Theodore Roethke (6 page)

Roethke, “Notebooks” (July
1933)

The beginning poet often has to accept the poetics of his master in order to gain his or her approval. From the letters quoted, it should be clear that Roethke needed approval rather desperately and went out of his way to get it. His early work fits neatly into the style of the period, the tightly rhymed and witty mode often called metaphysical. Roethke's best lyrics in this vein survive in
Open House
, which is the subject of chapter four. First, however, it is best to look at the poetics that Roethke adopted early in the thirties and never abandoned, a poetics of the kind M. H. Abrams in
The Mirror and the Lamp
calls “expressive,” a Romantic poetics.
¹
One doesn't normally think of Humphries, Bogan, and Kunitz as Romantic poets, of course, but as Eliot once said, in a Romantic age the best one can do is
tend toward
Classicism, which he did himself. By the time Roethke began writing poetry, the expressive poetics of Wordsworth and Coleridge had become almost a matter of course, the usual fate of once revolutionary ideas. Although the primary evidence of Roethke's Romantic poetics is in the poetry itself, the unpublished notebooks contain various ruminations about poetry which reinforce this evidence.

Roethke's poetics hark back to German Romantic theory and Coleridge, although his personal sources were Wordsworth and Emerson. Fundamental to this system is the concept of
poet as prophet. The poet becomes a priest of the imagination, a secular clergyman. But the cost of this special role is alienation from the mainstream of society; the seer appears to outsiders as a madman, the
poete maudit
of nineteenth-century French letters. The example of Whitman shows how swiftly this Romantic idea took hold in America, for Whitman was indeed at times a caricature of the prophetic bard. There is no doubt Roethke thought of himself as one of the “mad poets” and even embraced the idea. In the late poem “In a Dark Time” he rhetorically asks: “What's madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?” (
CP
, p. 239). Frank Kermode sums up the conditions of this vatic role for the poet: “He must be lonely, haunted, victimized, devoted to suffering rather than action—or, to state this in a manner more acceptable to the twentieth century, he is exempt from the normal human orientation towards action and so enabled to intuit those images which are truth, in defiance of the triumphant claims of merely intellectual disciplines.”
²

The true source of poetry for the Romantic poet is that divine energy celebrated by William Blake in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
:
“Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.” As Socrates told Ion, poets “compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.” Shelley echoed this notion in the
Defense of Poetry
with his assertion that poetry comes not by labor but by the compelling afflatus of genius, that spirit of creation whose visitations are “elevating and delightful beyond all expression.” Wordsworth did not go quite so far as either Plato or Shelley; still, he speaks of a strange, overwhelming joy at the source of the creative act in his famous Preface to
Lyrical Ballads
(1800). Not quite a seer, his ideal poet is nevertheless an exceptional man, “endowed with a more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness …pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him.”

Roethke's ideas about the origins of his own poetry and about poetry in general unfold in the notebooks in an unsystematic way. The bulk of his published criticism is small and consists mostly of occasional pieces gathered together after his death by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. Nevertheless, both sources suggest that Roethke was interested in the details of poetics, that he was conscious of the tradition he wrote in, and that he was aware of certain contradictions between Romantic theory and the facts of literary composition.

In short, writing poetry was plain hard work for Roethke—as, indeed, it had been for Shelley! A certain drudgery often attended his effort to compose verse. He wrote these jottings in the summer of 1945:
“Am I saying anything new when I say that poetry is difficult: heart-breakingly so? … A bleakness about poetry-writing: like getting to the factory at seven in the morning.”
³
Poets are unreliable sources for information about the way they write, but Roethke's daily journal entries appear more reliable than any of his public boastings. Long hours of meditation have always been a necessary prelude to the sudden clarity of vision which poets call “inspiration.” Roethke describes the process: “after long meditation, the mind opens up with a sudden burst, and all things appear in a clear light.”
⁴
The poet must give the impression of spontaneity, but he need not write spontaneously. It is clear from Roethke's rough drafts that he wrote quickly, especially in later years when he experimented with techniques of free association; nevertheless, his final version of each poem is hammered to perfection.

That Roethke was a conscious craftsman is obvious from the “Open Letter” he published in 1950. He writes that a poet,

This description of what a poet “must do” comes near to Wordsworth's formulation of emotion recollected in tranquility. Although Roethke could not in good conscience be called tranquil, the point remains: the poet must offer his meaning in the form of revelation. A poet's awareness of technique may very well contradict the notion of spontaneity (in Shelley's sense of the term). Nonetheless, a poet is no mere technician who gives his audience what often was thought but never so well expressed; he faces up to the mystery; he creates an actuality.

Romanticism has undergone endless permutations since its earliest
manifestations in Germany and France, England and America, but certain characteristic ideas about poetry persist to the present. A few of them seem fundamental to a Romantic poetics and occur in Roethke. The dangers of such an exercise are obvious enough, but it is worthwhile to have a clear grasp of Roethke's usually implicit poetics before looking at the poems in any detail.

