Williams introduced homosexuality into A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where it is the motivation for Brick’s marital reticence with the hot-blooded Maggie, and into Suddenly Last Summer, where the backstory focuses on a promiscuous gay aesthete, Sebastian Venable, who is slaughtered and cannibalized by a pack of poor Spanish boys whom he had solicited. (The Adonis archetype invoked here is part of Williams’ use of Greek mythology, as in his 1957 play, Orpheus Descending.) Sebastian’s sex tours were based on Williams’ own in Mexico and Italy, where he pursued orgiastic anonymous sex and indulged what he called his “deviant satyriasis.” When he got an “appetite” for blonds (a line he gives Sebastian), he would mull going north. Williams’ 1950 novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, fictionalized his own experiences with Italian gigolos the year after Streetcar’s huge success. (Mrs. Stone, his female proxy, would be played onscreen once again by Vivien Leigh in the 1961 movie.)
Williams was a bold pioneer for sexual candor: Baby Doll, for example, a lurid 1956 film based on his screenplay and directed by Elia Kazan, was condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency. Yet Williams was denounced by gay activists after the gay liberation movement awoke following the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. He was accused of always linking homosexuality to guilt, self-punishment, degeneracy, and death—themes of the closeted era in which he had written his major plays. But he himself had been courageously and even recklessly open about being gay at a time when it could have proved personally and professionally costly. Though he loved New Orleans for its sexual tolerance and pleasure-seeking lifestyle, Williams never liked Mardi Gras and was always uncomfortable about drag queens, who he felt degraded women. With his taste for macho and even heterosexual men, he criticized the “swish” and “camp” style among pre-Stonewall gays.
The sex roles of A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams’ greatest play, are certainly polarized by any conventional standard. The heterosexual electricity between Stanley and Stella across the gender divide is positively blinding. (Eyes repeatedly “go blind” in the stage directions at moments of sexual arousal.) In the 1970s, after his popularity had waned with the rise of younger playwrights, Williams told a gay interviewer that he did not want to ghettoize himself: “I wish to have a broad audience because the major thrust of my writing is not sexual orientation, it’s social. I’m not about to limit myself to writing about gay people.” With his empathy for the suffering yet dynamic individual, Williams produced not tendentious political potboilers but works of true universality, whose passionate characters have entered world literature.
* [Commissioned for A New Literary History of America, ed. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Harvard University Press, 2009).]
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DANCE OF THE SENSES:
NATURAL VISION AND PSYCHOTIC MYSTICISM IN THEODORE ROETHKE*
The poetry of Theodore Roethke springs almost entirely from his early, formative experiences in the Saginaw Valley of central Michigan. Although he traveled in Europe and taught for many years amid beautiful landscapes, from Pennsylvania’s Delaware River Valley to the Green Mountains of southern Vermont to panoramic Puget Sound in Washington State, very little of what Roethke observed there found its way into his work until relatively late in his career. His finest poetry, which critics have called spiritual autobiography, was a journey of personal memory, a process of recovery of his vivid childhood impressions in Saginaw, to which both sides of his family had emigrated from Germany.
Roethke’s love of the Michigan landscape was profound. In a college essay that he wrote as an undergraduate in Ann Arbor, he declared: “I can sense the moods of nature almost instinctively. Ever since I could walk, I have spent as much time as I could in the open. A perception of nature—no matter how delicate, how subtle, how evanescent,—remains with me forever. I am influenced too much, perhaps, by natural objects. I seem bound by the very room I’m in….When I get alone under an open sky where man isn’t too evident,—then I’m tremendously exalted and a thousand vivid ideas and sweet visions flood my consciousness.”1
Roethke described the Saginaw Valley as “very fertile flat country” that lies “at the northern edge of what is now the central industrial area of the United States.”2 There had been extensive ancient habitation in the area by Native Americans, notably the Sauk and Chippewa tribes. The young Roethke had a shoebox full of arrowheads he had found along riverbanks. Once Saginaw became lumber country, emigrants began trickling in—Mainers from New England, French-Canadians, Irish, Germans, Italians, and Slavs. In East Prussia, Roethke’s grandfather had been head forester of the estate of Bismarck’s sister; his grandmother, a housekeeper, was in charge of the estate’s wine cellar. After a mysterious altercation with their employers, the couple left first for Berlin and then America while Roethke’s father was still a baby. In Saginaw, the Roethke family began as market gardeners selling produce and then expanded into flower-growing. The Roethke sons, including Theodore Roethke’s father, eventually owned one of the biggest wholesale flower companies in the region and country. There were twenty-five acres under cultivation, with a quarter of a million feet under glass. The Roethkes also owned an icehouse, a fenced game preserve, and a patch of virgin forest outside town.
