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Overview
The author considers the sources of Roethke's poetry and the influence on him of a wide circle of poets including T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Whitman, Wordsworth, Smart, Donne, Sir John Davies, and Dante. In addition, she traces the changes in Roethke's response to his literary past as he moves from his early lyrics to his final sequences. His imitation of selected poets began as a conscious effort but later became a basic component of his imaginative faculties, encompassing an historical attitude and a psychological state.
Originally published in 1976.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691616919 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Essays in Literature , #1417 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 190 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke
By Jenijoy La Belle
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1976 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06312-6
CHAPTER 1
Conscious Imitation
"In any quest for identity today — or any day," wrote Roethke, "we run up inevitably against this problem: What to do with our ancestors? I mean it as an ambiguity: both the literal or blood, and the spiritual ancestors. Both, as we know, can overwhelm us. The devouring mother, the furious papa. And if we're trying to write, the Supreme Masters." This "problem" as defined by Roethke in 1963, the last year of his life, was exactly the one with which he was struggling thirty years earlier while writing the poems for his first volume, Open House (1941). He was desperately "trying to write," but he was frightened and awed by the presence of the great poets of the past:
Corruption reaps the young; you dread The menace of ancestral eyes; ...
("Feud," CP 4)
He figured the relationship between modern poets and past poets as an "ancient feud," and felt that he would not be able to create poetry until he had somehow vanquished his literary forefathers: "The spirit starves/Until the dead have been subdued." He had yet to learn how to transform past poets from enemies into allies.
Another of his earliest poems, "Sale," also involves what one inherits from the past. In both "Feud" and "Sale" Roethke conceives of the literary tradition as a "legacy" — "of pain" in the first poem, of property in the second. "The remaining heirs" in "Sale," however, are more vigorous than the "Darling[s] of an infected brood" in the earlier poem; and instead of "blubber [ing] in surprise," they attempt to rid themselves of their legacy by putting it up "For sale." Selling off tradition operates as a metaphor on several levels. It is a wry comment in an almost literal sense on what the poet does when he writes a poem about the past and sends it off to be published; more generally and less literally, it shows Roethke searching for methods by which the modern poet can make use of the past, and the particular way that he discovers in this poem is to dispose of it as if it were old furniture. The present house of poetry, to continue with Roethke's explicit metaphor, is cluttered with the furnishings of our literary ancestors. To prepare for his "open house," Roethke had to throw out the inessential fixtures — the antimacassars, Chippendale chairs, and hand-painted wallpaper. His wish for a "language strict and pure" in his title poem, combined with the sentiments in "Sale," suggest that he wanted to associate himself with a tradition that was likewise "strict and pure" — that he would select — in effect, create — his own tradition, discarding what was worthless, to provide himself with the proper milieu for the creation of his poetry.
Both Roethke's attitude towards the past and some of his images that embody this attitude are reminiscent of Chapter xii in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, also about an inheritance and the relation of the present generation to the preceding ones. Holgrave speaks "of the influence of the Past": '"Shall we never, never get rid of this Past!' cried he. ... 'It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. ... Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man's icy hand obstructs us!'" The image in "Sale" of "grandfather's sinister hovering hand" is expressive of the same heavy oppression of the present by the past suggested in Hawthorne's lines. But just as Holgrave's concept of the past alters in the course of the novel, Roethke's attitudes towards the past change in the course of his career: "I remember the late John Peale Bishop, that fine neglected poet, reading this ['Feud'] and saying, 'You're impassioned, but wrong. The dead can help us.' And he was right; but it took me some years to learn that."
Since Roethke wished to write in a "language strict and pure," "naked" and "spare," he had to exclude certain kinds of diction from his poetry. "I am trying to avoid the sentimental and literary diction of the Georgians or the earlier Floral Offerings of the nineteenth century," he wrote in a letter in 1945, "and write a natural sensuous poetry with some symbolical reference in the more complex pieces." His lyric "On the Road to Woodlawn" is closely connected with this passage. The poem is, on one level, about "sentimental and literary diction," an interpretation strengthened by Roethke's using in the verse exactly the same phrase as in the letter — "floral offerings." Two opposing attitudes towards this type of poetry are presented in the poem. One attitude is the same as that stated in the letter: sentimental poetry is dead, and, to use Hawthorne's words again, "needs to be decently buried." "On the Road to Woodlawn" is its funeral. The modern poet should not look to such flaccid verse for his own creations, but should exclude it from his tradition.
Running counter to the decision to inter this poetry, however, is Roethke's nostalgic attachment to it. His poem begins,
I miss the polished brass, the powerful black
horses,
The drivers creaking the seats of the baroque
hearses,
The high-piled floral offerings with sentimental
verses,
The carriages reeking with varnish and stale
perfume.
