Theodore Roethke
About
Born on May 25, 1908 in Michigan and educated there, Roethke went on to Harvard before pursuing an academic career at various American universities. His first volume of verse, Open House (1941), initiated his hallmark use of plant imagery as a symbol for human flowering and decay. He followed this with autobiographical verse in The Lost Son, and Other Poems (1948) and Praise to the End! (1951), which showed him embracing the visionary style of Yeats. “The Waking” won the poet the Pulitzer Prize in 1954, while the Bollingen Prize-winning Words for the Wind is probably his best known work. After Roethke’s death in 1963 the remainder of his verse, letters, and essays were published posthumously, and a Collected Edition of the poems appeared in 1975.
–Thomas Hampson and Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold, PBS I Hear America Singing
Related Information
Pennsylvania Center for the Book
pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/Roethke__TheodoreModern American Poetry
modernamericanpoetry.org/poet/theodore-roethkeSongs
Sheet Music
14 Songs on American Poetry
Early in the Morning (Robert Hillyer)
I am Rose (Gertrude Stein)
Memory (Theodore Roethke)
My Papa's Waltz (Theodore Roethke)
Night Crow (Theodore Roethke)
O You Whom I Often and Silently Come (Walt Whitman)
Root Cellar (Theodore Roethke)
Sally's Smile (Paul Goodman)
See How They Love Me (Howard Moss)
Snake (Theodore Roethke)
Such Beauty As Hurts to Behold (Paul Goodman)
The Waking (Theodore Roethke)
Youth, Day, Old Age, and Night (Walt Whitman)
Samuel Barber: Collected Songs
2. My Lizard (Wish For a Young Love) (op. 41, no. 2)
3. In The Wilderness (op. 41, no. 3)
4. Solitary Hotel (op. 41, no. 4)
5. Despite and Still (op. 41, no. 5)
Open House
2. Give Way, Ye Gates
3. The Waking
4. The Serpent
5. I Knew a Woman
6. First Meditation
7. The Right Thing
Two Poems of Theodore Roethke
2. I Strolled Across an Open Field