Roethke said about the greenhouses, in reference to their appearance in his second book, The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948): “They were to me, I realize now, both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere German-Americans turned their love of order and their terrifying efficiency into something truly beautiful. It was a universe, several worlds, which, even as a child, one worried about, and struggled to keep alive.”3 Similarly, in a notebook entry from the mid-1940s, Roethke asked himself, “What was the greenhouse? It was a jungle, and it was paradise; it was order and disorder.”4
Absorbing the dazzling sights and dank smells of the greenhouse, the young Roethke stored up a wealth of sensory impressions for his later work. Roethke’s father, who was Prussian to his bones, was an intimidating, godlike figure who nevertheless had an artistic streak: he experimented with breeds of roses and orchids, some of which he never sold. Roethke’s identification of the palatial greenhouse with his colossus-like father is evident in this striking passage from the notebooks: Roethke says, “I was born under a glass heel and have always lived there.”5
Roethke’s relationship to nature in Saginaw was therefore dual: there were the thick woods and teeming wetlands; the harsh winters, lush summers, and colorful autumns; but also the intricate world of horticulture—where nature is managed and subjected to the artificial forms and borderlines of civilization. Ultimately, the Roethke greenhouse, like the “stately pleasure-dome” of Coleridge’s Xanadu, is a symbol of art itself—the poem’s structure and transparency roofing a seething subject matter with its invisible roots. Roethke’s vision of nature is close to Walt Whitman’s—not in Whitman’s epic sweep but rather in his microscopic attention to and compassion for the tiniest twigs and pebbles of the American landscape. As a craftsman of highly condensed lyrics, Roethke cited among his primary inspirations the Elizabethan song poets and the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals. British High Romanticism from William Blake on was also a major influence. The critic John Wain observed, “The greenhouse occupies the same place in Roethke’s poetic evolution as the hills and dales of the Lake District do in Wordsworth’s.”6
Roethke’s expansive natural vision seemed perfectly suited to the back-to-nature idealism of the 1960s. I was introduced to Roethke’s work in college in the mid-1960s at the State University of New York at Binghamton. The poet Milton Kessler—the greatest teacher I ever had—had been a graduate student of Roethke’s at the University of Washington. My entire introduction to contemporary poetry was through Kessler’s intensely dramatic readings of Roethke, whose work had an enormous impact on me and marked me for life. Roethke represented a stunning departure from the genteel and sanitized poems that had been assigned to u
s in high school—such as Robert Frost, who may have influenced Roethke but whose work I resented for what I felt to be its pious platitudes.
What Kessler highlighted in Roethke was his sensory engagement with his material, above all his kinesthetic robustness, illustrated by his famous poem, “My Papa’s Waltz.” But in the famous greenhouse poems too, there is a sense of Roethke’s own powerful looming physical presence. Kessler talked about the unsettling disjunction between Roethke’s huge size and the fineness of his perception, as in “Elegy for Jane,” a strange and haunting poem where Roethke remembers a dead girl’s “neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils.” There is a charged sense of danger and trespass. Interestingly, Roethke as a child had been small and sickly but had shot up to his bulky 6'2" height the year before he left for college.
