Roethke's work from the mid-1930s; "On the Road to Woodlawn," an intriguing transitional poem from the late '30s; and "Cuttings," the opening piece in the greenhouse sequence, dating from the mid-'40s. Examining Roethke's work on these poems in his unpublished notebooks and drafts, we can see significant developments, in both the way he wrote and the way he felt about what he wrote, which are the underpinnings of the poet's extraordinary breakthrough.

Here is the final text of "Genesis" as it appeared in Open House:

This elemental force
Was wrested from the sun;
A river's leaping source
Is locked in narrow bone.

This wisdom floods the mind,
Invades quiescent blood;
A seed that swells the rind
To burst the fruit of good.

A pearl within the brain,
Secretion of the sense;
Around a central grain
New meaning grows immense.

This poem was first published in The Nation in 1936 and is typical of much of Roethke's early work. The end-stopped, metrical lines—there are no rhythmic substitutions—and the tight rhyme scheme give the feeling of fierce energy controlled by form. The central image of the poem, the "pearl within the brain," parallels that of two other Open House poems in iambic trimeter quatrains, 'The Adamant" and "Reply to Censure." Based on a dichotomy between self and world which is announced in the title poem of Open House, "Genesis," like the other two poems, develops the concept of an inviolable core of personal identity. "Open House" calls for "language strict and pure" which will "keep the spirit spare." Relying heavily on direct statements, unelaborated images, and abstractions, the language of "Genesis" meets this definition. As "Open House" indicates, the tightly controlled style derived from such "pure" language and strict adherence to the demands of rhyme and meter is a way of keeping the spirit "spare," constraining the self within the bounds of the conscious will. The style of "Genesis" and other early poems thus reflects not only Roethke's aesthetic preferences but also his sense of the self as an entity to be controlled and ordered through the process of writing.

The composition of poetry, however, is not entirely a function of the conscious will. The origins of "Genesis" in the poet's notebooks reveal at least a partial suspension of will as Roethke works toward his first sense of the poem. Roethke's use of rhyme and meter in this preliminary work is an example. In the completed text of "Genesis," these formal aspects stress the poet's conscious, rational control over his material. However, in the primary stage of composition, Roethke's use of rhyme and a repeating rhythm shows his reliance on the sounds of words, not their meanings, as a way of generating poetic material. The notebook in which the first work on "Genesis" was done contains a number of disconnected lines and couplets—such as "A haze before the sun," "Arise from red-eyed ache," and "Its attributes are worn"—before Roethke puts together a recognizable stanza. These fragments are not unified by a particular concept, an idea the poet has consciously chosen to develop, but rather by their common iambic trimeter rhythm. At this early stage of composition, then, Roethke is using meter as a device to generate lines without a clear sense of what he wants to say; conscious acts of arrangement, clarification, and judgment are held in abeyance.

Rhyme is employed in a similar manner:

What splits its way through rock
Like subterranean fire

The creeping flame, desire,
Will seek its way through rock

A ravenous tongue of flame
Remote in deepest shock.

"Fire" leads the poet to "desire," and "rock" leads to "shock." But what differentiates Roethke's work with these three couplets from his work with the other fragments is that links of sound are used along with conscious considerations of image and meaning as Roethke develops the hackneyed metaphor of love as flame. It is significant that, despite the clichés inherent in them, Roethke selects these three couplets from a mass of less conscious but more imaginative material. Rejecting intriguing phrases like "The muscles of the wind" and "Colours scrape the eye," the poet settles on the lines most clearly molded by the conscious mind as the primary material for the conclusion of this early version of "Genesis":

This elemental force
Was wrested from the sun;

A river's leaping source
Is locked in narrow bone.

This love is lusty mirth
That shakes eternal sky,
The agony of birth,
The fiercest will to die.
The fever-heat of mind
Within prehensile brute;
A seed that swells the rind
Of strange, impalpable fruit.

This faith surviving shock,
This smoldering desire,
Will split its way through rock
Like subterranean fire.

[This text is reproduced in Roethke's essay "Verse in Rehearsal" in On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke, edited by Ralph J. Mills, Jr., 1965.]

