ELEGY FOR JANE

ELEGY FOR JANE

 

Theodore Huebner  Roethke

He was born Theodore Huebner Roethke in Saginaw ,Michigan, the son of Otto Roethke and Helen Huebner , owners of a local greenhouse .As a student at Saginaw S  Arthur Hill high School .Roethke demonstrated early promise in a speech on the junior Red cross that was subsequently

Published in twenty -six languages .the poet’s adolescent years were jarred , however ,by the death of his father from cancer in 1923 , a loss that should powerfully  shape Roethke’s  psychic and creative lives .from  1925 Roethke distinguished himself at the University of Michigan at Ann ‘arbor , graduating magna cum laude .resisting family pressure to pursue a legal career, he quit law school after one semester and from 1929 to 1931, took graduate courses at the university of Michigan and later the Harvard graduate  school, where he worked closely with the poet Robert hillier.

The hard economic time of the great depression forced Roethke to leave Harvard and to take up a teaching career at Lafayette collage from  1931 to 1935. Here he met Rolfe  Humphries, who introduced him to Louise Bogan ; during these years Roethke also found a powerful supporter, colleague, and friend in the poet at Stanley kunitz. In the fall of 1935 Roethke assumed his second teaching post at Michigan state  collage at Lansing but was soon hospitalized for what would prove to be recurring bouts of mental illness. throughout his  subsequent career Roethke used these periodic incidents of depression for creative self-exploration. They allowed him, as he said, to “reach a new leave of reality.”

During the remainder of the decade Roethke enjoyed a growing reputation as a poet. He taught at Pennsylvania state university from 1936 to 1943, publishing in such  prestigious journals as poetry, he new republic, the Saturday review, and Sewanee review. He brought out his first volume of verse, open house, in 1941. Not insignificantly, the title piece of first book stand as an early figure for the confessional aesthetic of of Roethke’s later poetry. “my secret cry aloud,” her writes, describing his psyche, or “ heart,” as an “open house” with widely swung” doors.

Open house was an important beginning for Roethke as it was favorably reviewed in the new Yorker, the Saturday review, the Kenyon review, and the Atlantic. W. H. Auden called it “completely successful.” not surprisingly, this first work shows the influence of poetic models such as john Donne, William Blake, Leonie Adams , Louise Bogan , Emily Dickinson. Rolfe Humphries ,Stanley  Kunitz, and Elinor Wylie writers hose verse had shaped the poet’s early  imagination and style .Yet the book’s subjective focus on personal experience marked an important departure both from T.S. Eliot’s doctrine of poetic impersonality , articulated n “ Tradition and the Individual Talent .”(1917 ). And from what the New critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley later deplored as the intentional fallacy .

The year after Open House was published Roethke was, invited to deliver one of the prestigious Morris gray lectures at Harvard  University ,and n 1943  he left Penn State to teach at Bennington college, where he joined such luminaries as Leone Adams and Kenneth burke .Bennington challenged Roethke to develop as a teaching poet .HIs collaboration with pivotal , volume of Roethke ‘s career, The Lost son and Other Poems (1948) .n the book’s opening fourteen lyrics , the so -called “ greenhouse  poems ,” the metaphor of the open house passes n to the figure of the glasshouse as the dominant   symbol of the self’s interior existential world. Roethke described the glasshouse .n “ An American poet Introduces Himself and   His poems “ (BBC  broadcast ,30 July  19543 ) , as “ both heaven and hell … It was a universe , several worlds ,which ,3even s a child ,one worried about , and struggle d ot keep alive .”the poet’s close attention to the subhuman world of organic growth served as a  scenic counterpart to Roethke’s own imaginative  development ,and it staged  Roethke’s need s the “ lost son “ to work through his psychic  ambivalence toward the absent  patriarch Otto Roethke as well as the fathering “ great dead “  of the literary tradition .

The descent into the organic  life of things themselves dramatized the theme of regression that is explored in psychoanalytic  terms in the book’s title piece “ sometimes ,of course ,there is regression ,” Roethke said in “ an American Poet introduces Himself and HIs Poems .” “ I believe that the spiritual man must go back in order to go forward. “ the Lost son “ presented this regressive aesthetic in terms of both  descent into the subhuman life of nature and a return to repressed ,childhood scenes .Karl Malakoff was one of the first critics to interpret these so_ called “ developmental poems “ in terms of Roethke’s divided attitude toward his father Otto , depicted, for example ,in his widely anthologized work “My Papa’s Waltz . “ Apparently ,Roethke’s filial anxieties stemmed from the trauma of Otto’s death, which interrupted  the adolescent ‘s successful passage through oedipal rivalry .the five sections of “ The Lost son “ work through the poet’s conflicted attitude towards the dead patriarch and, by extension, what Roethke described as his “spiritual ancestors ‘ of the literary tradition . Indeed, in a telling Yale Review  essay,” How to write Like somebody Else “ compete with papa “. Roethke’s drive to master his precursors ,however ,led  him to forge significant literary innovations .

