Biography

Theodore Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan, where both his father and his grandfather maintained greenhouses. For young Roethke the greenhouses represented the beauty that can come out of the "terrifying efficiency" and order practiced by German Americans, and he noted how the barren Michigan landscape contrasted sharply with the greenhouses' lush, floral interiors, reminding him that desolation is never far away. In his first four books of poetry, Roethke situated himself as a child in the midst of nature, exploring the cultivator as god, fate, witch, and muse. His later poems show the poet releasing himself to delight in love's mysteries and pleasures. Roethke's volumes of poetry are The Lost Son (1948), Praise to the End! (1951), The Waking (1953), Words for the Wind (1958), and The Far Field (1964).

Explorations

Building on a tradition centered on Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, H. D., and William Carlos Williams, and experimenting with both free verse and classic prosody, Roethke and A. R. Ammons are often singled out as representing a new kind of nature poet. There are Transcendental and romantic themes in the work of both of these artists, but we also see them looking at details, and at change, in a manner suggestive of the modern scientific mind. For both of these poets, spiritual consolations have to be reconciled with the facts as they present themselves, small often-surprising facts that most American nature poets before Dickinson and Frost would not have welcomed in verse.

1. Discuss Ammons's Easter Morning (1981) and Roethke's The Lost Son (1948) as elegies. What do elegies usually do? In terms of theme and mood, where do they usually arrive? Do these poems follow those rules? If so, to what extent and where? What do they draw upon to find their way out of the predicament of grief?

2. Compare Roethke's two short Cuttings poems (1948) to the opening forty-five lines of Ammons's Corson's Inlet (1965). How does each poem deal with the problem of observing, and writing about, a natural world that is always in transition?

3. Compare the final stanza of Roethke's In a Dark Time (1964) to the closing three stanzas of Ammons's The Dwelling (1987). These poems both seem to deal with Frost's problem of "What to make of a diminished thing," but do they arrive at the same answer? Describe the differences, and then speculate on how these differences resonate in other poems by each author.

Other sites to consult:

• Ted Tapia's Roethke page. Includes a biography, a bibliography, and links between Roethke's life and poetry. One caveat: beware the floating menu bar.
• Academy of American Poets Roethke page. Includes a biography, a bibliography, selected poems, an audio file, and links to discussions of his contemporaries.
• Poems from the Planet Earth. A brief biography and bibliography, plus links to selected Roethke poems.
• "After Free Verse: The New Non-Linear Poetries". This intriguing essay by the respected scholar and critic Marjorie Perloff sheds important contextual light on Roethke's work.