The stanzaic form of "Genesis" arises early in the process of composition. The fragmentary lines and couplets in Roethke's notebook are followed immediately by attempts to construct an abab quatrain. This early movement from fragments to the development of a stanza reflects Roethke's interest in working with consciously crafted material as soon in the writing process as possible. The stanza we see emerging, however, is not the one we might expect from the poet's attention to the "rock"-"shock" couplets but rather one for which there is no preliminary material in the notebook passage, the second quatrain in the draft cited above. In his three attempts to complete this stanza Roethke struggles to develop a single formal unit before he considers the implications in what he has previously written. His interest is clearly not so much in content, in developing a complete thought from the preliminary material, as it is in form. Looking back at this early notebook passage as a whole, we see that the fragmentary material before the quatrain—though it has no relation to the stanza's ideas or images—is nonetheless essential to the creation of the stanza because it provides a framework of rhythm and rhyme in which the poet can undertake more extensive work. Before this formal structure is established, the most developed units in the notebook passage are only a few lines long; after it, we find a group of some twenty lines on the same topic. The earliest work in the notebook, then, can be considered a kind of poetic "gearing up," in which the repetition of the basic trimeter rhythm and the alternate rhyming in the couplets are more important than the meanings of individual lines and images.

Once form has been established, however, the writing process changes. For one thing, deletions become much more frequent. Among the forty lines and fragments of preliminary material in the notebook passage, the poet has crossed out only two completely—both of these in his work on the quatrain—and made small deletions of single words or phrases in about a dozen more. At a later stage of composition, when Roethke has the first three stanzas of the draft version done and is working on the fourth only two complete lines out of ten are left untouched, and one-third of the lines are deleted completely. The poet's more critical attitude toward what he has written reflects his movement from the generation of poetic material—which involves, as we have seen, the partial suspension of the conscious will—to the transformation of the generated material into the artifice of the poem, a process which, at this stage of Roethke's career, is based on conscious, logical choice. In keeping with this change, Roethke no longer uses meter and rhyme as a way of developing new images and connections but rather employs them to gain control over his material by eliminating the parts that do not fit. For example, from the preliminary couplet "A ravenous tongue of flame / Remote in deepest shock" Roethke keeps the last line for consideration but not the first; other fragments ending in "flame" or "flames" are also deleted because they do not fit the "fire"-"desire," "rock"-"shock" rhyme scheme. Rhythmic irregularities too are removed, as in the deletion of "hot" from "This ant-like flame, hot desire." Roethke even includes a list of rhymes for "shock" on the right hand side of the page, setting up a tight structure which new alternate lines must fit.

In forming and polishing individual quatrains at this stage of composition, Roethke does not concern himself much with the order of stanzas in the work. As we have seen, he begins with the second stanza; some pages later in the same notebook is a draft of the first. The first complete draft of the poem, of course, contains two stanzas which do not appear in the published text and lacks the vital concluding stanza which makes "Genesis" what it is:

A pearl within the brain,
Secretion of the sense;
Around a central grain
New meaning grows immense.

In the first two stages of composition we have seen how Roethke generates poetic material and then forms and polishes stanzaic "pearls" from it. The poet's large-scale revisions of the first complete draft mark a third stage, in which the "New meaning" of the work is developed.

In his essay "Verse in Rehearsal" Roethke quotes the comments of his friend Rolfe Humphries on the early, four-stanza version of "Genesis." Humphries' remarks, though extensive, say little about the overall meaning of the work, concentrating instead on problems like the draft's "conventional rhymes," its "monogamous adjective-noun combinations," and the redundance of the phrase "strange, impalpable fruit" in the third stanza. Roethke must have considered these comments important, since he reprinted them in the essay; but the relation between Humphries' remarks and Roethke's revisions is not as direct as the essay might imply. The poet deals with most of the problems his friend notes, but instead of doing the technical "tinkering" that Humphries advises—finding a title to account for the standard rhymes; changing "strange, impalpable" to a four-syllable word—Roethke replaces everything in the poem except the opening stanza and one line in the third quatrain. One reason for this radical revision is that the poet had already done the kind of poetic polishing his friend suggests when he was working on the individual stanzas. Roethke's early sense that the draft was at least technically proficient is reflected in the fact that he submitted it to three periodicals before sending it to Humphries.

