DANCE OF THE SENSES:
NATURAL VISION AND
PSYCHOTIC MYSTICISM IN
THEODORE ROETHKE’s POETRY

The keynote lecture of a conference celebrating the centenary of the birth of Theodore Roethke, held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on October 17, 2008. Funding for the conference was ­generously provided by the Department of English; Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies; College of Literature, Science and the Arts Development Office; and Office of the Vice President for ­Research.

Theodore Roethke, 1962

Photo by James O. Sneddon, University of Washington University of Michigan Alummni Association, Box #145, ROE Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan

The poetry of Theodore Roethke springs almost entirely from his early, formative experiences in the Saginaw Valley of central Michigan. Although he traveled in Europe and taught for many years amid beautiful landscapes, from Pennsylvania’s Delaware River Valley to the Green Mountains of southern Vermont to panoramic Puget Sound in Washington State, very little of what Roethke observed there found its way into his work until relatively late in his career. His finest poetry, which critics have called spiritual autobiography, was a journey of personal memory, a process of recovery of his vivid childhood impressions in Saginaw, to which both sides of his family had emigrated from Germany.

Roethke’s love of the Michigan landscape was profound. In a college essay that he wrote as an undergraduate in Ann Arbor, he declared: “I can sense the moods of nature almost instinctively. Ever since I could walk, I have spent as much time as I could in the open. A perception of nature—no matter how delicate, how subtle, how evanescent,—remains with me forever. I am influenced too much, perhaps, by natural objects. I seem bound by the very room I’m in. . . . When I get alone under an open sky where man isn’t too evident,—then I’m tremendously exalted and a thousand vivid ideas and sweet visions flood my consciousness.”[1]

Roethke described the Saginaw Valley as “very fertile flat country” that lies “at the northern edge of what is now the central industrial area of the United States.”[2] There had been extensive ancient habitation in the area by Native Americans, notably the Sauk and Chippewa tribes. The young Roethke had a shoebox full of arrowheads he had found along riverbanks. Once Saginaw became lumber country, emigrants began trickling in—Mainers from New England, French-Canadians, Irish, German, Italians, and Slavs. In East Prussia, Roethke’s grandfather had been head forester of the estate of Bismarck’s sister; his grandmother, a housekeeper, was in charge of the estate’s wine cellar. After a mysterious altercation with their employers, the couple left first for Berlin and then America while Roethke’s father was still a baby. In Saginaw, the Roethke family began as market gardeners selling produce and then expanded into flower-growing. The Roethke sons, including Theodore Roethke’s father, eventually owned one of the biggest wholesale flower companies in the region and country. There were twenty-five acres under cultivation, with a quarter of a million feet under glass. The Roethkes also owned an icehouse, a fenced game preserve, and a patch of virgin forest outside town.

Roethke said about the greenhouses, in reference to their appearance in his second book, The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948): “They were to me, I realize now, both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere German-Americans turned their love of order and their terrifying efficiency into something truly beautiful. It was a universe, several worlds, which, even as a child, one worried about, and struggled to keep alive.”[3] Similarly, in a notebook entry from the mid-1940s, Roethke asked himself, “What was the greenhouse? It was a jungle, and it was paradise; it was order and disorder.”[4]

Absorbing the dazzling sights and dank smells of the greenhouse, the young Roethke stored up a wealth of sensory impressions for his later work. Roethke’s father, who was Prussian to his bones, was an intimidating, godlike figure who nevertheless had an artistic streak: he experimented with breeds of roses and orchids, some of which he never sold. Roethke’s identification of the palatial greenhouse with his colossus-like father is evident in this striking passage from the notebooks: “I was born under a glass heel and have always lived there.”[5]

Roethke’s relationship to nature in Saginaw was therefore dual: there were the thick woods and teeming wetlands; the harsh winters, lush summers, and colorful autumns; but also the intricate world of horticulture—where nature is managed and subjected to the artificial forms and borderlines of civilization. Ultimately, the Roethke greenhouse, like the “stately pleasure-dome” of Coleridge’s Xanadu, is a symbol of art itself—the poem’s structure and transparency roofing a seething subject matter with its invisible roots. Roethke’s vision of nature is close to Walt Whitman’s—not in Whitman’s epic sweep but rather in his microscopic attention to and compassion for the tiniest twigs and pebbles of the American landscape. As a craftsman of highly condensed lyrics, Roethke cited among his primary inspirations the Elizabethan song poets and the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals. British High Romanticism from William Blake on was also a major influence. The critic John Wain observed, “The greenhouse occupies the same place in Roethke’s poetic evolution as the hills and dales of the Lake District do in Wordsworth’s.”[6]