(CP 22)
Though the poet has to expel this kind of verse from his working tradition, he regrets its absence and realizes that there yet remains some life in it: "— And the eyes, still vivid, looking up from a sunken room." Indeed, the poem itself shows that a certain amount of vitality subsists; for in the act of consigning this body of poetry to the grave, Roethke used the very kinds of ornate images and Latinate constructions associated with it. The way he finally turned to account this stale sentimental verse was to write about it qua sentimental verse — just as in "Sale" and "The Auction," where the dead weight of tradition inhibiting his ability to write was made the subject of his poems and thereby became a provisional solution to the modern poet's abiding problems of what to write about and what to do with the past.
Following "Open House" are several poems about the inability to write. In "Death Piece," the mind is without movement:
Invention sleeps within a skull
No longer quick with light,
The hive that hummed in every cell
Is now sealed honey-tight.
His thought is tied, the curving prow
Of motion moored to rock;
And minutes burst upon a brow
Insentient to shock.
(CP 4)
Instead of the doors of creativity being "widely swung" as in "Open House," they are shut tight. "Interlude" also portrays the poet's failure to create — this time through the image of a dry storm, similar to T. S. Eliot's "dry sterile thunder without rain." The poet "waited for the first rain in the eaves," but
The rain stayed in its cloud; full
dark came near;
The wind lay motionless in the long
grass.
The veins within our hands betrayed
our fear.
What we had hoped for had not come
to pass.
(CP 6)
Just as weather vanes show the condition of the atmosphere, so the veins in the hands show the condition of the man. The storm, instead of producing rain, produces chaos, like the "rage" that produces only "witless agony" instead of poetry in "Open House." "The Adamant" continues to develop the theme of the inability to write. "The deed will speak the truth," Roethke declared optimistically in his title poem; but "The Adamant" demonstrates the difficulty of getting at that truth. "Truth never is undone" means not only that truth is invulnerable to attack, but also that it is impossible to reach and release. The poet, trying to get at the core of truth and break it into words, cannot reach it, even using all of the powers of the mind: "Thought does not crush to stone." The truth "lies sealed," just as poetic "invention" remains "sealed honey-tight" in "Death Piece."
"Mid-Country Blow," which follows "The Adamant," presents a way out of the inability to create:
All night and all day the wind roared
in the trees,
Until I could think there were waves
rolling high as my bedroom floor;
When I stood at the window, an elm
bough swept to my knees;
The blue spruce lashed like a surf
at the door.
The second dawn I would not have
believed:
The oak stood with each leaf stiff
as a bell.
When I looked at the altered scene,
my eye was undeceived,
But my ear still kept the sound of
the sea like a shell.
(CP 12)
Like Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper," this poem is concerned with the function of memory in the creation of poetry. The first stanza describes what was experienced — a storm reminding the speaker of a flood. The wind, which "lay motionless in the long grass" in "Interlude," now roars in the trees; the waves roll, and the spruce lashes like a surf. The entire experience is identified with movement and creativity. The second stanza describes the silent dawn and can be compared with those poems of rigidity and inactivity where the poet was aware of his inability to produce. But here Roethke's memory of personal experience transports him back to a time of motion and productivity.
The memory of the wind provides images of energy for "Mid-Country Blow," but the literary as well as the personal memory may stimulate and provide a model for poetic expression. A case in point is the brief and exquisite lyric "No Bird." C. W. Truesdale, in his article on "Theodore Roethke and the Landscape of American Poetry," writes that this poem, "as William Meredith suggests about many poems in Open House, might have been written by any gifted and astute imitator of classical English verse." Well, maybe. Except, and this is a most important exception, Roethke did not imitate classical English verse. In fact, he almost never modeled his poems after the general style of any literary period or tradition; instead, he imitated the distinctive practice of individual authors. Truesdale does go on to suggest a specific poet who he thinks may have influenced Roethke's lyric: " 'No Bird,' though a lovely and accomplished epitaph, is Roethke wearing for a moment the mask of Herrick." But Roethke tells us in his title poem "Myself is what I wear," and when he deliberately suggests the cadences and construction of another poet, he has a purpose in doing so. There would be no justification for referring to Herrick's style in "No Bird": there is, I would suggest, a significant reason for echoing the techniques of Emily Dickinson — Roethke wrote the poem as a tribute to the dead poetess. "No Bird" is Emily Dickinson's epitaph. She had once written, "I many times thought Peace had come/When Peace was far away." Hence Roethke begins his poem
Now here is peace for one who knew
The secret heart of sound.
The ear so delicate and true
Is pressed to noiseless ground.
(CP 17)
Roethke explicitly (though subtly) commends the musical tones of Dickinson's poetry, and he pays homage to it implicitly by adopting some of her characteristic practices. He borrows her diction and one of her most frequently used rhythm patterns, common meter (alternately eight and six syllables to the line), often rhyming abab. Roethke's indebtedness to Emily Dickinson is strikingly revealed by comparing the last stanza of "No Bird" with the last stanza of "On this long storm the Rainbow rose":
Slow swings the breeze above her head,
The grasses whitely stir;
But in this forest of the dead
No bird awakens her.