Roethke may have felt growing reservations about the craftsmanship of the piece as the rejection slips came in, but I think the main problems that bothered him at this final stage of the compositional process had to do with the overall meaning, tone, and stance of the poem. He expresses this dissatisfaction in his comments on the draft sent to Humphries: "Sophomoric straining? Just old tricks? Or fair traditional piece?" The last of these three remarks is, of course, wishful thinking. The second comment views the "traditional" aspects of the piece from a darker perspective. In this sense the remark could be taken primarily as a sign of doubts about the conventionality of the poem's technique, as Humphries appears to read it; but it also connects with Roethke's first comment. "Sophomoric straining?" shows the poet's worries about how he appears in the poem, about whether he seems immature or phony in it. I think Roethke is referring to a kind of pose of disembodied wisdom here, one which he has assumed before in uncollected poems like "Prepare Thyself—"Prepare thyself for change, / The ever-strange, / Thy soul's immortal range."—and "The Knowing Heart"—"O this mortality will break / The false dissembling brain apart." This kind of poetic stance—in which the poet assumes a pompous, all-knowing attitude in order to claim broad metaphysical knowledge he has not earned in the poem or in his experience—must have seemed like an "old trick" to Roethke; it is an easy way for a young poet to take on large topics. It pervades the three stanzas the poet omitted from the final draft, with their references to "prehensile brute" and "eternal sky" and their confident statements about the results of "love" and "faith surviving shock."

It might be argued that the final version of "Genesis" is also pompous in tone, with its description of "wisdom flooding the mind" and the concluding image of the "pearl within the brain." But the published text is not "sophomoric straining"; we accept its claims partially because they are toned down and made more specific than those in the earlier draft but also, and more importantly, because we can see their relation to the poet who makes them. The final text clearly traces the movement of the "elemental force" of external energy inward to the individual mind and body and its development there into the substance of the growing "pearl." The title "Genesis," which appears only after Roethke has begun work on the three-stanza version, clarifies this movement by focussing our attention on the poem as a description of a creative process, with the implication that the poem itself is the result of such a process. The earlier four-stanza draft—though it has elements of the basic external-internal, energy-matter dichotomies—includes neither this progression toward the individual self nor the implied reference to the poet in the process of writing. Its tone seems impersonal and pompous, its claims unjustified by experience. In revising the poem after this draft has been completed, Roethke finds a new meaning in the work, as well as a new poetic stance, one which presents the self with more accuracy and honesty. As the title poem of Open House indicates, Roethke sees the self at this stage of his career as an entity essentially created in the act of writing. Thus it is not surprising that the version of "Genesis" which presents the self most accurately and with the least pomposity is also the best aesthetically, with a clear structure, language which has been made "strict and pure" by the deletion of confusing or unnecessary adjectives, total metrical regularity, and a rhyme scheme that is both tight and original.

"The great danger is softness" Roethke wrote in a letter in 1935. What we find in "Genesis" and other early poems is a pose which counteracts this danger by projecting a spare and inviolable core of identity: a pearl; an adamant; even, as in "Open House," a shield. This is the poetry of what Dennis E. Brown terms "the entrenched self ["Theodore Roethke's 'Self-World' and the Modernist Position," Journal of Modern Literature, July, 1974], and behind the trenches we see few specifics of Roethke's individual identity. By the late 1930s, however, Roethke was becoming aware of the limitations of this kind of writing. In a review of Ben Bellit's The Five-Fold Mesh in 1939, Roethke raised some critical points which could apply to his own early work:

Often instead of being truly passionate, he is merely literary; he shapes ingenious verbal patterns, but they are not always poetry. Too much of his work seems to spring from an act of will rather than from an inner compulsion. Except for half a dozen poems—and that is enough—he creates no more than remarkable artifice. [Roethke, On the Poet and His Craft]

As Richard Blessing notes [in Theodore Roethke's Dynamic Vision, 1974], Roethke began to feel dissatisfied with the "well made poem" in the late '30s. In seeking to develop his own work beyond mere "remarkable artifice," Roethke produced two intriguing poems in this period which found their way into Open House. Both "The Premonition," with its reliance on unstressed line endings and half-rhyme, and "On the Road to Woodlawn," with its rough hexameter rhythm, are formally looser than the other work in the volume; both poems too arise from an "inner compulsion" which becomes central in Roethke's work: the poet's drive to understand and communicate with his dead father. There are also significant differences in compositional method from that of the early work, as an analysis of the writing of "On the Road to Woodlawn" reveals.

The composition of "On the Road to Woodlawn" represents a transitional phase between Roethke's work on poems like "Genesis" in the mid-'30s and his work on the greenhouse poems in the early '40s. Here is the final text as it appeared in Open House:

     On the Road to Woodlawn

I miss the polished brass, the powerful black horses,
The drivers creaking the seats of the baroque hearses,
The high-piled floral offerings with sentimental verses,
The carriages reeking with varnish and stale perfume.

I miss the pallbearers momentously taking their places,
The undertaker's obsequious grimaces,
The craned necks, the mourners' anonymous faces,
—And the eyes, still vivid, looking up from a sunken room.

As we might gather from the length and rhythmic variation of the lines, Roethke does not use a repeating rhythm as a way of generating material for this poem. Rather the poem has its origins in questions which lead to a gathering of imagery:

Where is the polished brass
Where are the
Or the streamlined fenders the black flags
The line, snipped by the traffic light,
[notebook]

These questions reflect the process of memory which is at the heart of Roethke's work on this and many subsequent poems. While this conscious attempt to tap his own past experience through memory is a technique not seen in the preliminary work on "Genesis," we do find the same use of rhyme as a generating tool in both poems:

I miss the powerful black horses:
The drivers in the creaking seats of the baroque hearses;
The high piled Floral Offerings with sentimental verses,
[notebook]

After this rhymed section, the poet returns in his notebook to unrhymed fragments as he works to clarify details in his memory of the funeral procession. Here, in contrast to "Genesis," the scene of the poem, existing as it does in the past, is determined considerably before the meter. On the next page of the notebook, in fact, Roethke's examination of the scene has led him from the funeral procession to his dead father, whom he now addresses in trimeter: "Far and away above you / The hissing Planets whirl." After these lines is a question in prose which concludes the work on this poem in the notebook. When Roethke asks himself, "Do the clues to our generation lie in the diseased?" [quoted by Allan Seager in The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke, 1968]—a question I take to refer to his father's slow death from cancer—he is thinking about neither the poem's form nor its descriptive detail. The question, unlike anything in the notebook work on "Genesis," reflects Roethke's concern with the meaning of the experience before the poem is written.

The issue of the personal significance of the experience for Roethke is held largely in abeyance as the poet works on completing and polishing a draft of the poem. It is in this second stage of composition that the work on this poem most closely resembles that on "Genesis." The aaab cccb rhyme scheme is established, and the poet tries out different versions of lines to fit it. There is also some rhythmic tinkering, though considerably less than with "Genesis" because of the later poem's looser metrical form. The basic work on the first stanza of "On the Road to Woodlawn" is completed at this stage, but the second stanza at this point is considerably different from the published text:

Now, as if performing a task that disgraces,
The black-flagged cars, filled with anonymous faces,
Hurry to where, among urns, a vacant place is,
—As if that cemetery had insufficient room.

If Roethke had decided to retain this draft stanza as the conclusion of "On the Road to Woodlawn," he would have produced a poem not unlike "Highway: Michigan," "Idyll," or the other poems on social topics in Open House, a piece beginning with observation and description from the poet's own viewpoint and including at the end a vision of the social problem—highway mania, suburban anxiety, our inability to deal with death—expressed in a largely impersonal way. But the question of the personal meaning of the scene begins to concern Roethke again after he has completed this draft; beneath the two typed stanzas on the draft sheet is new work in pencil on what will become the second stanza of the published text.

The most noticeable changes between the draft and published texts of the second stanza are the clear presence of the poet himself in the final version, signalled by the "I miss" which now repeats the directly personal opening of the piece; and the replacement of an objective, thematically centered last line with one based on a haunting personal image. This concluding hallucinatory vision of the father staring up from the casket does not resolve the movement of the poem the way the pearl image does in "Genesis"; it does not unify the pattern of images in the work or clarify the overall meaning of the poem. Neither does it develop the personal stance seen in the earlier work. In "On the Road to Woodlawn" the self is presented as vulnerable, and the experience is seen as essentially irresolvable. In revising this poem in the last stage of the writing process, Roethke does not work toward creating a vision of self as he had earlier, but rather toward describing personal experience specifically and honestly.