Roethke’s expansive natural vision seemed perfectly suited to the back-to-nature idealism of the 1960s. I was introduced to Roethke’s work in college in the mid-1960s at the State University of New York at Binghamton. The poet Milton Kessler—the greatest teacher I ever had—had been a graduate student of Roethke’s at the University of Washington. My entire introduction to contemporary poetry was through Kessler’s intensely dramatic readings of Roethke, whose work had an enormous impact on me and marked me for life. Roethke represented a stunning departure from the genteel and sanitized poems that had been assigned to us in high school—such as those of Robert Frost, who may have influenced Roethke but whose work I resented for what I felt to be its pious platitudes.

What Kessler highlighted in Roethke was his sensory engagement with his material, above all his kinesthetic robustness, illustrated by his famous poem, “My Papa’s Waltz.” But in the famous greenhouse poems too, there is a sense of Roethke’s own powerful looming physical presence. Kessler talked about the unsettling disjunction between Roethke’s huge size and the fineness of his perception, as in “Elegy for Jane,” a strange and haunting poem where Roethke remembers a dead girl’s “neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils.” There is a charged sense of danger and trespass. Interestingly, Roethke as a child had been small and sickly but had shot up to his bulky six-foot, two-inch height the year before he left for college.

It is the tangled multiplicity of the senses, including rank smells, that differentiates Roethke from most other poets of his time or indeed ours. (His departure point may have been the Metaphysical poets’ constant theme of mortality and decay, which is also a pungent motif in Shakespeare’s late tragedies.) Through his assertive rhythms and his subliminal assault on the nerves, Roethke’s poetry achieves a seductive micro-muscular activation of the reader. Roethke certainly revolutionized my ideas about literature. My aesthetics had been formed by Oscar Wilde, that worshipper of beauty and high priest of the religion of art, whom I had discovered in high school via a British collection of his epigrams in a second-hand book store in Syracuse. Roethke was a revelation in adding the next term: the centrality of the senses in art. For art, I always argue, is not philosophy. Whatever ideas art may convey must be concretely embodied in material or sensory form. Hence the drift of high-profile poetry, post-Roethke, toward an abstruse philosophizing has, in my view, been both lamentable and self-destructive and has helped produce the present marginalization of contemporary poetry in the U.S.

Roethke compared teaching to dance: a class was a performance that, like dance, vanished “down the rathole” when it was over.[7] Judging from Milton Kessler’s testimony about Roethke’s flamboyant classroom style, there was definitely a kinesthetic dimension to his teaching. Roethke wrote, “Most teaching is visceral,” and in his notebooks he said, “The teaching of poetry requires fanaticism.”[8] In a letter to a cousin, he wrote about the teaching of literature, “The best teachers don’t teach it as a ‘subject’ at all (as body of information, as ‘culture’, etc.) instead as experience. . . . [I]t is a constant ­effort to recover the creative powers lost in childhood.” He felt that a teacher should use “every possible means to move students ahead intellectually and even at times, if you’ll pardon the word, spiritually.” It’s a method “that makes great use of the associational forces of the mind.”[9] Teaching, Roethke said in his notebooks, is “one of the few sacred relationships left in a crass secular world.”[10]

In a collection called Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, the poet Henry Carlile recalled that Bishop, a virtuoso poet who (at least when I saw her read when I was in graduate school) was publicly discreet and reserved, “deplored” the influence of her fellow teacher Roethke on students at the University of Washington. Carlile alludes to Roethke’s “spiritual bombast” and his “overwhelming, hyperbolic” style in the classroom: “His students worshiped him and imitated some of his worst mannerisms.”[11] From the long list of topics and quotations from poetry recorded by one of his students from a single class, one can appreciate the huge range of Roethke’s pedagogical method and the supple, associative play of his mind.[12]

Insofar as I adopted Milton Kessler’s own eclectic, associative, Roethke-shaped teaching style for the whole of my own career, I must, if it is not too presumptuous, number myself among Roethke’s spiritual grandchildren. My sense of connection with him was deepened by the fact that my first teaching job out of graduate school in the 1970s was at Bennington College, where Roethke taught in the mid-1940s. Shingle Cottage, which still housed a faculty poet when I was there, was hallowed ground because it was where Roethke had written his great greenhouse poems. (He had been encouraged in that project by the polymath critic, Kenneth Burke, who lived for half the week in a room upstairs.) I spent many convivial hours in that picturesque country house, where Roethke had, by his own testimony, danced in the nude at the height of ­inspiration!

