Photo by Linda Robinson Walker Otto Roethke's galoshes on the back porch. Otto danced Ted around the kitchen, the son standing on his father's feet: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.      "My Papa's Waltz"

At the time of his death Theodore Roethke '29, '36 MA, '62 D Lit (Hon) had won about as many prizes as a poet could, rivaling or surpassing other American poets such as Robert Frost (who was 34 years older), William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell and E. E. Cummings.

Roethke's death at 55 in 1963 shocked his fellow poets into tributes that they might have toned down for a slower, later death. John Ciardi, for instance, in the Michigan Quarterly Review's 1967 collection of tributes, penned these lines: "Ted Roethke was a tearing man,/ a slam-bang wham-damn tantrum O/ from Saginaw in Michigan...a roaring man,/ a ring-tailed whing-ding yippee O./ He could outyell all Michigan/and half the Mississippi O."

The homages his friends wrote are the stunned reactions to a man cut down in mid-stride: He died after mixing some drinks, putting them in the fridge and plunging into a neighbor's pool for a swim. Roethke (pronounced "Rett-key") had a heart attack and drowned. "All that night you wallowed through my sleep," wrote Robert Lowell, "then in the morning you were lost."

The sense of loss at Roethke's death was compounded by the deaths of other poets who died in 1963: William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and the Irish poet Louis MacNiece; E. E. Cummings had died in 1962. Isabella Gardiner resented all creatures given longer lives than Roethke and the others, especially the alligators "able to thrash and lash and grin at sixty-eight."

The Large Poet of the Small
The 22 poems in tribute to Roethke depict a man who was larger than life in both talent and, at 6' 2" and around 200 pounds, in stature as well.

Courtesy U-M Bentley Historical Library Theodore Roethke in 1962, a year before his death.

Ciardi isn't the only memorialist whose vocabulary runs to the loud and Bunyonesque. Others use words like "roaring" and "raving," "hulked" and "lumbered," and most often liken him to a "bear," sometimes a "wise one," sometimes an "old Michigan" one.

Roethke was remembered as a "mountainous" or "bulbous" man who walked with "an uneasy swaying effect" and "sad laboriousness." Allan Seager said he had an "immense torso with slender legs" that made him look like "an anvil on two sticks" or, to another man, "an ostrich." Roethke's next-door cousin Violet remembered him as a sickly boy who suffered severe hay fever and sneezing fits as a child and slept with his head completely wrapped.

The tribute poems are set in the open air, invoking as Lewis Turco did "the chip of the prairie dogs," "the moon's wake," "ponds of silence." John Berryman lamented, "The Garden Master's gone." All honor what Donald Hall, speaking of Roethke on a 1965 WUOM program, called his "poetry of nature." Not a "poetry of large land masses, mountains and hills, as of tiny things. As he was always saying, 'the small, the small.' He'd love a blade of grass and he'd love a bit of root. He'd love a tiny bird, a little worm crawling along."

Roethke baffled his friends and fellow poets by the seemingly irreconcilable poles of his nature. He was a carousing, crude giant who paraded an invented intimacy with gangsters, Stutz Bearcats, football triumphs as a "scat back" and other vita enhancers. And he was a poet whose delicately chosen words display in the miniatures of nature the inward search of a man Robert Lowell called a "helpless, elemental creature." In the poem "Otto" (his father's name), Roethke wrote, "Who loves the small can be both saint and boor."