Building on modernist stream -of - consciousness narrative techniques , Roethke achieved an arresting poetic performance in an associative, and often surreal, verbal style ,one that depicted primal and psychic states of mind ,IN his next volume ,praise to the End !  (1951) ,Roethke’s regressive aesthetic  continued to explore further the  pre-rational experience of early childhood and sexual discoveries of adolescence ,the volume’s title ,as an allusion to words worth’s The prelude, signaled the work’s romantic celebration of the child’s unity of being gain the natural world .employing nonsense lyrics ,nursery rhymes ,synesthesia ,and natural personifications, works such as “ where Knock Is Open wide “ were written “ entirely from the viewpoint of a very small child “ - as Roethke observed  in “Open letter “ (1950) . Such unmediated encounters with nature and the unconscious in ,for example, “I Need ,I Need “ also characterize the poet’s initiation into erotic sexuality in “Give Way , Ye gates <” Sensibility ! ,” and “ O Lull Me , Lull Me .”

Praise to the end ! was composed after the poet’s move to the University of Washington where he not Only found talented protégés in Carolyn Keizer David  Wagoner, and James Wright (1927- 1980) but loyal colleagues such as Robert Heilman who , as department head, helped Roethke manage his recurring bouts of depression ,the  early 1950s augured Roethke growing stature with the award of a Guggenheim fellowship ( 1950) , Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize ( 1951 ) ,and major grants from the ford foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1952 , the following year Roethke married Beatrice O’ Connell ,whom he had met during his earlier  stint at Bennington .the two spent the following spring at W.H. Auden’s villa at Ischia ,off the coast of Italy. Where Roethke edited the galley proofs for the waking : Poems 1933-1953(1953) , a seminal volume that won the Pulitzer  the next year .Although thematically akin to Roethke’s work of the late 19401s , this volume’s title piece marked the pet’s return to formalist verse, composed as it is in the complex villanelle patter .the waking also included such major works in the Roethke cannon as “ Elegy for Jane “ and “four for Sir John Davies ,” which was modeled on Davies’s metaphysical poem “ Orchestra .”

Throughout  1955 and  1956 the Roethke’s traveled in Italy, Europe ,and England on a Fulbright grant. The following years he published a collection of work that included forty-three new poem entitled works for the wind (1957),which won the Bollingen prize, the national book award, the Edna St. Vincent Millay prize ,the Longview foundation award, and the pacific northwest writer’s award divided into five sections, the new poems included children’s verse, love  poetry (including his famous “I knew a woman”),poem on natural themes, and two long works entitled “dying man”, an elegiac work in the yeatsian mood, and “meditation of an old woman, “a verse commemoration of the poet’s mother. Now at the height of his popularity and fame, Roethke balanced his teaching career with reading tours in new york and Europe, underwritten by another ford foundation grant. While visiting with friends at Bainbridge island, Washington, Roethke suffered a fatal heart attack. During the last year of his life be had composed the sixty-one new poems that were published posthumously in the for field (1964)--which received the national book award --and in the collected poems (1966).

Roethke’s historical significance rests both on his established place in the American canon and on his influence over a subsequent generation of award  -winnings poets that includes Robert Bly , James Dickey , Carolyn Keizer ,Sylvia Plath ,Anne  sexton

, William Stafford, David Wagoner , and James Wright ,Although Roethke’s Last works have been criticized for their indebtedness to such high modernists as T.S Eliot ,Wallace Stevens and  W.B.Yeats  ,contemporary poets and critics have also emphasized  the expansive  vision  of self ,at one with American place, that Roethke  masterfully presented in the whitmanesque catalogs of “ North American Sequence .” there is no poetry anywhere ,” James  dickey wrote  in the Atlantic (Nov ,1968), “ that s so valuably conscious of the human body as Roethke’s ; no poetry that can place the body in an environment . “ Roethke’s  pioneering explorations of nature , regional setting depth psychology, and personal confessionalism - coupled with his stylistic innovations in open form poetics and his mastery of traditional ,fixed forms -have secured his reputation as one of the most distinguished and widely read American poets of the twentieth century .