Theodore Roethke (3 page)

It was Matthew Arnold who called Emerson the friend and the aider of anyone who would live in the spirit, and Roethke is the latest major American poet to benefit from this help.

Emerson adapted from Coleridge the idea that the “ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque.”
²¹
Poetic vision, then, becomes the coincidental alignment of one's personal axis with that of nature's. It is seeing into the heart of things. This liberates the poet from his dependence on culture, for the source of real knowledge is within him already. In this ideal state of transparency, the inner and outer realms come together. Everything in nature remains itself, a separate thing, but a luminous symbol as well, an analogue to the interior paradise. Roethke took over Emerson's so-called doctrine of correspondences entirely, in one late poem announcing his experience of “A steady storm of correspondences!” (
CP
, p. 239). According to this doctrine, every landscape becomes, in effect, a moralized landscape. Because the ruin is in his own eye, the poet reads into
nature his spiritual condition, or better, he discovers the appropriate symbol in nature, whether it suggests joy or desolation.

Roethke liked to count himself “one of the happy poets” though his poems often move through purgatorial stages, sometimes willfully, as he acknowledges in “The Long Waters”:

This desire for the peaks and ravines is typically Romantic; as in Wordsworth, Roethke's periods of disintegration were a necessary part of the soul's progress from paradise lost to paradise restored. This involves a play of polarities such as one finds in Blake, Wordsworth, and Whitman, not a systematic dialectic of any kind, but as a critic has said of Wordsworth: “[one finds in him] a very strong habit of thinking in terms of paired opposites or contrarieties. Everywhere in nature, in individual man and in society, [he] saw a constant interplay of opposing forces.”
²²
It is the image of the journey that controls this dialectic of opposites in
The Prelude
, which Abrams calls “Wordsworth's account of unity achieved, lost and regained.”
²³
Like Dante's traveler who found himself lost, but to wonderful advantage in the end, Wordsworth undertook his fearful journey aided by the spirit of Coleridge, to whom the entire poem is addressed, and a number of guides who are analogous to Dante's Virgil or Beatrice:

Roethke called on similar spiritual aid in “The Abyss”:

In this moment of spiritual crisis, he demands a native guide, but one thoroughly apprised of the Romantic contrarieties: “I am not the poet of goodness only,” said Whitman in
Song of Myself
“I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.”
²⁵
“The Lost Son” poem itself describes the loss and partial restoration of unity, and the sequence of poems that follows traces the regressive journey of the poet-protagonist from adolescence back to the womb, into the perfect state of bliss that precedes the fall into creation. After
The Waking
(1953) Roethke begins “the long journey out of the self” (
CP
, p. 193) which takes him through the antithetical quest of his Yeatsean period into the Whitmanesque last poems of
The Far Field
. The details of this journey, archetypal in poetry, are the subject of this study.

In
Natural Supernaturalism
(a phrase adapted from Carlyle) Abrams reflects: “Life is the premise and paradigm for what is most innovative and distinctive in Romantic thinkers. Hence their vitalism: the celebration of that which lives, moves, and evolves by an internal energy, over whatever is lifeless, inert, and unchanging.”
²⁶
Roethke, like no other poet since Whitman, made the subject of his poetry the celebration of everything that moves with organic life, including the self in its dynamic interplay with the natural world. Nothing that lives can be less than amazing, as Whitman declared:

Throughout
Song of Myself the
single leaf of grass is taken for the symbol of organic life, that which is most amazing in all creation: “A child said
What is the grass?
fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.”
²⁷
He does not know exactly, but he thinks of it as the type of everything that flourishes and dies. This is the great Romantic metaphor and the source of that final optimism we attach to Blake, Wordsworth, Emerson, Whitman, and Roethke.

Whitman's acceptance of reality, his celebration of each separate fact, whether good or evil, coincides with his master's; Emerson wrote in his last chapter of
Nature
:
“To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman, and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none of these things is superficial, but that each phenomenon hath its roots in the faculties and affections of the mind.”
²⁸
Because the ruin or blank in nature is in our own eye, we must re-establish our line of vision, our axis of real sight, with the natural world. It is a question of aligning the essentially identical structures of subjective and objective realms (mind and nature). Mcintosh points to a passage in Schelling behind this:

The fear behind this, of course, is the loss of contact with anything outside the individual mind, solipsistic withdrawal and detachment. So one must actively seek to contact nature; according to Emerson, to realize the correspondences; to make the natural world an extension of one's body; to connect the private self with the infinitely greater self which is transcendent.

This was Roethke's effort from his middle years to the end of his life:

This epiphany, summarized by the last two images—the rower in equipoise, gliding, and the transient flower in its vase, filled to brimming—is directly in the Emersonian line of vision. Contact with nature has been established, and the poet has found his identity
in relation to
nature, not outside of it.

Once the self gathers enough stability to engage nature in vital conflict, the transcendental journey out of the self begins. Roethke accomplished this selfhood in the
Praise to the End!
poems and the wonderful love elegies of his middle period (“Words for the Wind” and “Four for Sir John Davies” especially). His last volume comprises that “long journey out of the self,” for in this book,
The Far Field
, Roethke's transcendental glimmerings find ultimate expression:

Here he continues the Emersonian program taken up in various ways by poets like Jones Very, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, and Hart Crane. (Even Stevens and Eliot were fevered with self-transcendence in their own, highly original ways.) Roethke, who was able to assimilate the most divergent influences, must finally be seen as the central American Romantic poet of the generation that includes Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Karl Shapiro, Richard Eberhart, and John Crowe Ransom. He is the celebrant of a uniquely American nature, a Romantic descended from Blake, Wordsworth, and Yeats, but one whose language is idiomatically American and whose meaning derives from the Emersonian tradition.

More so than many of his contemporaries, Roethke's poetry seems divided into periods marked by radical changes of style; but there are no real shifts of intention. Roethke's original symbol cluster remains the
same. The few themes he took for his own at the beginning are never deserted, though they undergo constant revision or elaboration. The dream world Roethke imaged has a unity that reveals itself gradually as the work unfolds in time, centered on an autobiographical myth reflecting a deep Romantic bias. If we judge Roethke harshly, we must judge the tradition of Emersonian Romanticism in the same terms. Indeed, any argument for Roethke's greatness impels us to see him whole
and
in the context of this visionary line that, far from exhausting itself, continues as the lifeblood of contemporary poetry in America.

CHAPTER TWO THE POET AS APPRENTICE

I am that final thing
,

A man learning to sing
.

Roethke, “The Dying Man”

In a late essay, Roethke referred to his own poetic apprenticeship:

The fact is, few poets of Roethke's stature have been so open-minded about criticism, so willing to play the role of apprentice, so indefatigable in the quest for mastery over the details of their craft. To the end of his life he sought out those whose advice might prove useful; this was one aspect of his greatness. It is also true that Roethke had a long way to go before he could write as well as he ultimately did.

Roethke first began writing seriously as a graduate student at Harvard in 1930, and from the beginning his poems could be called autobiographical, although his treatment of this material was indirect, tentative, even self-deceived. One extract from his earliest existing notebook points to the problem:

Characteristically, he always speaks of himself in the third person when referring to something close to the bone, like his childhood. And the earliest poems cast nervous glances at the matters that really concerned him—the relations with his father, his struggle for ego—but there is no confrontation. It is one thing for a poet to recollect the past—this is easy; but the
re-creation
of the past which occurs in the mature poetry meant reliving the experience, and this could not have been easy.