Based as it is on memory, the composition of "On the Road to Woodlawn" involves more conscious work with the subject matter, particularly in the early stages, than does the writing of "Genesis." Paradoxically, however, "Genesis" in its final version appears a more consciously crafted poem than "On the Road to Woodlawn." The personal stance developed in the earlier poem emphasizes the conscious awareness of "meaning" in experience, in contrast to the depiction in the later work of an emotional event the self does not completely comprehend. Roethke's sense of the difference between these two modes of dealing with experience in poetry, as well as his increasing frustration with the "Genesis" mode, is summarized in this notebook entry: "I can suck something dry from experience, but I can't see it imaginatively."

The poet's progress toward a kind of writing which would allow him to "see experience imaginatively" was not easy. Here, for example, is some early notebook work on the greenhouse poem "Old Florist":

I cannot claim those acres,
The benches knocked to stone,
The hot beds smashed to kindling
The rose house tumbled down.

Those tall hard-fingered florists
Swearers and drinkers, they

The garish shanties creep across
The fields once full of flowers

These lines are essentially a false start; after them come the fragments like "spitting tobacco juice" which are the actual raw material for the poem. The problems in the lines are related, I think, to Roethke's use of meter and, in the first quatrain, rhyme. In meeting these formal demands, Roethke assumes an odd melodramatic tone, in which the self is cast in a traditional elegiac role and the subject is glamorized. Diction suffers too, as in the inverted "Swearers and drinkers, they"; in another attempt to work on this material in meter Roethke even uses the contraction "shan't." Formal techniques, then, instead of generating authentic poetic material from memory, essentially replace careful examination of past experience with language and images based on a conventional pose. In an early poem like "Genesis" this process works because the poet's goal is not to examine his own self and past but to create an identity, a personal stance, through the act of asserting artistic control over largely impersonal material. But in the early 1940s, in order to use memory effectively and develop an accurate sense of self, Roethke had to eliminate the formal techniques which led him to conventional stances.

In Roethke's notebooks we can see important changes in the poet's working methods. While Roethke's biographer Allan Seager exaggerates the differences between the notebooks of the '30s and those of the early '40s, his basic point, that the poet began to "loosen up" in the late '30s, is valid. Even the earliest notebooks appear fragmentary and confusing, with drafts of different poems and parts of poems interspersed among teaching notes, addresses, fragments of letters, and other material. Like the later notebooks, they show evidence of Roethke's re-reading. But as the poet completes Open House and begins work on his second volume, the notebooks become even more confusing. For one thing, Roethke's work in them is much more extensive than earlier, involving not only a large increase in draft material for poems but many more prose fragments, questions, partial narratives, and other related material. The re-readings become more frequent, with corrections and additions of new material. In his new, more extensive use of the notebooks, Roethke spends a great deal of time describing aspects of the greenhouse, often without an idea of one particular poem in mind. One notebook from the early '40s contains several pages of such work, including details that find their way into "Root Cellar"—"All the breathing of growing"—"Weed Puller"—"Weeds beneath benches, / The drain-holes festooned with mossy roots dripping"—and "Transplanting"—"To be pinched and spun quick by the florists' green thumbs." The evocation of images from memory is more important than artifice here. I do not mean to imply that Roethke is unconcerned with the composition of specific poems at this point; we can see this passage eventually leading into work on "Forcing House." But the artifice here, the separation of greenhouse experience into distinct units that will become poems, arises gradually from the description instead of guiding and focussing the writing from the beginning. There is neither the rush to complete a formal unit, as in the early work, nor the clear sense of a particular subject, as in "On the Road to Woodlawn." "The poem invents the form; it insists on the form," Roethke writes in one notebook. The poet's sense of artifice has become more organic; writing now involves discovery, not just conscious choice. Roethke's belief in this period that "A poem becomes independent of you" shows a new attitude toward the self in the writing process, a movement away from will and stance toward a more subtle and fluid sense of himself and his material. The new type of preliminary work in the poet's notebooks reflects Roethke's growing awareness that it is vital to keep the gates of memory open, the self open to past experience.

