Theodore Roethke Read Online Free PDF Page A

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:
    He remembered his youth, his childhood. But most of all, he remembered his childhood. Somehow this stood out more strongly than anything. There was something very fine in the suffering young boy. He had led a hideous life, but everything was natural there. His courage at the time was a fine, moral courage. Physically, he had been afraid of everything: of dogs, of thunder. Now he was afraid of the very idea of life. Sometimes he almost hated to be alive. 1
    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.
    Born in the heart of the Saginaw Valley in Michigan on 25 May 1908, Roethke witnessed the decline of American wilderness and the growth of a small but vigorous town. The lumber boom, which began in the 1840s, had lured immigrants to this remote area of the frontier from all over Europe. An immense flow of capital from the Eastern seaboard had brought Saginaw into prosperity; even as the forests dwindled, the business potential of the area attracted newcomers, such as the poet’s grandfather, Wilhelm Roethke, who came to Michigan from East Prussia in 1872 with his three sons: Emil, Charles, and Otto. In the old country Wilhelm had been the chief forester on the estate of Bismark’s sister, the Grafin von Arnim. But in the new world, he would work for no one but himself and established the market garden which evolved into the greenhouse of his grandson’s childhood. Otto Roethke eventually attained full control of the business, which he pursued with the same tenacity that his son lavished on his craft.
    Inevitably, Roethke’s intellectual and spiritual roots were deeply American. Recounting his interests and ambitions as an adolescent, he wrote:
    I really wanted, at fifteen and sixteen, to write the “chiselled” prose as it was called in those days. There were books at home and I went to the local libraries (and very good ones they were for such a small town); read Stevenson, Pater, Newman, Tomlinson, and those maundering English charm boys known as familiar essayists. I bought my own editions of Emerson, Thoreau, and, as God’s my witness, subscribed to the Dial when I was in the seventh grade. ( SP , p. 16)
    Apparently he was not encouraged by his father, who had no intellectual interests, but was by his mother, Helen Heubner Roethke: “[her] favorite reading was the Bible, Jane Austen, and Dostoyevsky” said her son ( SP , p. 58). But Allan Seager warns that this later recollection of Mrs. Roethke may well have no factual basis. 2
    As I have said, Roethke looked to Emerson as his first master: his personal copy of Nature , dog-eared and heavily underscored, has a comment scribbled inside the title page which hails Emerson as one of “the great optimists” who revealed “the possibilities of the human spirit.” It goes on: “One of the potencies of Emerson is that he appeals to your own initiative.” 3 This was crucial to the young man interested in the possibilities of the spirit; he learned that he could discover himself in the woods, the self which contains everything necessary for the full life. Roethke wrote at the end of Nature : “After all, nature exists only for man, who is to be the master.” Like Blake and the other Romantics, he affirms the belief that “without man, nature is barren.” For him, nature