Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1980 The Death Motif in the Love Poems of Theodore Roethke George Wendt Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Wendt, George, "The Death Motif in the Love Poems of Theodore Roethke" (1980). Dissertations. 2106. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2106 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1980 George Wendt THE DEATH MOTIF IN THE LOVE POEMS OF THEODORE ROETHKE by George Wendt A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 1980 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to my readers, Dr. William R. Hiebel, Dr. Anthony S. LaBranche and Dr. Joseph J. Wolff. Their criticism helped me improve my dissertation. I would also like to thank Mrs. Beatrice Roethke Lushington for the insights she shared with me. Last, I am most grateful to my wife Anne for more patience and support than any husband could ever deserve. ii VITA The author, George Frederick Wendt, is the son of William Henry Wendt, Jr.,and Virginia Hauf Wendt. He was born on October 3, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois. His elementary education was obtained at Saint Vincent Ferrer Grade School in River Forest, Illinois, and his secondary education at Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois, where he graduated in 1965. In June, 1969, he graduated from the University of Minnesota and received the degree of Bachelor of Arts with a major in English. In June, 1973, he was awarded the Master of Arts in English from Loyola University of Chicago, and in 1978 he was granted a University Fellowship. From 1969 to 1978, he taught English at Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois, serving as Department Chairman in his last four years there. Since January, 1979, he has held the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Communications at Illinois Benedictine College, Lisle, Illinois. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii LIFE . iii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION . 1 II. INCARNATION 28 III. TO FIND A BALANCE 56 IV. THE TWO EXTREMES . 80 v. FAR FROM LOVE 99 VI . LOVE FOUND AND LOST 133 VII. A GIRL TOO YOUNG YET OLD ENOUGH 158 VIII. A WOMAN YOUNG AND A MAN OLD 185 IX. A DANCE OF THREE MYTHS . 207 X. CONCLUSION . • • . 231 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 253 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION "Sex and death: the two things you must use and not abuse, my children."1 When Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) jotted this observation in his poetry notebooks, he could well have been consciously echoing two of his spiritual ancestors. Walt Whitman had exclaimed "What indeed is finally beautiful except death and love."2 And near the end of his life, Yeats had concluded, "I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood--sex and the dead."3 These themes fascinated and troubled Roethke. He once considered entitling his 1958 collection of poems not Words for the Wind but Poems of Love and Death. 4 Writing Robert 1straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke 1943-1963, ed. David Wagoner (New York: Doubleday, 1972), p. 191; hereafter referred to in the text as S.F. 2Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. Sculley Bradley (Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1949), p. 98. 3Frank Touhy, Yeats (New York: McMillan Publishing Co., 1976), p. 196. 4James Richard McLeod, Theodore Roethke: A Manuscript Checklist (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971), p. 28. 1 2 Heilman, Roethke disclosed how he struggled to compose these poems: "Love and death, the two themes I seem to be occupied with, I find are exhausting: you can't fool around, or just be 'witty,' once you are playing for keeps."5 Roethke arranged two sequences of love poems-­ one in Words for the Wind (1958) and one in The Far Field (published posthumously in 1964). This dissertation will study the death motif in these love poems. By way of an introduction, I would like to develop several topics: Roethke's place in literary history, how his love poems fit in the Roethke canon, and critical approaches to these love poems. Chronologically, Theodore Roethke can be grouped with those poets whose important work begins to appear just before the outbreak of World War II--Randall Jarrell, Richard Wilbur, Richard Eberhart, Karl Shapiro, Robert Lowell, John Frederick Nims. 6 These poets wrote in a period which followed two phases in twentieth century poetry. The first is marked by the great revolutionaries: Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. The second stage can be divided into 5selected Letters of Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), p. 208; hereafter referred to in the text as S.L. 6Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Theodore Roethke (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), p. 5. 3 those poets who developed the work of their forerunners and those who reacted against this legacy. Included in the former group are Auden, Spender and Day Lewis; included in the latter group are Dylan Thomas, George Barker and David Gascoyne. Roethke and his contemporaries, then, found themselves with the freedom to be as traditional or experimental as they chose. 7 Over the course of his career, Theodore Roethke chose a wide range of moods and styles, and--to a certain degree--the critical evaluation of his work often fluctuated radically in response to his changes in form. Attempts to place Roethke in literary history on the basis of his general stature as a poet range from James Dickey's pronouncement that Roethke is the greatest American poet toM. L. Rosenthal's derogatory comments about all but a handful of Roethke's short traditional lyrics. 8 This variety of critical assessment results, 7Ralph J. Mills, Jr., "Toward a Condition of Joy: Patterns in Poetry of Theodore Roethke," Northwestern University Tri-Quarterly Review I (Fall 1958), pp. 25-26. BJames Dickey writes "There is no poetry anywhere that is so valuably conscious of the human body as Roethke's; no poetry that can place the body in an environment--wind, seascape, greenhouse, forest, desert, mountainside, among animals or insects or stones-- so vividly and evocatively, waking unheard of exchanges between the place and human responsiveness at its most creative. He more than any other poet is the poet of pure being." "The Greatest American Poet," Atlantic, 222 (November 1968), pp. 53-58. On the negative side, M. L. Rosenthal castigates Roethke for too little social concern, 4 at least partly, from the variety of Roethke's styles. Some critics like Roethke's traditional short lyrics; some like his most experimental longer poems; some like his ability to change styles--his ability to grow. If they find any flaws at all, critics most often fault Roethke for two weaknesses: his derivativeness and his lack of range. Particularly in some of the lyrics written in the middle of his career, Roethke is charged with an excessive indebtedness to Yeats. According to some critics, poems like "Four for Sir John Davies," "The Dying Man" and the sixteen "Love Poems" of Words for the Wind, all were written in a voice almost indistinguishable from Yeats. 9 (In Chapter X I will discuss how well Roethke did or did not assimilate the Yeatsian influence.) The other for his cliches and derivativeness, and for his failure to get beyond adolescent hysteria. The New Poets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 112-118; "The Couch and Poetic Insight," Reporter, 32 (March 25, 1965), pp. 52-53. 9w. D. Snodgrass complains that "Roethke, who had invented the most raw and original voice of all our period, was now writing in the voice of another man, and that, perhaps, the most formal and elegant voice of the period." "That Anguish of Concreteness" in Theodore Roethke: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Arnold Stein (Seattle.:_ University of Washington Press, 1965), p. 82. And in "From the Middle and Senior Generations," American Scholar, 28 (Summer, 1959), pp. 384-385, John Berryman expresses his disappointment with Roethke's "literary" poems--those deriving from Yeats and Eliot-­ in Words for the Wind. 5 major flaw several critics cite is Roethke's excessive concern for the self to the neglect of almost all social concerns. Even granting that Roethke's self symbolizes a generic or universal self, these critics point out that the poet makes "so little reference direct or remote to the incredible experiences of the age."10 (This issue of the poet's range I will analyze and evaluate in Chapter IX.) Despite what some critics call Roethke's weaknesses, the general critical opinion seems to afford Roethke a place as a major American poet. He has received most--if not all--of the major awards a contemporary poet can earn including a Pulitzer Prize (1954), a Bollingen Prize (1958) and two National Book Awards (1958, 1964). Two book-length bibliographies attest to the critical attention Roethke has received. 11 ~oreover, a book-length study of his influence on other contemporary poets (notably, James Wright, Robert Bly, James Dickey, Sylvia Plath, and Ted 10M.