So pivotal has Roethke always been to my understanding of modern poetry that I included three of his poems in Break, Blow, Burn, my book of commentaries on lyric poetry. The only other writers with three poems in that book are Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, and Emily Dickinson. Perhaps not coincidentally, all four of those poets were among Roethke’s claimed artistic ancestors. Imagine my unhappy surprise, therefore, when on my two national tours for that book—for the Pantheon hardback in 2005 and the Vintage paperback in 2006—I discovered that Roethke’s reputation was no longer as I had remembered it. There were two persistent questions or comments most often made to me by interviewers or patrons at bookstore signings. The first was, “Why isn’t Charles Bukowski in your book?” I doggedly replied that I had certainly intended to feature him very prominently to dramatize my protest against pretentious or middlebrow academic criticism. But to my distress, I could find no satisfactory complete Bukowski poem to endorse for the general reader.

The second most frequent comment, however, came as a complete shock. I was thanked for having featured Roethke in my book because, I was told again and again, he has slowly faded from attention and is no longer even well represented in poetry anthologies. Upon investigation, I was horrified to discover a dribbling out of scholarly books about Roethke over the past twenty years. For example, the massive Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia owns only two books of Roethke criticism published in the 1990s—one in 1991 and the other in 1999. There has been nothing in the last decade. Furthermore, virtually all of the books on Roethke, from the 1960s on, were published by small or regional university presses—from Louisiana, Missouri, and Indiana to Washington State—with none produced by the bicoastal elite universities. Of course this situation is appalling and unacceptable. An American literary criticism that neglects Theodore Roethke has sunk into irrelevance and folly.

After pained reflection, I have identified what I would propose are three primary reasons for Roethke’s apparent eclipse. First of all, the general politicization of literary criticism from the 1970s on may have eroded Roethke’s position. Social crises and political events—the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War—made little or no impact on Roethke’s poetry. Furthermore, it is hard to classify him according to the approved theoretical categories of class, race, and gender. There seems to be agreement even among sympathetic scholars (I am not one of them) that Roethke’s views of women are sentimental and retrograde. The hovering spirit woman of “The Visitant,” for example—one of my favorite poems in all of literature—belongs to the prefeminist period of archetype and myth, as explored by the poet Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1948) and by the Jungian analyst Erich Neumann in his magnum opus, The Great Mother (1955). The dethroning of the European tradition and the demythologization of criticism has also unfortunately led to the erasure of myth critics like Northrop Frye, whose magisterial Anatomy of Criticism (1957) was still considered a landmark when I entered graduate school in 1968 but which now seems to have been completely forgotten.

One of the striking characteristics of Roethke’s poetry is his portrait of nature as informed by magical presences, as in the German folk songs and fairy tales that he loved in childhood. Roethke attributes a primitive state of consciousness not just to slugs and insects but to fungi and mildew. Hence Roethke’s worldview resembles that of animism, the earliest stage in the history of world religions. The critic Lynn Ross-Bryant notes an intriguing parallel between Roethke and the Beat poet, Gary Snyder, who declared in his book, Myths and Texts: “As poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.”[13] Yes, Roethke, like Snyder, seeks ancient wisdom—whereas too many of today’s poets and critics are over-absorbed in the present and in the narrow ideological conflicts of post-Enlightenment politics.

It might certainly seem, with the global rise of the environmental movement since the 1960s, that a nature poet such as Roethke would be treasured. But environmentalist assumptions too have become politicized. In today’s debates, nature is projected as a victim of exploitation and despoliation, a hostage to unbridled capitalist greed. But until very late in his work, there is no sense whatever in Roethke that nature needs to be preserved or protected by man or that it can suffer serious or permanent harm. Yes, nature can be directed, tamed, pruned, and nurtured. (Roethke humorously spoke of his family’s constant fretting about fertilizer: “My father literally spent weeks scouring the valley contracting with farmers for cow-dung.”)[14] But ultimately for Roethke, nature’s generative forces are remote and unknowable. The human in Roethke’s worldview is simply a subset to nature.