Romantic poetics are, first of all, expressive. Poetry, according to A. W. Schlegel, is not imitation but self-expression (from
ex-pressus
and
ex-primere
). It is by definition autobiographical; the poet writes from his own experience, expressing something from deep inside him, making the unconscious conscious. Thus we find Roethke quoting Yeats's friend, the poet A. E., in his notebook: “The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.” We see him admonishing himself in another passage: “Make your poetry the reflection of your life.” And in another jotting he says: “The poet writes the history of his own body.” But his best formulation of this doctrine is: “Poetry is still the natural form of self-expression.”
⁵
The notion of autobiographical necessity accounts for the predominance of the lyric mode in poetry since Romanticism took hold early in the last century; the lyric was for this same reason the main vehicle of expression for Roethke.

Another Romantic notion, parallel to the first, is that poetry represents a form of emotional, rather than intellectual, expression. Critics after Wordsworth commonly held this belief, and by the time John Keble occupied the Chair of Poetry at Oxford (1832), the belief was generally accepted. Keble writes: “Poetry is the indirect expression in words, most appropriately, in metrical words, of some overpowering emotion, or ruling taste, or feeling, the direct indulgence whereof is somehow repressed.”
⁶
A twentieth-century version of this idea appears in the critical writings of I. A. Richards, who was Roethke's teacher at Harvard. Richards distinguishes between the “symbolic” or “scientific” use of words and the “emotive” use. The former is descriptive, mainly “for the support, the organization, and the communication of references.” The latter is used “to express or excite feelings and attitudes,” and this is where poetry enters, “the supreme form of emotive language.”
⁷
A life-long admirer of Richards, Roethke wrote in his unpublished teaching notes the following proposition: “Poetry—the emotional equivalent of thought.” He liked to think of himself as an intuitive, not an intellectual, poet, and while taking notes on Kierkegaard he made the following aside: “Why, damn it, do I insist on being a
thinker?
Why can't I just be a refiner of the medium, like Herrick, and let it go at that?” Another time he asked himself: “With good intuitive equipment, why think?” He believed that a poet should depend on the sureness of his
emotions as the ultimate guide: “I like to think a thing part way through and feel the rest of the way.” The distinction, raised by I. A. Richards, between emotive and scientific language, interested Roethke a great deal; he copied out this passage from an essay by Samuel Beckett in 1947:

One finds endless variations on this theme in Emerson, Whitman, Yeats, and other Romantic poets and critics, but the basic sentiment is Roethke's when he says: “Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys!” (
CP
, p. 92). Or in the beautiful villanelle, “The Waking”: “We think by feeling. What is there to know?” (
CP
, p. 108). For Roethke, poetry was the sensuous and concrete expression of emotion, a contrasting mode to the intellectual, abstract disciplines of science and philosophy. The difficult notion of “concreteness” plays a central role in Roethke's poetics. It recalls the immediate, hard reality sought after in his poems, a reality apprehended by the senses and transformed by the imagination. He says in his notebook: “It's the essence of poetic thought to be concrete.”
⁹

Another key premise for a Romantic poetics relates to diction. It was Hopkins who called poetry “the current language heightened,” and in doing so, reformulated Wordsworth's argument in the Preface that ornamental figures of speech and inflated, “poetical” diction have no place in poetry. The poet need not deviate from normal speech patterns, for the poetry occurs in the choice of subject, not the level of diction. The subject itself naturally leads the poet “to passions the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures.”
¹⁰
One finds the following remark in Roethke's teaching notes: “Plain words do the trick, yet there must be a sufficient heightening, an edge to the common speech, some stepping up of rhythm.” And again: “Stick to observation: Look at things. Study what seems to be commonplace and it ceases to be commonplace.”
¹¹
As a meditative poet, Roethke's method was to focus his attention wholly on the subject, allowing the natural variety of simple diction and normal speech rhythms to suffice. The poet, says Emerson, is a
namer:
“the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other.”
¹²
So poetry becomes what D. H. Lawrence calls “an act of attention,” a concentration of vision, not an inflated
language. Romantic poetry, Kermode argues, is therefore dependent upon the image, “the Image as a radiant truth out of space and time.” In keeping with the notion of poetry as emotive language, he emphasizes that image-making is not an intellectual act, except in so far as intellect is involved in that creative operation of the whole mind which is Imagination.”
¹³
Roethke's poems demonstrate the importance of this idea for contemporary poetry. His best work is a naming, in ordinary speech sufficiently heightened, of the thing to which he stands nearest. And, as he said in his teaching notes, “the Romantic image often attempted to
approximate
or suggest the quality of the thing itself.” He goes on to remark, á la Pound, that the image is not merely pictorial representation, rather it is “a unification of disparate ideas and emotions, a complex presented spatially in time.”
¹⁴

This leads us naturally to the mysterious Romantic concept of imagination, the faculty that resolves disparate ideas and emotions into the magical unity of an image. Because this unity depends on the concept of organic form, they will be discussed together. “The poet,” said Coleridge in a famous passage from the
Biographia Literaria
, “described in
ideal
perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were)
fuses
, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination. This power …reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.”
¹⁵
That art involves a “reconciliation of opposites” is central to Romantic theory; contrary elements must be passed through the crucible of imagination for the image to become a unifying agent. This image must not, however, be static. Emerson, who hymns the imagination in his essay “The Poet,” elaborates: “But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought.” He explains that “all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.”
¹⁶