Related to this new openness in the writing process is the value Roethke now places on what can perhaps best be defined as "looking." This concept first appears in the mid-'30s in a letter from Roethke's friend Louise Bogan. Charging Roethke with a kind of fear of feeling in his early verse, she sent him a copy of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and advised, "… you will have to look at things until you don't know whether you are they or they are you" (Bogan's emphasis). Roethke echoed this idea many years later in the film In a Dark Time, noting Rilke's careful observation of animals and referring to long, intense "looking" as "an extension of consciousness." This "extension of consciousness," it is important to remember, arises not only from introspection, "looking" at the self, but also from close observation of entities outside the self. In the lengthy descriptive passages from the greenhouse notebooks we can see the poet "looking" as he writes. An example is Roethke's work on the memory of pulling weeds, which extends for more than a dozen pages. The scene is examined again and again; details are repeated; and, though practically all of the images and phrases in "Weed Puller" appear in the passage, there is little attempt to order the material as it is being written. Roethke is not just gathering lines here as he might have done earlier—the work is too repetitious and extensive for that. Rather, he is intensely "looking" at a memory in an attempt to "extend his consciousness" to include elements of the greenhouse experience of his younger self, to go beyond simple description toward "seeing it imaginatively." What the poet eventually learns from this "looking" is revealed in the general comment about weed pulling he makes in a later notebook: "Ambivalent / Spirituality & sensuousness."

Though the greenhouse notebooks show that Roethke has moved away from conscious, limiting structures in his concepts of self and artifice, there is nonetheless a great deal of conscious work involved in the writing of the greenhouse poems. Roethke's comment on weed pulling is an example: After "looking" at the experience until his present sense of self begins to merge with aspects of the greenhouse and his past identity, the poet steps back from what he has written, examines it, and states what he has learned. The knowledge gained through this examination is then used in developing the artifice of the poem. This more conscious work comes after a given poem has begun to emerge from the mass of greenhouse notes; it can thus be seen as part of a second stage in the compositional process. While it is necessary to discuss the preliminary greenhouse work with reference to several poems, as their origins are intermingled, the nest stage in the writing process is best seen in the poet's work on a single poem. Here is the final text of "Cuttings" as it appeared in The Lost Son and Other Poems:

Sticks-in-a-drowse droop over sugary loam,
Their intricate stem-fur dries;
But still the delicate slips keep coaxing up water;
The small cells bulge;

One nub of growth
Nudges a sand-crumb loose,
Pokes through a musty sheath
Its pale tendrilous horn.

Like the second stage in the composition of an early poem, Roethke's work in completing a draft of "Cuttings" involves the development and selection of material to fit his idea of the artifice of the poem. In the early poems, of course, Roethke uses meter and rhyme as tools in the process, deleting material that does not fit the pattern and listing rhyme words as a kind of boundary within which new lines might be written. The absence of these tools in the composition of the greenhouse poems makes Roethke's task more difficult. The poet discusses this problem in "Some Remarks on Rhythm":

We must realize, I think, that the writer in freer forms must have an even greater fidelity to his subject matter than the poet who has the support of form. He must keep his eye on the object, and his rhythm must move as a mind moves, must be imaginatively right, or he is lost. [On the Poet and His Craft]