("No Bird")
The quiet nonchalance of death —
No Daybreak — can bestir —
The slow — Archangel's syllables
Must awaken her!
("On this long storm ...")
Moreover, the phrase "forest of the dead" in Roethke's poem is taken from Emily Dickinson's "Our journey had advanced":
Our pace took sudden awe —
Our feet — reluctant — led —
Before — were Cities — but Between —
The Forest of the Dead —
Since Emily Dickinson was writing about death in both "On this long storm the Rainbow rose" and "Our journey had advanced," it is apt that Roethke summoned up these poems when he composed her epitaph. Although no bird awakens the dead poetess, Roethke's imagination is "awakened" by her poems. Emily Dickinson herself would not have created a poem in this way. She once wrote in a letter to her "Preceptor," Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "I marked a line in One Verse — because I met it after I made it — and never consciously touch a paint, mixed by another person." Roethke borrowed an ample supply of "paint" from other poets and blended it with his own — until all of his poetry was colored and shaded by his reading. Sometimes, as he himself was well aware, a true poem was not created but was instead "reeking with varnish," like those carriages in "On the Road to Woodlawn"; however, he did not consider his method any less legitimate or creative than that employed by poets whom we often think of as more inventive. One could even define his method with a phrase from Emily Dickinson — "instinct picking up the Key Dropped by Memory."
It is not enough, then, just to place one of Roethke's poems in a tradition; we must find the particular author and even the particular work that the modern poet is responding to. Once the special context is discovered, our entire conception of "No Bird" is irrevocably altered. Indeed, we realize the poem's true subject. In Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the Poetry, Karl Malkoff states that another poem, "The Adamant," belongs "in the metaphysical tradition." Yes, in a vague sense, but again the definite context must be provided to move from Malkoff's loose stylistic label towards Roethke's real interests. Read aloud the following two stanzas from Emily Dickinson's "'Twas warm — at first — like Us —" and then "The Adamant":
The Forehead copied Stone —
The Fingers grew too cold
To ache — and like a Skater's Brook —
The busy eyes — congealed —....
And even when with Cords —
'Twas lowered, like a Weight —
It made no Signal, nor demurred,
But dropped like Adamant.
("'Twas warm ...")
Thought does not crush to stone.
The great sledge drops in vain.
Truth never is undone;
Its shafts remain.
The teeth of knitted gears
Turn slowly through the night,
But the true substance bears
The hammer's weight.
Compression cannot break
A center so congealed;
The tool can chip no flake:
The core lies sealed.
("The Adamant")
Roethke is writing a poem about truth. But seeing Emily Dickinson's powerful poem about death from which "The Adamant" descended alters our conception of the tone of his poem. The relationship in Roethke's poem between the speaker and "truth" is, as I have pointed out earlier, one associated with inactivity. Knowing the source underscores the stasis suggested by the poem.
The question here is whether or not Roethke is consciously following Emily Dickinson. In the case of "No Bird," where the poem is so clearly about the poet from whom he is borrowing, it is undoubtedly a process of which he is aware — that he, in fact, designs. With "The Adamant," however, as with so many of Roethke's poems, the relationship between the poet and his sources does not allow us to determine whether or not the course is conscious. Words and images were stored in what Roethke called his "elephantine memory," and when they took the form of his poem, he may not have been aware of where he first met them or indeed that he had met them anywhere before except in his own mind. Finally, for the reader, the classifications of "conscious" or "unconscious" are not the central issue: the point is that it happens, time after time. Roethke makes use of a tradition not just in some general sense, but through a unique borrowing of particular portions from other poems.
One of Roethke's early lyrics begins with the end of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Inversnaid." Hopkins' poem, describing a dark, turbulent stream and its surroundings, concludes with a question and an entreaty:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Roethke chose " 'Long Live the Weeds' " as the title for his poem in which he, like Hopkins, finds value in "the ugly of the universe." It is, writes Roethke, "The rough, the wicked, and the wild/That keep the spirit undefiled":
With these I match my little wit
And earn the right to stand or sit,
Hope, love, create, or drink and die:
These shape the creature that is I.
(CP 18)
Roethke must contend with harsh reality and with those earlier poets — in this instance, Hopkins — who wrote about it. Both personal and literary experience "shape the creature that is I." These two types of experience are grasped simultaneously by Roethke's "wit."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke by Jenijoy La Belle. Copyright © 1976 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Acknowledgments, pg. vii
- Contents, pg. xi
- Introduction, pg. 1
- I. Conscious Imitation, pg. 7
- II. Sympathetic Imitation, pg. 24
- III. A Widening Sensibility, pg. 51
- IV. Archetypes of Tradition, pg. 84
- V. A Motion Not His Own, pg. 104
- VI. Meditations, pg. 126
- VII. A Storm of Correspondences, pg. 141
- Afterword, pg. 165
- Index, pg. 169