When Wordsworth imagines his Lucy “Roll’d round . . . / With rocks, and stones, and trees,” the human unit has been dissolved and absorbed into a vast dynamic of pure energy. There is an exhilarating sense of the sublime, which is also felt in Shelley’s ode to the awesome peak of Mont Blanc. Roethke, in contrast, celebrates the small and particular; he shows a tender respect for the homely and specific that, I suspect, he may have learned from George Herbert and Emily Dickinson. Remarkable examples include such innovative compound phrases from Roethke’s poem “Cuttings” as “sand-crumb” or “intricate stem-fur.” Roethke’s focus on the infinitesimal is nearly scientific. When Whitman embraces chaff or debris, he is trying to banish conventional distinctions between gold and dross, good and evil, clean and dirty. Hovering behind Whitman’s epic, therefore, is a moral imperative, a critique of constricting definitions of gender and sexual orientation. But with Roethke, there is no social critique but rather a mystical search for the hidden power within natural forms.

The degree to which Roethke was directly influenced by mystical literature has been much debated by critics. However, Neal Bowers definitively established, through a study of Roethke’s notebooks as well as the record of his borrowings from the University of Washington library, that Roethke was very curious and knowledgeable about mysticism.[15] Evelyn Underhill’s classic 1911 book, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, struck a special chord with him, and he copied out her outline of the stages of the mystic’s spiritual journey.

But what is unique in Roethke is that he has integrated the standard mystic vision of ecstatic unity with the cosmos with a darker, mustier, more realistic organicism. Roethke values precisely what cannot be sublimated or transcended. His natural vision, drawing on his practical observation of botany in action in the family greenhouse, triggers a dance of the senses—that Dionysian delirium which the nature-loving Ralph Waldo Emerson called for but, paralyzed by his own good taste, could not join. Roethke spoke openly of his cultivation of “Dionysian frenzy”—notably in the strange circular dance in the woods that began his overwhelming mystic experience and first mental breakdown while he was teaching at Michigan State College in East Lansing in 1935.[16]

The second reason I would propose for Roethke’s present eclipse is related to the general loss in status of poetry criticism itself over the past three decades. From the 1950s through the 1960s, the professor-critics who specialized in poetry were at the top of the prestige ladder in English departments and in the humanities in general. Poststructuralism, which invaded U.S. universities via Johns Hopkins and Yale in the 1970s, changed all that. Poststructuralism, as I have long maintained, is helpless with poetry. It was designed for narrative forms like the short story and novel or nonfiction prose. Poetry, with its metaphors, symbolism, and body-
centered rhythms, is beyond postructuralism’s reach.

Furthermore, the writing style encouraged by poststructuralism—extended, labyrinthine sentences, doubled-back, self-interrogating syntax, and arch flourishes of irony (imitating in English the aggressively anti-rationalist French of Derrida and Lacan)—changed basic notions of language. This development, I submit, gradually marginalized poets like Roethke who employ suggestive sensory effects to contemplate real things in nature—whose very existence poststructuralism, trapped in its own slippery rhetoric, denies. Roethke’s syntax and vocabulary are based not on abstruse French precedents but on the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic substrate in English. This linguistic attraction or atavism reinforces the concreteness in Roethke’s worldview. As American higher education, from the 1970s on, toppled the canon of Dead White European Males, the Anglo-American core in English departments was supplanted or minimized—and along with it a consciousness of the ancient and medieval etymology of English words, a complex lineage that is wittily evoked in our poetry by such masters of the language as Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. Among Roethke’s outstanding attributes is the tactility with which he employs the brusque texture of monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon and Old High German words—the barnyard element in English, a vestige of the agrarian past. Hence appreciation of Roethke, who is not an ironist and who uses words not simply as ciphers on a page but as resistant, mouth-filling things-in-themselves, has been undermined by the collapse in will and mission of English departments ­nationwide.

The third reason I would offer for Roethke’s lack of attention in recent criticism is the shift in paradigms in psychology. Both Freud and Jung can be felt throughout Roethke’s poetry. Whether Roethke actually read Freud or Jung is not the point. It has been reliably established that he had read Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934), with its Jungian framework. And his use of Freudian psychobiography was very daring for poetry of the 1940s and directly influenced the new genre of Confessional poetry of the late 1950s and ’60s. But I submit that it was the highly unusual fusion of Freud with Jung in Roethke’s poetry that made his work so cutting edge and increased his power for my Baby Boom generation during the 1960s.

