Playing for keeps
ASHLEY BROWN
Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke edited by Ralph J. Mills Jr (Faber 60s) This well-edited selection of letters will be of considerable interest to admirers of the American poet. During his last years Theodore Roethke (1908-63) occasionally moved with ease in some parts of literary London, and in a sense he filled the place once occupied by his friend Dylan Thomas. He was taken up by Edith Sitwell and John Davenport and Stephen Spender; the BBC put him on live television (his italics) with Peter Ustinov and Professor Trevor-Roper. Eliot was slower to endorse him, but eventually he responded too. When Roethke arrived in Europe in 1953 he was about to publish his fourth volume of poems, and within a few years he was the most honoured poet of his generation. But his success did not (on the evidence of these letters) bring him the sort of assurance that he should have had by this time; he craved adulation. In his last letter he reports: 'New documentary movie (on me) supposed to be a smash—better-than any so far ...- Roethke at first glance appears to be another case of the self-destructive American genius cut off by premature death. But he was very shrewd about his talent, and the fact is that he wrote good poems almost steadily for thirty years. As he was well aware, he depended on his 'personal myth' more than most poets. His intellectual resources were almost wholly drawn from English and American poetry: no foreign languages, no obsession with history or society, not even a considered interest in another art. As a late romantic he was more closely bound to the English language than Wordsworth or Frost. But he loved and drew upon many kinds of poetry in the language: for instance the plain style of Sir John Davies, the epigrams of Blake. Mother Goose, Yeats's late ballads, and (reluctantly) Eliot's Four Quartets. When one considers the different resources of Davies. Blake. Yeats, and Eliot, one is astonished by the absence of 'ideas' in Roethke's poems. He once wrote: `Love and death, the two themes I seem to be preoccupied with. I find are exhausting : you can't fool around, or just be "witty." once you are playing for keeps'. This was written to Professor R Alert B. Heilman, the chairman of the Department of English at the University of Washington. Professor Heilman's part in Roethke's career is larger than these letters suggest. Tor this poet spent almost his entire adult life within the world of English Departments. at American universities. From 1931 on (when the letters begin) he taught at a succession of five universities, and it was in the Pacific Northwest that he had his greatest success as teacher during his last sixteen years. Roethke, as everyone who reads him knows, suffered at times from a serious manic- depressive condition. He had to take leaves of absence from his post at Seattle, and even- tually an irate legislator got wind of this fact and brought it to the attention of a university officer. Whereupon Professor Heilman defended Roethke in a splendid long letter that should be better known. (it is printed in The Glass House, a recent biography of Roethke by Allan Seager.) Few poets. indisposed or otherwise, could have bad such a champion in the modern university. which for better or worse is their chief source of patronage.
The only objection I have to this selection of letters is that it is wholly concerned with Roethke's career as poet, and all too often that means getting on in the world. He was a man of strong sentiments, and one would ex- pect to find letters to his parents or lovers or to the attractive former student whom he married in 1953; but almost nothing of this sort turns up. In Roethke's case we should see that the man who created was very close to the man who suffered. What we do get is a brisk running commentary on many of his contemporaries. and this in its own way is revealing
Roethke was the oldest of a brilliant generation that includes Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell. John Berryman, and Robert Lowell. They published their first books in the 1940s and they have a commanding presence in American poetry today. Roethke seems to have kept his distance from these potential rivals. His friends were somewhat older: Louise Bogan, Rolfe Humphries. and Stanley Kunitz, fine unspectacular poets who have never quite had their due, true craftsmen from whom he could learn much. He was also close to the critic Kenneth Burke. who twenty years ago wrote a famous essay on 'The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke'--in reference to a series of poems on a greenhouse owned by the poet's father. Burke was one of a series of father-figures who meant a great deal to Roethke. Indeed he seems to have con- sciously sought the role of son in many of his relationships, and long after he had reached middle age. (At the age of forty-one he brought out a volume called The Lost Son.) Perhaps this is why he could be so aggressive about, the poets of the preceding generations. At 'one point or another he made harshly critical remarks about Eliot. Pound. Stevens. Williams, Aiken, Wintek and Crane. (Tate and Auden fared rather better.) And yet. as though on a boyish dare, he finally challenged the greatest of his elders In a letter to Professor Mills in 1959: `I can take this god damned high style of W.B.Y. or this Whitmanesque meditative thing of T.S.E. and use it for other ends, use it as well or better. Sure, a tough assignment. But while Yeats' historical lyrics seem beyond me at the moment. I'm damned if I haven't outdone him in the more personal or love lyric'. It was this adolescent will to prove himself that 'drove him to his achieve- ment. The talent-yas there. and he knew how to deploy it. But without the powerful ego it would have remained (in the best sense of the term) academic and correct; as he said, he was 'playing for keeps'.
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