It is the tangled multiplicity of the senses, including rank smells, that differentiates Roethke from most other poets of his time or indeed ours. (His departure point may have been the Metaphysical poets’ constant theme of mortality and decay, which is also a pungent motif in Shakespeare’s late tragedies.) Through his assertive rhythms and his subliminal assault on the nerves, Roethke’s poetry achieves a seductive micro-muscular activation of the reader. Roethke certainly revolutionized my ideas about literature. My aesthetics had been formed by Oscar Wilde, that worshipper of beauty and high priest of the religion of art, whom I had discovered in high school via a British collection of his epigrams in a second-hand bookstore in Syracuse. Roethke was a revelation in adding the next term: the centrality of the senses in art. For art, I always argue, is not philosophy. Whatever ideas art may convey must be concretely embodied in material or sensory form. Hence the drift of high-profile poetry, post-Roethke, toward an abstruse philosophizing has, in my view, been both lamentable and self-destructive and has helped produce the present marginalization of contemporary poetry in the U.S.
Roethke compared teaching to dance: a class was a performance that, like dance, vanished “down the rathole” when it was over.7 Judging from Milton Kessler’s testimony about Roethke’s flamboyant classroom style, there was definitely a kinesthetic dimension to his teaching. Roethke wrote, “Most teaching is visceral,” and in his notebooks he said, “The teaching of poetry requires fanaticism.”8 In a letter to a cousin, he wrote about the teaching of literature, “The best teachers don’t teach it as a ‘subject’ at all (as body of information, as ‘culture’, etc.) instead as experience….[I]t is a constant effort to recover the creative powers lost in childhood.” He felt that a teacher should use “every possible means to move students ahead intellectually and even at times, if you’ll pardon the word, spiritually.” It’s a method “that makes great use of the associational forces of the mind.”9 Teaching, Roethke said in his notebooks, is “one of the few sacred relationships left in a crass secular world.”10
In a collection called Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, the poet Henry Carlile recalled that Bishop, a virtuoso poet who (at least when I saw her read when I was in graduate school) was publicly discreet and reserved, “deplored” the influence of her fellow teacher Roethke on students at the University of Washington. Carlile alludes to Roethke’s “spiritual bombast” and his “overwhelming, hyperbolic” style in the classroom: “His students worshiped him and imitated some of his worst mannerisms.”11 From the long list of topics and quotations from poetry recorded by one of his students from a single class, one can appreciate the huge range of Roethke’s pedagogical method and the supple, associative play of his mind.12
Insofar as I adopted Milton Kessler’s own eclectic, associative, Roethke-shaped teaching style for the whole of my own career, I must, if it is not too presumptuous, number myself among Roethke’s spiritual grandchildren. My sense of connection with him was deepened by the fact that my first teaching job out of graduate school in the 1970s was at Bennington College, where Roethke taught in the mid-1940s. Shingle Cottage, which still housed a faculty poet when I was there, was hallowed ground because it was where Roethke had written his great greenhouse poems. (He had been encouraged in that project by the polymath critic, Kenneth Burke, who lived for half the week in a room upstairs.) I spent many convivial hours in that picturesque country house, where Roethke had, by his own testimony, danced in the nude at the height of inspiration!
So pivotal has Roethke always been to my understanding of modern poetry that I included three of his poems in Break, Blow, Burn, my book of commentaries on lyric poetry. The only other writers with three poems in that book are Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, and Emily Dickinson. Perhaps not coincidentally, all four of those poets were among Roethke’s claimed artistic ancestors. Imagine my unhappy surprise, therefore, when on my two national tours for that book—for the Pantheon hardback in 2005 and the Vintage paperback in 2006—I discovered that Roethke’s reputation was no longer as I had remembered it. There were two persistent questions or comments most often made to me by interviewers or patrons at bookstore signings. The first was, “Why isn’t Charles Bukowski in your book?” I doggedly replied that I had certainly intended to feature him very prominently to dramatize my protest against pretentious or middlebrow academic criticism. But to my distress, I could find no satisfactory complete Bukowski poem to endorse for the general reader.
