The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland

Chapter Four. Theodore Roethke

four Theodore Roethke The smallest sprout shows there is really no death. —Walt Whitman,“Song of Myself ” In ,Aldo Leopold died of a heart attack while fighting a brush fire on hisWisconsin farm.The same year saw the publication of The Lost Son by Theodore Roethke, the volume that secured his reputation as a major American poet. Like Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, published the following year, Roethke’s second book conveys the spirit of a midwestern place, in this case, the Saginaw River valley of Michigan and the greenhouses once operated there by Roethke’s family. Most textual analyses of this and Roethke’s other books have focused on the poet’s private sensibility ,his often elliptical and Freudian journey through memory and grief in search of transcendence.The few regionalist examinations of Roethke’s work mostly reflect on his late residence in the Pacific Northwest. Some claim that he found his ultimate sense of place during his fifteen years in Seattle,Washington, as a northwestern poet.While acknowledging these readings, the present chapter argues for Roethke’s midwestern cultural identity and contribution to the region’s tradition of literary pastoral. Much of Roethke’s work (the formal love poetry, for example) attenuates place in favor of metaphysical abstraction and symbolism. Some of his  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. best writing,however,draws significantly from midwestern landscape and cultural archetypes; the greenhouse, his central symbol, reconciles utilitarian and Romantic values in midwestern pastoral ideology. However else he may be described, Roethke was a midwesterner and the seminal figure in a poetry of place that includes notable work by James Wright, Jim Harrison, and many other subsequent midwestern writers.1 In The Glass House:The Life of Theodore Roethke (), Allan Seager touches on the poet’s regional context, beginning with Tocqueville’s Romantic impressions of the wilderness that was Saginaw in .The violent history of the valley’s Indian inhabitants, early immigration by New Englanders,and the environmental devastation wreaked by the logging era all come under the biographer’s purview. But, as Seager notes, these legacies do not directly appear in Roethke’s poetry: [Roethke] ignores all the vivid tales of the lumber boom, tales that expressed courage, will, and cunning that might have engaged another man. . . . He must have been aware of the Indians , for he collected a shoebox full of flint arrowheads in his rambles along the riverbanks. . . . But, for the most part, he pays no attention to the history of the valley which expresses in modes of physical action an energy like his own. It is as if he had inherited the best part and did not need to acknowledge it. () Roethke’s vision of place and landscape was personal rather than public , leading Seager to claim, alluding toWhitman,“It was himself he had to sing, not the circumambient world. He only used that” (). Since Roethke wrote of his father’s property and the surrounding countryside with affection and specificity, there is an element of overstatement in Seager’s latter assertion. As the poet told his British audience in a  radio address,“It was a wonderful place for a child to grow up in and around”: There were not only twenty-five acres in the town, mostly under glass and intensely cultivated, but farther out in the country the last stand of virgin timber in the SaginawValley, and, elsewhere, a wild area of cut-over second-growth timber, which my father and uncle made into a small game preserve.  The Midwestern Pastoral You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. As a child . . . I had several worlds to live in, which I felt were mine. (On the Poet, ). The statement points to the perennial midwestern tension between pastoral and wild landscapes; like Cather and Leopold, Roethke admired both and sought to reconcile the demands of human use with the selfwilled processes of natural growth and evolution. From his earliest evocations of Michigan seasons to the late “North American Sequence,” Roethke wrote equally well of wild and tame places and the plants and animals that...