Another daring synthesis of Freud and Jung could be seen in the then highly controversial work of the leftist critic, Leslie Fiedler, beginning in the late 1940s and culminating in his 1960 opus, Love and Death in the American Novel. Freudian criticism remained under a cloud throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s, when the New Criticism was at its height and when psychological interpretations of literature were still considered crude and déclassé. A speculative integration of Freud with Jung can also be seen in Norman O. Brown’s transition from his Freudian Life against Death (1959) to his mystical Love’s Body (1966), with its disconnected sets of archetypal paradigms drawn from literature, religion, and philosophy.

In Roethke’s poetry, the standard Freudian family romance of an omniscient, judgmental father-god and a sainted, self-sacrificing mother, combined with gnawing guilt over unruly sexual impulses, is combined with a Jungian cataloguing of the mythic archetypes of heroic quest and elemental nature. However, this extraordinary aspect of Roethke’s work has slowly ceased to be visible because of ancillary cultural changes. In the early 1970s, just as psychoanalytic criticism and historiography seemed poised to receive academic recognition, French Freud was imported through the overwrought Jacques Lacan.

Simultaneously, in the real world, professional therapists were abandoning full-scale Freudian psychoanalysis, a protracted and expensive process that excavated childhood memories, and were moving toward more pragmatic protocols of psychological counseling, supplemented by medications. Over time, basic Freudian insights, including dream interpretation (a tremendous tool for interpreting symbolism in literature and art), have faded away. It’s hard even to recall how Freudian references once suffused general culture, from the comedy routines of Lenny Bruce or Elaine May and Mike Nichols to pithy bestsellers like Dr. Eric Berne’s Games People Play (1964), with its innovative transactional analysis. The Freudian style of lacerating or satirical self-examination is now gone amid a general trend, intensified by both poststructuralism and identity politics, toward blaming all psychological distress on oppressive external forces or conditions. Furthermore, Jung has been completely erased from academe, although his work continues to flourish off-campus in the New Age movement.

Hence the waning of both Freud and Jung has made Roethke’s exquisite psychological effects much more difficult for readers to grasp. But another factor is operative in Roethke’s psychological world. After his first hospitalization, Roethke was diagnosed as both a neurotic and a psychotic. It was his psychosis that was surely most fruitful for him as a poet. He liked to think of himself as the latest in a line of mad poets like Christopher Smart, John Clare, and William Blake. His was definitely not the madness of depressiveness and paralysis. Roethke mostly dwelled at the manic end of the schizophrenic spectrum, with its restless, roving energy and hallucinatory fantasy. Yet Roethke was not a true visionary like Blake, with his operatic private mythology of allegorical spiritual forces.

Roethke’s psychotic component can be detected in his hushed sense of continuity or identification with the subhuman environment, particularly in a poem like “Root Cellar,” with its uncanny riot of snaky shoots. It was once a well-known feature of schizophrenia that a patient would claim, “I am the wall”—an obliteration of the subject-object dichotomy that has been paralleled with peak moments of religious ecstasy, when saints feel a dissolution of the ego and an illumination of matter, transfigured by the Holy Spirit. Roethke said of the mystic episode preceding his first breakdown, “I knew how it felt to be a tree, a blade of grass, even a rabbit.”[17] In his notebooks he wrote, “I can project myself easier into a flower than a person.” And: “I change into vegetables. First, a squash, then a turnip. . . . I become a cabbage, ready for the cleaver, the close knives.” In another notebook entry, he wrote, “I wish I could photosynthesize.”[18] Roethke’s dissolution of human identity and his mapping of the humming energy field of matter made him instantly comprehensible to the 1960s psychedelic generation—something which has never been documented, to my knowledge, in the critical literature on him.

Roethke’s greenhouse poems replicate the quasi-religious way of seeing the world that so many members of my generation discovered through hallucinogens, some of them natural (like the mushrooms used in Mexican ritual) and some artificial, above all LSD, which at the time was being improbably touted as an agent of political transformation. Visions of physical and spiritual connectedness to plant and animal life were absolutely the norm during that period. Although I never took LSD (virtually everyone around me did), I identified strongly with the psychedelic worldview, which permeated Pop and Op Art, with their vibrating neon colors; movies like Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); and of course popular music. The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” are the most well-known psychedelic songs, but I would also mention the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” and early Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play.” Jimi Hendrix’s song, “Manic Depression,” would have special relevance to Roethke. This psychedelic perspective was projected onto the walls of concerts and dances through swirling, multicolored amoeboid gels—an ambient reference to a Roethke-like congruence between microcosm and macrocosm.