The second most frequent comment, however, came as a complete shock. I was thanked for having featured Roethke in my book because, I was told again and again, he has slowly faded from attention and is no longer even well represented in poetry anthologies. Upon investigation, I was horrified to discover a dribbling out of scholarly books about Roethke over the past twenty years. For example, the massive Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia owns only two books of Roethke criticism published in the 1990s—one in 1991 and the other in 1999. There has been nothing in the last decade. Furthermore, virtually all of the books on Roethke, from the 1960s on, were published by small or regional university presses—from Louisiana, Missouri, and Indiana to Washington State—with none produced by the bicoastal elite universities. Of course this situation is appalling and unacceptable. An American literary criticism that neglects Theodore Roethke has sunk into irrelevance and folly.
After pained reflection, I have identified what I would propose are three primary reasons for Roethke’s apparent eclipse. First of all, the general politicization of literary criticism from the 1970s on may have eroded Roethke’s position. Social crises and political events—the Great Depression, World War Two, the Cold War—made little or no impact on Roethke’s poetry. Furthermore, it is hard to classify him according to the approved theoretical categories of class, race, and gender. There seems to be agreement even among sympathetic scholars (I am not one of them) that Roethke’s views of women are sentimental and retrograde. The hovering spirit woman of “The Visitant,” for example—one of my favorite poems in all of literature—belongs to the pre-feminist period of archetype and myth, as explored by the poet Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1948) or by the Jungian analyst Erich Neumann in his magnum opus, The Great Mother (1955). The dethroning of the European tradition and the demythologization of criticism have also unfortunately led to the erasure of myth critics like Northrop Frye, whose magisterial Anatomy of Criticism (1957) was still considered a landmark when I entered graduate school in 1968 but which now seems to have been completely forgotten.
One of the striking characteristics of Roethke’s poetry is his portrait of nature as informed by magical presences, as in the German folk songs and fairy tales that he loved in childhood. Roethke attributes a primitive state of consciousness not just to slugs and insects but to fungi and mildew. Hence Roethke’s world-view resembles that of animism, the earliest stage in the history of world religions. The critic Lynn Ross-Bryant notes an intriguing parallel between Roethke and the Beat poet, Gary Snyder, who declared in his book, Myths and Texts: “As poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the upper Paleolithic: the fertility of the
soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.”13 Yes, Roethke, like Snyder, seeks ancient wisdom—whereas too many of today’s poets and critics are over-absorbed in the present and in the narrow ideological conflicts of post-Enlightenment politics.
It might certainly seem, with the global rise of the environmental movement since the 1960s, that a nature poet such as Roethke would be treasured. But environmentalist assumptions too have become politicized. In today’s debates, nature is projected as a victim of exploitation and despoliation, a hostage to unbridled capitalist greed. But until very late in his work, there is no sense whatever in Roethke that nature needs to be preserved or protected by man or that it can suffer serious or permanent harm. Yes, nature can be directed, tamed, pruned, and nurtured. (Roethke humorously spoke of his family’s constant fretting about fertilizer: “My father literally spent weeks scouring the valley contracting with farmers for cow-dung.”)14 But ultimately for Roethke, nature’s generative forces are remote and unknowable. The human in Roethke’s world-view is simply a subset to nature.
When Wordsworth imagines his Lucy “Roll’d round…/ With rocks, and stones, and trees,” the human unit has been dissolved and absorbed into a vast dynamic of pure energy. There is an exhilarating sense of the sublime, which is also felt in Shelley’s ode to the awesome peak of Mont Blanc. Roethke, in contrast, celebrates the small and particular; he shows a tender respect for the homely and specific that, I suspect, he may have learned from George Herbert and Emily Dickinson. Remarkable examples include such innovative compound phrases from Roethke’s poem “Cuttings” as “sand-crumb” or “intricate stem-fur.” Roethke’s focus on the infinitesimal is nearly scientific. When Whitman embraces chaff or debris, he is trying to banish conventional distinctions between gold and dross, good and evil, clean and dirty. Hovering behind Whitman’s epic, therefore, is a moral imperative, a critique of constricting definitions of race, gender, and sexual orientation. But with Roethke, there is no social critique but rather a mystical search for the hidden power within natural forms.
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