Comparing the composition of "Genesis" with that of "Cuttings," we see in the later poem fewer lines completed and then revised for rhythmic regularity, more fragmentary beginnings which are not revised but just dropped. In one notebook passage, for example, there are more than twenty consecutive attempts at the third line of the poem. It is clear from some of these fragments that Roethke knows the basic movement he wants to develop at this transitional point in the poem—the gradual transformation, within a continuous natural process, of dormant stems into slips actively drawing up water—but he cannot develop the details until he is satisfied with the beginning phrase of the transition. Unlike Roethke's work on the individual stanzas of "Genesis," the completion of a part of "Cuttings" is bound up with the poet's idea of the whole, his awareness that the clause beginning with "But" is central to the poem's entire movement. Working toward a line which is not formally metered but "imaginatively right," he repeats the opening "But" again and again, trying out different alternatives for the subject of the clause—"the sliced wedge of a stem," "the planted end," "the face"—in an attempt to start a train of thought and a corresponding rhythm which will carry him through this part of the poem. Roethke's difficulty in getting past the beginning of the line at this point reflects the fact that the process involved here is not a simple one of summarizing or reproducing experience. It is an attempt, rather, to re-create in the act of writing the movement of the poet's mind. In "Genesis" and other early poems a tough personal stance arises directly from Roethke's strict formal style and adamantine imagery, but in the greenhouse poems this process is essentially reversed: The imaginative attempt to re-live the act of perception determines the lines and phrases which make up the artifice; only when the poem's rhythms "move as a mind moves," following the self in the process of perception and cognition, are they "imaginatively right."

The concrete details and perceptions we find in the finished poem represent only a fraction of the total amount generated by Roethke's intense observation of greenhouse experience. The final stage of composition, after the poet has completed a draft, involves careful selection of lines and images, along with revision and rearrangement of material. The composition of "Cuttings" provides a clear example of this kind of work, as the first draft of the poem is vastly different from the final text. Here is the draft, with its early title:

     Propagation House

Slivers of stem, minutely furred,
Tucked into sand still marked with thumb-prints,
Cuttings of coleas, geranium, blood-red fuchsia
Stand stiff in their beds.
The topsoil crusts over like bakery sugar.

The delicate slips keep coaxing up water,
Bulging their flexible cells almost to bursting.
Even before fuzzy root-hairs reach for their gritty sustenance,
One pale horn of growth, a nubby root-cap,
Nudges a sand-crumb loose,
Humps like a sprout,
Then stretches out straight.

"Propagation House" has the overall structure of "Cuttings," most of its details, and several of the specific images. But, compared to the final text, it is wordy and slow-moving. Such an overabundance of detail is a natural result of Roethke's reliance on memory and extensive "looking" in the early stages of composition. It is also related to the poet's shift from formal to free verse, as a letter from William Carlos Williams suggests:

The thing sought is the essence and for this we need to be saying (as poets!) what we are saying. But in releasing ourselves, in that feeling of confident release the difficulty is that we say too much, we say more than is distinctively ourselves, we slop over a little.

In paring down his draft to express no more than is "distinctively himself," Roethke uses what he has learned of himself and greenhouse experience in the earlier stages of writing to clarify and condense his material. In the case of "Weed Puller," for example, Roethke uses his discovery that the experience involved "Ambivalent / Spirituality & sensuousness" to select the combination of sensuous images and spiritually oriented abstractions which will make up the finished poem.

Returning to "Cuttings," we find that the poet is most conscious of the artifice at this final stage of composition. Aesthetic concerns—redundance, awkward rhythms, too many adjectives, irrelevant details—merge with Roethke's drive to present himself and his perceptions honestly and directly. Most of the first stanza, for example, is discarded because its specific flower names and references to transplanting detract from the focus of the poem and the experience. As we have seen from Roethke's early work on the transition in the third line of the published text, the gradual change from apparent lifelessness to the beginnings of growth is central to the poet's perception of the scene, and the irrelevant material in the first stanza of "Propagation House" blurs this perception. Other details which distort the experience include the exaggeration of the phrase "almost to bursting" in line 7, the redundance of "flexible" in the same line and the appositive at the end of line 9, and the rather fussy effect produced by the accumulation of adjectives ending in "y" in lines 8 and 9. The rhythms of "Propagation House," with its abundance of unstressed syllables, lengthy lines, and feminine line endings, feel cluttered and overly elaborate. Roethke's goal in revising the draft is to pare them down, making them "natural," as he puts it. In addition to removing these distorting, unnatural elements, Roethke tightens the structure of the poem to clarify the experience presented. The strong separation between the seemingly lifeless stems and the "slips coaxing up water" created by the stanza break in "Propagation House" is reduced in "Cuttings," in keeping with Roethke's sense of the change as part of a continuous natural process. In the final text the stanza break serves to emphasize the time between the drawing up of water and the first growth, reflecting the process more accurately. These revisions all show the "greater fidelity to his subject matter" Roethke develops in the third stage of composition.

