THE PROTESTANT IMAGERY IN THEODORE ROETHKE¿S EARLY POETRY

The subject of this dissertation in American Literature and the History of ideas is the influence of Protestant spirituality on Theodore Roethke’s sensibility, worldview, and imagination in his early unpublished poems and his work from the thirties and the forties, collected in Open House (1941), The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948), and Praise to the End! (1951). The dissertation aims to demonstrate that, in spite of the apparent breaking point between Roethke’s first volume and the subsequent two, the three collections share a fundamental feature: they are rich with religious themes, motifs, and symbols and informed by philosophical notions that Roethke inherited from the literary-philosophical Protestant tradition and elaborated according to his personal sensibility and the spirit of his age. More precisely, in his early poetry Roethke recovers the original existential and psychological meaning of such pre-existing themes, motifs, and symbols but also enriches them thanks to a new awareness deriving from the discoveries of psychoanalysis and the reflections of Protestant existentialist philosophy.
The three chapters of which this dissertation is comprised bring to light the complexity of the relationship between Roethke’s early poetry and the literary-philosophical Protestant tradition by focusing on its points of contact with particular branches of such tradition. Chapter one deals with Roethke’s early unpublished poems and his poems from the thirties collected in Open House in relation to two opposite – albeit related – theological orientations: Calvinist Orthodoxy, dominated by the feeling of human fallenness and guilt, and the Protestant heresies that reclaimed the mystical aspirations at the origin of reformed spirituality, which implicitly asserted the divine nature of the human soul. Such mystical aspirations were inherited by Luther from the disciples of Meister Eckhart, whose view of the relationship between man and God was very similar to that expressed in the poetry Emily Dickinson, one of Roethke’s fundamental sources of inspiration in the thirties.
The second chapter, which focuses on the Greenhouse Poems collected in the first section of The Lost Son and Other Poems, explores the poems’ philosophical kinship with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Calvinist Theology of Nature, as well as their treatment of Biblical metaphors and symbols: the metaphor of God as a gardener and plants as eschatological symbols of resurrection and regeneration, previously used in seventeenth-century Protestant lyric poetry – especially that of Henry Vaughan –, William Blake’s poems which draw inspiration from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblem books, and Emily Dickinson’s poems which are influenced by Jonathan Edwards’ natural typology.
Lastly, the third chapter, which deals with the long narrative poems collected in The Lost Son and Other Poems and Praise to the End!, is centered on the protagonist’s spiritual struggle to overcome his estrangement from God, culminating in the paradoxical reversal from desperation to faith – or regeneration – at the core of the Protestant scheme of salvation described by Luther, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth. This process is analyzed predominantly through the echoes of Scripture in Job, the Psalms, the Song of Songs and the Gospels, as well as the Biblical symbols of desperation and regeneration through which the psychic and spiritual states experienced by the protagonist are evoked; namely, the pit, the deep waters, the wrath of God, the Rose of Sharon, and the Baptism.
The coexistence of all these variegated beliefs and feelings in Roethke’s early poetry is made possible by their common philosophical premises, widely analyzed by Søren Kierkegaard