Theodore Roethke Biography

Theodore Huebner Roethke was born in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1908. His father Otto Roethke and uncle owned a local greenhouse. As a child, he spent much time there observing nature. His impressions of the natural world contained there would later profoundly influence the subjects and imagery of his verse (Poets.org). After his father died in 1923 of cancer, this moment shaped his creative and artistic outlooks. Roethke attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, graduating magna cum laude, even though his family wanted him to study law he quit after one semester. From 1929 to 1931, he began taking graduate courses at the University of Michigan and the Harvard Graduate School. There he met and worked with poet Robert Hillyer. While teaching at Lafayette College he began his first book, Open House it was published and released in 1941. Roethke was hospitalized for a mental illness after this he found it useful for writing. In 1936 he began teaching at Pennsylvania State University. After being there for seven years he was published in journals as Poetry, the New Republic, the Saturday Review, and Sewanee Review. Roethke was influenced by other poets such as, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and Elinor Wylie. In 1953 he married Beatrice O’Connell, where they met at Bennington. In 1962 he was appointed poet in residence in addition to being professor of English. Awards and honors were frequent during these years, including a Pulitzer Prize (1953), the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award (1958), and even a posthumous National Book Award for his last poems, The Far Field(1964) (Gale). Theodore Roethke died of a heart attack in 1963.