The term "subject matter" should not be defined narrowly. In his letters to editors and friends in the mid-'40s, Roethke insisted that the greenhouse poems went "beyond mere description" of natural phenomena and suggested "at least two levels of experience." The level beneath that of greenhouse description includes Roethke's presentation of self in the sequence. "Cuttings," the shortest and least anthropomorphic of the greenhouse poems, presents something of a special case here: The second level is not brought out directly in the poem itself but rather through the interaction between "Cuttings" and the poem which follows it in the sequence and shares its title, "Cuttings (later)." While "Cuttings" has its origins in the poet's observation of a natural process, "Cuttings (later)"—even in its early stages—involves the relation between nature and the self. Here is the text as it appeared in The Lost Son and Other Poems:

     Cuttings (later)

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it,—
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

As we might expect from the subject and images—"sticks," water, and "sheath"—common to both poems, Roethke worked on "Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)" simultaneously. Both poems were primarily composed in 1944, although, like most of the greenhouse poems, they include details which appeared earlier in the undifferentiated greenhouse material of the notebooks. As I mentioned, the connection between nature and the self is at the core of "Cuttings (later)" from the beginning, but in bringing the piece to its final state Roethke makes the poem more specifically personal, moving from this rather rhetorical version of the concluding stanza—

Who could shun this hump and scratch,
The close sweat of growth,
Not quail to the same itch,
Not stir, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet?

to a stanza which anchors the link with nature firmly in the experience of "I," the poet himself, and expresses it not as a question but as an affirmative statement. While the connection between self and nature is clarified in the revisions of "Cuttings (later)," it is consciously excluded from "Cuttings." In one instance, Roethke uses details from the draft material of "Cuttings (later)" to revise the other poem from its "Propagation House" stage. The opening line of "Cuttings" appears among this draft material as "The best of me droops, in a drowse." In reworking this line, Roethke removes the personal pronoun from the material, keeping "Cuttings" focussed on nature, not the self. The fact that "Cuttings" concentrates on description without a perceiving "I" is no accident. As Jarold Ramsey notes [in "Roethke in the Greenhouse," Western Humanities Review, Winter, 1972], Roethke "suppresses all possible human implications" in "Cuttings" in order to establish an objective perspective. In doing this, the poet asserts that the connection between self and nature comes from close observation of greenhouse life and is not applied to the material from the beginning in a kind of arbitrary analogy. The "two levels" Roethke develops in the greenhouse poems are connected organically, as "looking"—even if not specifically directed toward the self—is intrinsically linked to an "extension of consciousness." In their position as the opening poems of the greenhouse sequence, "Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)" clearly announce the relation between natural processes and the development of self which is at the heart of the sequence and the volume as a whole.

In a statement made at Northwestern University in 1963 Roethke characterized the title poem of Open House as "a clumsy, innocent, desperate asseveration" and contrasted it to his subsequent work:

The spirit or soul—should we say the self, once perceived, becomes the soul?—this I was keeping "spare" in my desire for the essential. But the spirit need not be spare: it can grow gracefully and beautifully like a tendril, like a flower [Roethke's italics]. ["On 'Identity'," in On the Poet and His Craft]

In working toward this organic sense of self, Roethke went through basic changes in the way he wrote. In the late '30s and early '40s he began to rely more on memory and extensive "looking" at objects and experiences as a way of generating poetic material. Rhyme, meter, and even the awareness of artifice itself were downplayed as Roethke examined his past, attempting to re-create the process of perception in the act of writing. Dropping the support of formal verse, he worked toward rhythms which would "move as a mind moves" and a corresponding new sense of self: The artificial stance assumed in the early poems is replaced by a consciousness, open to experience, which grows in the process of writing and leads to an accurate expression of personal identity in the finished text. In a notebook kept as he was completing the greenhouse poems, Roethke wrote, "You must learn to walk before you can dance; you can't be a master of suggestion unless you are a master of description." The greenhouse poems are descriptive in the richest sense of the term. "Learning to walk" in these poems was, for Roethke, an essential prelude to the "dance" of more complex self-discovery in the "Lost Son" sequence.