by Lisa Putnam

Created on: January 19, 2011

Theodore Roethke was born to German-American parents in Saginaw, Michigan, and spent his youth working in his parents' greenhouse for their produce business.  Roethke began to write poetry when he was a student at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.  During The Great Depression he taught at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and later at Michigan State College in Lansing.  During that time he published nineteen poems and became friends with other noted poets.  After suffering from a mental breakdown in 1935, he began teaching at Pennsylvania State and focused on his poetry. 

He published his first book of poems, Open House, in 1941.  In 1948 he published his second book of poems titled The Lost Son, and Other Poems which was met with favorable and popular reviews.   Praise to the End!, The Waking: Poems, 1933-1952, Words for the Wind, and The Far Field (published posthumously) all followed.  During his career Roethke earned several awards, including: The Pulitzer Prize for The Waking, the National Book Award for Words for the Wind, Poetry Magazine’s Levinson Prize, two Ford Foundation grants, the Bollingen Prize, and a Fullbright grant.  Although he was an extremely accomplished poet, he suffered from severe depression and spent his life in and out of mental hospitals until his death.   

Theodore Roethke employed a unique style that appears to have been inspired by poets T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats, but is otherwise uncategorizable.  His poems revolve around his personal life, which was riddled with psychological illness, his childhood experiences, nature, and psychology. 

Perhaps one of Roethke’s gifts is his ability to make even the commonplace interesting.   In his poem “My Papa’s Waltz”, he describes a night of horse-playing with his father.  At first glance it appears as if the boy in the poem is in some sort of danger.  The opening line describing his father with whiskey on his breath is nothing short of alarming, his father’s “battered” hand leads imaginative minds to a bar fight, and the verse that the father “beat time” on his head makes a reader wonder if the boy is a willing participant of the “waltz”.  A more detailed read, however, invites the reader into the life of a boy who clung to his father “like death”, but could not follow Otto Roethke when he died when

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