Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  The degree to which Roethke was directly influenced by mystical literature has been much debated by critics. However, Neal Bowers definitively established, through a study of Roethke’s notebooks as well as the record of his borrowings from the University of Washington library, that Roethke was very curious and knowledgeable about mysticism.15 Evelyn Underhill’s classic 1911 book, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, struck a special chord with him, and he copied out her outline of the stages of the mystic’s spiritual journey.

  But what is unique in Roethke is that he has integrated the standard mystic vision of ecstatic unity with the cosmos with a darker, mustier, more realistic organicism. Roethke values precisely what cannot be sublimized or transcended. His natural vision, drawing on his practical observation of botany in action in the family greenhouse, triggers a dance of the senses—that Dionysian delirium which the nature-loving Ralph Waldo Emerson called for but, paralyzed by his own good taste, could not join. Roethke spoke openly of his cultivation of “Dionysian frenzy”—notably in the strange circular dance in the woods that began his overwhelming mystic experience and first mental breakdown while he was teaching at Michigan State College in East Lansing in 1935.16

  The second reason I would propose for Roethke’s present eclipse is related to the general loss in status of poetry criticism itself over the past three decades. From the 1950s through the 1960s, the professor-critics who specialized in poetry were at the top of the prestige ladder in English departments and in the humanities in general. Post-structuralism, which invaded U.S. universities via Johns Hopkins and Yale in the 1970s, changed all that. Post-structuralism, as I have long maintained, is helpless with poetry. It was designed for narrative forms like the short story and novel or nonfiction prose. Poetry, with its metaphors, symbolism, and body-centered rhythms, is beyond post-structuralism’s reach.

  Furthermore, the writing style encouraged by post-structuralism—extended, labyrinthine sentences, doubled-back, self-interrogating syntax, and arch flourishes of irony (imitating in English the aggressively anti-rationalist French of Derrida and Lacan)—changed basic notions of language. This development, I submit, gradually marginalized poets like Roethke who employ suggestive sensory effects to contemplate real things in nature—whose very existence post-structuralism, trapped in its own slippery rhetoric, denies. Roethke’s syntax and vocabulary are based not on abstruse French precedents but on the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic substrate in English. This linguistic attraction or atavism reinforces the concreteness in Roethke’s world-view. As American higher education, from the 1970s on, toppled the canon of Dead White European Males, the Anglo-American core in English departments was supplanted or minimized—and along with it a consciousness of the ancient and medieval etymology of English words, a complex lineage that is wittily evoked in our poetry by such masters of the language as Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. Among Roethke’s outstanding attributes is the tactility with which he employs the brusque texture of monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon and Old High German words—the barnyard element in English, a vestige of the agrarian past. Hence appreciation of Roethke, who is not an ironist and who uses words not simply as ciphers on a page but as resistant, mouth-filling things-in-themselves, has been undermined by the collapse in will and mission of English departments nationwide.

  The third reason I would offer for Roethke’s lack of attention in recent criticism is the shift in paradigms in psychology. Both Freud and Jung can be felt throughout Roethke’s poetry. Whether Roethke actually read Freud or Jung is not the point. It has been reliably established that he had read Maude Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934), with its Jungian framework. And his use of Freudian psychobiography was very daring for poetry of the 1940s and directly influenced the new genre of Confessional poetry of the late 1950s and ’60s. But I submit that it was the highly unusual fusion of Freud with Jung in Roethke’s poetry that made his work so cutting-edge and increased his power for my baby-boom generation during the 1960s.

  Another daring synthesis of Freud and Jung could be seen in the then highly controversial work of the leftist critic, Leslie Fiedler, beginning in the late 1940s and culminating in his 1960 opus, Love and Death in the American Novel. Freudian criticism remained under a cloud throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s, when the New Criticism was at its height and when psychological interpretations of literature were still considered crude and déclassé. A speculative integration of Freud with Jung can also be seen in Norman O. Brown’s transition from his Freudian Life Against Death (1959) to his mystical Love’s Body (1966), with its disconnected sets of archetypal paradigms drawn from literature, religion, and philosophy.

  In Roethke’s poetry, the standard Freudian family romance of an omniscient, judgmental father-god and a sainted, self-sacrificing mother, combined with gnawing guilt over unruly sexual impulses, is combined with a Jungian cataloguing of the mythic archetypes of heroic quest and elemental nature. However, this extraordinary aspect of Roethke’s work has slowly ceased to be visible because of ancillary cultural changes. In the early 1970s, just as psychoanalytic criticism and historiography seemed poised to receive academic recognition, French Freud was imported through the overwrought Jacques Lacan.

