Theodore Roethke Read Online Free PDF

becomes “a steady storm of correspondences” in which the world of the spirit unfolds, with “all shapes blazing unnatural light” ( CP , p. 239).
    A few years before his death, Roethke wrote to Ralph J. Mills, Jr., that “ early , when it really matters, I read, and really read, Emerson (mostly prose), Thoreau, Whitman, Blake and Wordsworth.” 4 From these poets the young student derived his notions of what poetry was all about; but he did very little writing of his own until he entered the University of Michigan in 1925, and then his work was mostly prose. The college essays that have survived from this period in his life show that he already had a sensible, modest approach to the craft: “I write only about people and things that I know thoroughly. Perhaps I have become a mere reporter, not a writer. Yet I feel that this is all my present abilities permit. I will open my eyes in my youth and store this raw, living material. Age may bring the fire that moulds experience into artistry.” He tells of his feelings toward nature with a wonderful innocence, trying (unsuccessfully) to sound unaffected:
    I have a genuine love of nature. It is not the least bit affected, but an integral and powerful part of my life. I know that Cooper is a fraud—that he doesn’t give a true sense of the sublimity of American scenery. I know that Muir and Thoreau and Burroughs speak the truth.
    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, subtle, how evanescent,—remains with me forever. ( SP , p. 4)
    His prose style, reminiscent of Emerson, is remarkably clear and forceful, and his predictions for himself stand up well under the harsh scrutiny of hindsight.
    The atmosphere in Ann Arbor in the mid-twenties was too provincial for Roethke, who wanted to break into the larger world of letters. So, after an abortive semester at Michigan Law School, followed by a semester of graduate studies in the English department there, he left his native state for Harvard, ostensibly to study with the critic I. A. Richards. He entered Harvard Graduate School in 1930 with hopes of gaining a Ph.D., but the depression squashed this plan and Roethke was forced to place himself in the precarious job market. He found a teaching position at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and finally had the chance to get his poetic apprenticeship under way.
    Rolfe Humphries (1894–1969), a poet and translator of Latin verse, lived not very far away in Belvidere, New Jersey. He was Roethke’s senior by fourteen years and already a solid figure in the literary establishment; more important, he was a craftsman of the first order (as his translations of Ovid, Lucretius, and Virgil demonstrate). Allan Seager writes: “Humphries was the first poet of ability with whom Ted could have a continuing association.” 5 Roethke’s own later testimony to his first mentor’s helpfulness appears in his essay “Verse in Rehearsal,” where he quotes from one of Humphries’s letters offering detailed critical commentary on an early draft of the poem “Genesis,” which eventually was published in Open House :
    This elemental force
    Was wrested from the sun;
    A river’s leaping source
    Is locked in narrow bone.
    The love is lusty mirth
    That shakes eternal sky,
    The agony of birth.
    The fiercest will to die.
    The fever-heat of mind
    Within prehensile brute;
    A seed that swells the rind
    Of strange, impalpable fruit.
    This faith surviving shock,
    This smouldering desire,
    Will split its way through
    rock Like subterranean fire.
    Humphries’s comments are restrained yet exacting. He forces Roethke to weigh every word carefully and to control his tone and argument with precision:
    It is certainly in the historical and traditional manner but you can make more use of the