Roethke, << REHT kee, >> Theodore (1908-1963), an American poet, received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for The Waking: Poems 1933-1953. Words for the Wind (1958) won seven awards, including the Bollingen Prize in 1958 and the National Book Award in 1959. Roethke shifted his style often between his first published work, Open House (1941), and his last collection, The Far Field (1964). His early poems had the concentrated quality of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. His next works showed the meditative mysticism of T. S. Eliot’s poems. His later poems showed the influence of William Butler Yeats.
Roethke’s concerns, however, remained constant. His field was the inner life rather than the political or social life. He looked for a sense of self in memories of childhood and for a sense of life in growing things. His father’s greenhouse revealed nature (rooting, blossoming, dying) and art (grafting stems, forcing bloom). Roethke also wrote poems for children. He was born on May 25, 1908, in Saginaw, Michigan. He died on Aug. 1, 1963.