  Simultaneously, in the real world, professional therapists were abandoning full-scale Freudian psychoanalysis, a protracted and expensive process that excavated childhood memories, and were moving toward more pragmatic protocols of psychological counseling, supplemented by medications. Over time, basic Freudian insights, including dream interpretation (a tremendous tool for interpreting symbolism in literature and art), have faded away. It’s hard even to recall how Freudian references once suffused general culture, from the comedy routines of Lenny Bruce or Elaine May and Mike Nichols to pithy bestsellers like Dr. Eric Berne’s Games People Play (1964), with its innovative transactional analysis. The Freudian style of lacerating or satirical self-examination is now gone amid a general trend, intensified by both post-structuralism and identity politics, toward blaming all psychological distress on oppressive external forces or conditions. Furthermore, Jung has been completely erased from academe, although his work continues to flourish off-campus in the New Age movement.

  Hence the waning of both Freud and Jung has made Roethke’s exquisite psychological effects much more difficult for readers to grasp. But another factor is operative in Roethke’s psychological world. After his first hospitalization, Roethke was diagnosed as both a neurotic and a psychotic. It was his psychosis that was surely most fruitful for him as a poet. He liked to think of himself as the latest in a line of mad poets like Christopher Smart, John Clare, and William Blake. His was definitely not the madness of depressiveness and paralysis. Roethke mostly dwelled at the manic end of the schizophrenic spectrum, with its restless, roving energy and hallucinatory fantasy. Yet Roethke was not a true visionary like Blake, with his operatic private mythology of allegorical spiritual forces.

  Roethke’s psychotic component can be detected in his hushed sense of continuity or identification with the subhuman environment, particularly in a poem like “Root Cellar,” with its uncanny riot of snaky shoots. It was once a well-known feature of schizophrenia that a patient would claim, “I am the wall”—an obliteration of the subject-object dichotomy that has been paralleled with peak moments of religious ecstasy, when saints feel a dissolution of the ego and an illumination of matter, transfigured by the Holy Spirit. Roethke said of the mystic episode preceding his first breakdown, “I knew how it felt to be a tree, a blade of grass, even a rabbit.”17 In his notebooks he wrote, “I can project myself easier into a flower than a person.” And: “I change into vegetables. First, a squash, then a turnip….I become a cabbage, ready for the cleaver, the close knives.” In another notebook entry, he wrote, “I wish I could photosynthesize.”18 Roethke’s dissolution of human identity and his mapping of the humming energy-field of matter made him instantly compreh
ensible to the 1960s psychedelic generation—something which has never been documented, to my knowledge, in the critical literature on him.

  Roethke’s greenhouse poems replicate the quasi-religious way of seeing the world that so many members of my generation discovered through hallucinogens, some of them natural (like the mushrooms used in Mexican ritual) and some artificial, above all LSD, which at the time was being improbably touted as an agent of political transformation. Visions of physical and spiritual connectedness to plant and animal life were absolutely the norm during that period. Although I never took LSD (virtually everyone around me did), I identified strongly with the psychedelic world-view, which permeated Pop and Op Art, with their vibrating neon colors; movies like Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); and of course popular music. The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” are the most well-known psychedelic songs, but I would also mention the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” and early Pink Floyd’s “See Emily Play.” Jimi Hendrix’s song “Manic Depression” would have special relevance to Roethke. This psychedelic perspective was projected onto the walls of concerts and dances through swirling, multicolored amoeboid gels—an ambient reference to a Roethke-like congruence between microcosm and macrocosm.

  Roethke, however, could reach his psychedelic altered consciousness merely by walking through the countryside and retrieving his childhood memories. Hence we might more accurately call his method psychotic mysticism. And here is yet another reason why Roethke’s work seems to have temporarily receded. The young people of the ’60s most influenced by psychedelics and therefore psychotic vision did not go on to graduate school, so there was a drastic loss of that radical perspective in arts criticism. Many psychedelic voyagers were also damaged by overzealous experimentation with drugs and lost the ability to communicate their spiritual discoveries to society. In medicine, furthermore, with the arrival of lithium, which suppresses the manic extreme in bipolar disorder, psychosis has virtually disappeared from modern life, with the exception of street people who resist being rounded up by social workers and put on a fixed schedule of medication.

  The neutralization and elimination of psychosis, combined with the widespread use of designer antidepressants among the urban professional class in the U.S., may have unexpectedly impoverished the cultural world and most of all harmed poetry, both in its appreciation and its production. We are now left in poetry with the even, flattened sound of adjusted neurosis rather than the hectic or inflamed rambunctiousness of psychosis. The vibrancy of Roethke’s psychotic mysticism, which is so wonderfully interwoven in his work with the English literary tradition, makes one ask, where have all the psychotic artists gone? I would suggest that they have abandoned poetry and have migrated into genres more amenable to hallucination—animation, video games, and science-fiction movies, with their spectacular computer-generated special effects. For example, the varied species of aliens and monsters in George Lucas’ six-part Star Wars series are worthy successors of William Blake. Poetry, alas, has lost its psychotics!

  In conclusion, renewed study of Theodore Roethke is precisely the way to reform and redirect literary studies, which are presently in disarray amid the slow implosion of post-structuralism and postmodernism. With his unerring instinct for universal themes and his plain use of common imagery—dog, fish, crow, crab, water, earth—Roethke is one of the most accessible of poets. He does not need the tortuous mediation of mandarin scholars to interpret and explain him. As the product of a family dedicated to unceasing manual labor, Roethke is completely without elitism. As a working poet, he shows aspiring writers how to gather and shape materials near to hand and how to develop and refine a unique voice that still preserves the great conversation among successive generations of poets.

