Research Paper On Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke was born on May 25, 1908 in Saginaw, Michigan. He was born to Otto and Helen Huebner Roethke. In 1872 Roethke's father and grandfather emigrated from Germany. This is where Roethke's grandfather and father bought 22 acres of land and started a market garden. After making enough money they bought a greenhouse. In 1906 Roethke's father married Helen Huebner, also a German immigrant. This led to the birth of Theodore. While growing up, Roethke helped his father out in the greenhouse taking care of the flowers. While working with plants and nature this deeply affected him as we see it in his poetry. From all this time working with his dad Roethke gets one of his major ideas for writing poetry. One poem we can see this in is "CHILD ON TOP OF A GREENHOUSE (1948)." "The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried puttyThe half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers,Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,A few white clouds all rush eastward,A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting! (1-6) This poem, it seems, is from Roethke'
In 1954 Roethke was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this book. He does this in many of his love poems. In 1943 Roethke left Penn State and moved to Bennington, Vermont where he began teaching at Bennington College. It seems that he wanted his beautiful wife never to grow old. This is where he fell in love with a librarian, Kitty Stokes. After this break down, Doubleday published Words for the Wind for which Roethke received the Bollingen Prize and the National Book Award. "The Whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy" (1-4)"At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle. "Whatever he smelled was good:The fruit and flesh smells mixed. This poem is called "PICKLE BELT (no date). During his years at Michigan, Roethke attended classes having to do with mostly literature and language. In this was another love poem, one of his most famous "I Knew a Woman. Roethke also wrote a poem about this pickle factory. " (11-12)In these six simple lines we see a boy who's father is drunk but even though the child is getting beat up he still loves his father for other reasons. In 1947 went back to Penn State to teach and here he compiled his second book The Lost Son. On the positive side of things Roethke loved the way his father looked at life and gave life to nature, like the greenhouse.
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