Roethke, however, could reach his psychedelic altered consciousness merely by walking through the countryside and retrieving his childhood memories. Hence we might more accurately call his method psychotic mysticism. And here is yet another reason why Roethke’s work seems to have temporarily receded. The young people of the ’60s most influenced by psychedelics and therefore psychotic vision did not go on to graduate school, so there was a drastic loss of that radical perspective in arts criticism. Many psychedelic voyagers were also damaged by overzealous experimentation with drugs and lost the ability to communicate their spiritual discoveries to society. In medicine, furthermore, with the arrival of lithium, which suppresses the manic extreme in bipolar disorder, psychosis has virtually disappeared from modern life, with the exception of street people who resist being rounded up by social workers and put on a fixed schedule of medication.

The neutralization and elimination of psychosis, combined with the widespread use of designer antidepressants among the urban professional class in the U.S., may have unexpectedly impoverished the cultural world and most of all harmed poetry, both in its appreciation and its production. We are now left in poetry with the even, flattened sound of adjusted neurosis rather than the hectic or inflamed rambunctiousness of psychosis. The vibrancy of Roethke’s psychotic mysticism, which is so wonderfully interwoven in his work with the English literary tradition, makes one ask, where have all the psychotic artists gone? I would suggest that they have abandoned poetry and have migrated into genres more amenable to ­hallucination—animation, video games, and science-fiction movies, with their spectacular computer-generated special ­effects. For example, the varied species of aliens and monsters in George Lucas’s six-part Star Wars series are worthy successors of William Blake. Poetry, alas, has lost its psychotics.

In conclusion, renewed study of Theodore Roethke is precisely the way to reform and redirect literary studies, which are presently in disarray amid the slow implosion of poststructuralism and postmodernism. With his unerring instinct for universal themes and his plain use of common imagery—dog, fish, crow, crab, water, earth—Roethke is one of the most accessible of poets. He does not need the tortuous mediation of mandarin scholars to interpret and explain him. As the product of a family dedicated to unceasing manual labor, Roethke is completely without elitism. As a working poet, he shows aspiring writers how to gather and shape materials near to hand and how to develop and refine a unique voice that still preserves the great conversation among successive generations of poets.

Much of American and British poetry from Roethke’s period has dated. But Roethke’s major poems, written more than a half century ago, still feel fresh and contemporary. Roethke’s refusal to be drawn into political topicality has ironically aided his longevity. With young people increasingly drawn to environmental issues, the time seems right for poetry to realign itself with nature and to recover the prophetic power it once had in the 1960s. Let us all agree that a path to that reawakening lies through Theodore Roethke, a giant of American imagination.

NOTES

1. Theodore Roethke, “Some Self-Analysis,” in On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (University of Washington Press: Seattle and London, 1965), 4.

2. Theodore Roethke, “An American Poet Introduces Himself and His Poems,” On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke, 7.

3. Roethke, “An American Poet Introduces Himself and His Poems,” 8–9.

4. Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke 1943-63, ed. David Wagoner (New York, 1974), 150.

5. Roethke, Straw for the Fire, 150.

6. John Wain, “The Monocle of My Sea-Faced Uncle,” in Theodore Roethke: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Arnold Stein (Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 1965), 61.

7. Quoted in Allan Seager, The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke (New York, University of Michigan Press: 1968), 139. “A class can be a dance,” Roethke also said in “A Word to the Instructor,” On the Poet and His Craft, 55.

8. Roethke, “The Teaching Poet,” On the Poet and His Craft, 51. Straw for the Fire, 231.

9. Quoted in Seager, The Glass House, 138–39. See also “poetry as experience” in “A Word to the Instructor,” On the Poet and His Craft, 52.

10. Roethke, Straw for the Fire, 231.

11. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, eds., Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press: 1994), 209.

12. Quoted in Seager, The Glass House, 180–84.

13. Quoted in Theodore Roethke: Poetry of the Earth, Poet of the Spirit (Port Washington, Kennikat Press: 1981), 19.

14. Quoted, in Seager, The Glass House, 13.

15. See “Roethke’s Mysticism,” in Neal Bowers, Theodore Roethke: The Journal from I to Otherwise (Columbia, MO, University of Missouri Press: 1982), 2–46.

16. Quoted from an unpublished transcript of interviews with Roethke for the film, In a Dark Time, in Bowers, 10.

17. Quoted in Seager, The Glass House, 101.

18. Roethke, Straw for the Fire, 93, 150.