Biography of theodore roethke in a dark
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What occured during that cold night is confusing, but Roethke later described having a "mystical experience" during a walk. In 1953 Roethke married Beatrice O'Connell, whom he had met during his earlier at Bennington. His next book Words for the Wind, published in 1958, was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize.
One story has Roethke teaching a class when he learns of the Bollingen Prize.
It was also in New York on another occasion that he became reaquainted with Beatrice O'Connell, his former Bennington student whom he would marry in January 1953.
His book, The Waking: Poems 1933-1953 received the Pulitzer Prize in spring of 1954. He weeded greenhouse beds and gathered moss in the tract of original forest on the family property.
Roethke was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950, the Poetry magazine Levinson Prize in 1951, and major grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters the year after.
He went on to publish sparingly but his reputation grew with each new collection, including The Waking which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1954.
Roethke admired the writing of such poets as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, William Blake, and William Wordsworth, as well as W. B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas.
It included major works such as Elegy for Jane and Four for Sir John Davies, which was modeled on Davies's metaphysical poem Orchestra. This book was published in 1948, the year after he began to teach at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he remained until he died in 1963.
"The Lost Son" was Roethke's groundbreaking long poem.
His breakdown happened on November 11, 1935. Then in 1943 he left Penn State to teach at Bennington College, where he met Kenneth Burke, whom he collaborated with. After him are Jacques de Lacretelle, Raúl Rivero, Pavao Pavličić, Bill Bright, Tanith Lee, and Antoine Blondin.
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Contemporaries
Among people born in 1908, Theodore Roethke ranks 389.
At all times, however, the natural world in all its mystery, beauty, fierceness, and sensuality, is close by, and the poems are possessed of an intense lyricism. It begins:
At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry:
I was lulled by the slamming of iron,
A slow drip over stones,
Toads brooding wells.
All the leaves stuck out their tongues;
I shook the softening chalk of my bones,
Saying,
Snail, snail, glister me forward,
Bird, soft-sigh me home,
Worm, be with me.
This is my hard time.After reading some of Roethke's work, Hilyer's comment was, "any editor who wouldn't buy these is a fool" (Seager, 69).
From 1931 to 1935, Roethke taught at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. There Roethke began editing the galley proofs for The Waking: Poems 1933-1953 which was published later that same year, and won the Pulitzer Prize the next year.
He could be somber or playful, surrealistic or erotic or romantic, or many of these things at once.
Louise Bogan, writing for The New Yorker, described the poem this way:
"In the long poem that gives the book its title, he plunges into the subconscious as into a pond, and brings up all sorts of clammy and amorphous material.In 1942 Harvard asked Roethke to deliver on of their prestigious Morris Gray lectures. To gain acceptance -- since good grades were a social negative among his peers -- he joined an illegal fraternity called Beta Phi Sigma and learned to drink the bootleg whisky that was available during prohibition.
Traumatic Events
When Roethke was 14, a series of traumatic events began: A conflict developed between Roethke's father and his brother Charles.
The new poems included his famous I Knew a Woman, and Dying Man. Roethke began a series of reading tours in New York and Europe, underwritten by another Ford Foundation grant.