Theodore Roethke

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Theodore Huebner Roethke (born May 25, 1908 in Saginaw , Michigan , † August 1, 1963 on Bainbridge Island , Washington ) was an American poet.

biography

Theodore Roethke's parents Otto Roethke and Helen Huebner were both German immigrants. Roethke grew up in Saginaw, where his father and uncle ran a gardening business. His childhood in the greenhouses of this nursery resulted in a deep closeness to nature, which influenced his later work. A traumatic event was the death of his father, who died of cancer in 1923, and that of his uncle, who died of suicide that same year.

After attending Arthur Hill High School , Roethke studied from 1925 to 1929 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He dropped out of a law degree desired by the family in the first semester and instead took graduate courses at the University of Michigan and later at the Graduate School of Harvard University . The economic troubles of the time of the Great Depression then forced him to quit and he took up a teaching position at Lafayette College in 1931 .

In 1935 he moved to Michigan State University , where he had to interrupt his teaching due to a depressive illness. Depressive episodes, which he himself saw as times of creative self-knowledge, should accompany his further life. From 1936 to 1941 he taught at Pennsylvania State University . During this time he published in magazines such as Poetry , New Republic , Saturday Review and Sewanee Review . In 1941 he published his first volume of poetry Open House .

The work was discussed in major magazines and received recognition from critics and fellow writers (especially WH Auden ). The following year, Roethke was invited to a Morris Gray lecture at Harvard University . In 1943 he went to Bennington College , where he met, among others, Léonie Adams and Kenneth Burke . Burke in particular had a major influence on Roethke's second volume of poetry, The Lost Son and Other Poems , which appeared in 1948.

From 1947 Roethke was Professor of English at the University of Washington , where among others Carolyn Kizer , David Wagoner and James Wright were among his students. Roethke received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950 , the Levinson Prize of Poetry magazine in 1951, and awards from the Ford Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters , later the American Academy of Arts and Letters , the following year . Since 1956 he was an elected member of this academy. In 1951 his third volume of poetry, Praise to the End! .

In 1953 Roethke married Beatrice O'Connell, who was once his student, and traveled with her to WH Auden's villa on Ischia . This is where the collection The Waking: Poems 1933-1953 was created , for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 . After traveling to Europe in 1955-56, he published the volume of poetry Words for the Wind in 1957 , for which he received the Bollingen Prize , the National Book Award , the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize , the Longview Foundation Award and the Pacific Northwest Writer's Award . In the years that followed, the now famous author divided his time into teaching and extensive reading trips.

In 1963 Roethke suffered a fatal heart attack while visiting friends on Bainbridge Island. The book of poetry The Far Field was published posthumously that year and again received the National Book Award. In 1966, The Collected Poems were published. In the next generation of poets, Robert Bly , James Dickey , Sylvia Plath , Anne Sexton and William Stafford were particularly influenced by Roethke. The Theodore Roethke Home Museum is now located in his childhood home in Saginaw .

Works

  • Open House (1941)
  • The Lost Son (1948)
  • Praise to the end! (1951)
  • The Waking: Poems 1933-1953 (1953)
  • Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse (1958)
  • I am! Says the Lamb (1961)
  • Party at the Zoo (1963)
  • Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical (1964)
  • The Far Field (1964)
  • Collected Poems (1966)

Web links

Wikiquote: Theodore Roethke  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Members: Theodore Roethke. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 23, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Roethke, Theodore
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roethke, Theodore Huebner (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lyric poet
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Saginaw , Michigan
DATE OF DEATH August 1, 1963
Place of death on Bainbridge Island , Washington