  Much of American and British poetry from Roethke’s period has dated. But Roethke’s major poems, written more than a half-century ago, still feel fresh and contemporary. Roethke’s refusal to be drawn into political topicality has ironically aided his longevity. With young people increasingly drawn to environmental issues, the time seems right for poetry to realign itself with nature and to recover the prophetic power it once had in the 1960s. Let us all agree that a path to that reawakening lies through Theodore Roethke, a giant of American imagination.

  1. Theodore Roethke, “Some Self-Analysis,” in On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke, ed. Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (Seattle and London, 1965), p. 4.

  2. Roethke, “An American Poet Introduces Himself and His Poems,” ibid., p. 7.

  3. Ibid., pp. 8–9.

  4. Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke 1943–63, ed. David Wagoner (New York, 1974), p. 150.

  5. Ibid.

  6. John Wain, “The Monocle of My Sea-Faced Uncle,” in Theodore Roethke: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Arnold Stein (Seattle and London, 1965), p. 61.

  7. Quoted in Allan Seager, The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke (New York, 1968), p. 139. “A class can be a dance,” Roethke also said in “A Word to the Instructor,” On the Poet and His Craft, p. 55.

  8. Roethke, “The Teaching Poet,” On the Poet and His Craft, p. 51; Straw for the Fire, p. 231.

  9. Quoted in Seager, The Glass House, pp. 138–39. See also “poetry as experience” in “A Word to the Instructor,” On the Poet and His Craft, p. 52.

  10. Roethke, Straw for the Fire, p. 231.

  11. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (Amherst, MA, 1994), ed. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, p. 209.

  12. Quoted in Seager, The Glass House, pp. 180–84.

  13. Quoted in Theodore Roethke: Poetry of the Earth, Poet of the Spirit (Port Washington, 1981), p. 19.

  14. Quoted in Seager, The Glass House, p. 13.

  15. See “Roethke’s Mysticism,” in Neal Bowers, Theodore Roethke: From I to Otherwise (Columbia, MO, 1982), pp. 2–46.

  16. Quoted from unpublished transcript of interviews with Roethke for the film In a Dark Time, in Bowers, ibid., p. 10.

  17. Quoted in Seager, The Glass House, p. 101.

  18. Roethke, Straw for the Fire, pp. 93, 150.

  * [Keynote lecture of a conference celebrating the centenary of the birth of Theodore Roethke, held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on October 17, 2008. Published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2009.]

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  FINAL CUT:

  THE SELECTION PROCESS FOR BREAK, BLOW, BURN*

  Break, Blow, Burn, my collection of close readings of forty-three poems, took five years to write. The first year was devoted to a search for material in public and academic libraries as well as bookstores. I was looking for poems in English from the last four centuries that I could wholeheartedly recommend to general readers, especially those who may not have read a poem since college. For decades, poetry has been a losing proposition for major trade publishers. I was convinced that there was still a potentially large audience for poetry who had drifted away for unclear reasons. That such an audience does in fact exist seemed proved by the success of Break, Blow, Burn, which may be the only book of poetry criticism that has ever reached the national bestseller list in the United States.

  On my two book tours (for the Pantheon hardback in 2005 and the Vintage paperback in 2006), I was constantly asked by readers or interviewers why this or that famous poet was not included in Break, Blow, Burn, which begins with Shakespeare and ends with Joni Mitchell. At the prospectus stage of the project, I had assumed that most of the principal modern and contemporary poets would be well represented. But once launched on the task of gathering possible entries, I was shocked and disappointed by what I found. Poem after poem, when approached from the perspective of the general audience rather than that of academic criticism, shrank into i
nconsequence or pretension. Or poets whom I fondly remembered from my college and graduate school studies turned out to have produced impressive bodies of serious work but no single poem that could stand up as an artifact to the classic poems elsewhere in the book. The ultimate standard that I applied in my selection process was based on William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” a masterpiece of sinewy modern English.

  Ezra Pound, because of his generous mentoring of and vast influence on other poets (such as T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams), should have been automatically included in Break, Blow, Burn. But to my dismay, I could not find a single usable Pound poem—just a monotonous series of showy, pointless, arcane allusions to prior literature. The equally influential W. H. Auden was high on my original list. But after reviewing Auden’s collected poetry, I was stunned to discover how few of his poems can stand on their own in today’s media-saturated cultural climate. Auden’s most anthologized poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts,” inspired by a Brueghel painting, felt dated in its portentous mannerisms. A homoerotic love poem by Auden that I had always planned to include begins, “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm.” But when I returned to it, I found the poem perilously top-heavy with that single fine sentence. Everything afterward dissolves into vague blather. It was perhaps the most painful example that I encountered of great openings not being sustained.