Root Cellar (poem)

"Root Cellar" is a poem written by the American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) published in Roethke's second collection, The Lost Son and Other Poems, in 1948 in Garden City, New York. The poem belongs among Roethke's series of "Greenhouse Poems" the first section of The Lost Son, a sequence hailed as "one of the permanent achievements of modern poetry" [1] and marked as the point of Roethke's metamorphosis from a minor poet into one of "the first importance",[2] into the poet James Dickey would regard among the greatest of any in American history.

Roethke grew up in Saginaw, Michigan, where his father, Otto, owned a 25-acre greenhouse. Roethke, in his letters, described the greenhouse as his "symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth".[3] Roethke's father died when Roethke was fourteen, the same year his uncle committed suicide, a circumstance which looms behind Roethke's conception of the greenhouse.

Within a greenhouse, the root cellar functions to keep roots alive, allowing them to grow in this underground structure. Roethke vividly portrays the root cellar in "a violent inferno of creation".[4]

  1. ^ Martz, Louis (1965). Stein, Arnold (ed.). Theodore Roethke: Essays on the Poetry. Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp. 27. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  2. ^ Wain, John (1965). Stein, Arnold (ed.). Theodore Roethke: Essays on the Poetry. Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp. 61. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  3. ^ Mills, Ralph J., ed. (1968). Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke. Seattle.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).