History
Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan. His father, Otto Roethke, was a German immigrant, who owned a large local greenhouse. Much of Theodore's childhood was spent in this greenhouse, as reflected by the use of natural imagery in his poetry. The poet's adolescent years were jarred, however, by the death of his father from cancer in 1923, a loss that would powerfully shape Roethke's psychic and creative lives.
He attended the University of Michigan and Harvard University and became a professor of English. He taught at several universities, among them Lafayette College, Pennsylvania State University and Bennington College.
In 1940, he was expelled from his position at Lafayette and returned to Michigan. Just prior to his return, he had an affair with established poet and critic Louise Bogan, who later became one of his strongest early supporters.[1] While teaching at Michigan State College (now Michigan State University) in Lansing, he began to suffer from depression, which he used as a creative impetus for his poetry. Lastly, he taught at the University of Washington, leading to an association with the poets of the American Northwest.
In 1953, Roethke married Beatrice O'Connell, a former student. Roethke did not inform O'Connell of his repeated episodes of depression, yet she remained dedicated to Roethke and his work. She ensured the posthumous publication of his final volume of poetry, The Far Field.
Theodore Roethke suffered a heart attack in a friend's swimming pool in 1963 and died on Bainbridge Island, Washington, aged 55. The pool was later filled in and is now a zen rock garden, which can be viewed by the public at the Bloedel Reserve, a 150-acre (60 hectare) former private estate. There is no sign to indicate that the rock garden was the site of Roethke's death.
References to Roethke
In his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut includes an excerpt from Roethke's poem, The Waking. Vonnegut writes in the opening chapter, "I had two books with me, which I'd meant to read on the plane. One was Words for the Wind, by Theodore Roethke, and this is what I found in there: I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go". Since the narrator in the opening chapter is Vonnegut himself, the choice of this stanza from The Waking provides an impetus for Vonnegut's journey back to Dresden to confront his memories of the Dresden firebombing.
John le Carré mentions the same stanza from "The Waking" in his 1989 novel The Russia House, although curtailed to just the last line: "I learn by going where I have to go."
Stanley Kunitz recounts Roethke's exuberant recitation of his children's poem, The Cow, for Kunitz's daughter in the poem, Journal for My Daughter ([1]).
Martin Sheen, playing President Josiah Bartlet on the TV series The West Wing, quotes the last two lines from the Roethke poem "Infirmity": "How body from spirit slowly does unwind | Until we are pure spirit at the end." in the [[List of The West Wing episodes|episode Faith Based Initiative]].
Frank Herbert, a quote from Dar-es-Balat in one of the last chapters of Heretics of Dune as follows:
The world is for the living. Who are they?
We dared the dark to reach the white and warm.
She was the wind when the wind was in my way.
Alive at noon, I perished in her form.
Who rise from the flesh to spirit know the fall:
The word outleaps the world and light is all.
--Theodore Roethke, Historical Quotations: Dar-es-Balat
American poet Robert Lowell wrote a poem 'For Theodore Roethke', published in the collection 'Near the Ocean' in 1967.
Bibliography
Open House (1941)
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)
Praise to the End! (1951)
The Waking (1953)
Words for the Wind (1958)
I am! Says the Lamb (1961)
Party at the Zoo (1963) & n dash; written for children
The Far Field (1964) – published posthumously
On Poetry & Craft (1965) - a collection of prose
The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1966) - includes 16 previously uncollected poems but does not include Party at the Zoo
-------------------Quote Corner-------------------
"The self persists like a dying star,
In sleep, afraid."
"The whisky on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death;
Such waltzing was not easy."
"When I saw that clumsy crow
Flap from a wasted tree,
A shape in the mind rose up:"
"Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love."
"Nothing would give up life;
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath."
"Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,"
"Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
She slowed to sigh, in that long interval."
---------------------Poetry Corner-----------------
Night Journey
Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens on the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love.
Journey into the Interior
In the long journey out of the self,
There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places
Where the shale slides dangerously
And the back wheels hang almost over the edge
At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.
Better to hug close, wary of rubble and falling stones.
The arroyo cracking the road, the wind-bitten buttes, the canyons,
Creeks swollen in midsummer from the flash-flood roaring into the narrow valley.
Reeds beaten flat by wind and rain,
Grey from the long winter, burnt at the base in late summer.
-- Or the path narrowing,
Winding upward toward the stream with its sharp stones,
The upland of alder and birchtrees,
Through the swamp alive with quicksand,
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly.
The Storm
1
Against the stone breakwater,
Only an ominous lapping,
While the wind whines overhead,
Coming down from the mountain,
Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
the lamp pole.
Where have the people gone?
There is one light on the mountain.
2
Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
The waves not yet high, but even,
Coming closer and closer upon each other;
A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,
Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot,
The wind from the sea and the wind from the mountain contending,
Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upward into the darkness.
A time to go home!--
And a child's dirty shift billows upward out of an alley,
A cat runs from the wind as we do,
Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia,
Where the heavy door unlocks,
And our breath comes more easy--
Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.
3
We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress.
We wait; we listen.
The storm lulls off, then redoubles,
Bending the trees half-way down to the ground,
Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in the orchard,
Flattening the limber carnations.
A spider eases himself down from a swaying light-bulb,
Running over the coverlet, down under the iron bedstead.
Water roars into the cistern.
We lie closer on the gritty pillow,
Breathing heavily, hoping--
For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater,
The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell,
The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses,
And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.
May 25, 1908 – August 1, 1963, was a United States poet, who published several volumes of poetry characterized by its rhythm and natural imagery. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book, The Waking.
Quotes and Poetry by Roethke provided by Poemhunter.com
Quotes and Poetry by Roethke provided by Poemhunter.com
Adding your comment:
