-1906: Otto Roethke married a Saginaw woman by the name of Helen Huebner.
-1908: Theodore Huebner Roethke was born on May 25.
-1913: Theodore was sent to John Moore School where he studied reading, writing, arithmetic, and for an hour a day German.
-1918: The Roethke's bought their first car, a dark blue Buick. Otto would drive Helen and the children around on Sunday afternoons.
-1921: His mother sent Theodore to Arthur Hill High School. She was opposed to his attending of Saginaw High.
-This was also the same time he put on a pair of long pants, as they were considered almost puberty rites in those times.
-As a freshman, Theodore wrote a speech addressing the Saginaw chapter of the Red Cross. It was so successful that it was translated into twenty-six languages and received wide international attention.
-1922: Theodore joined an athletic fraternity at the end of his freshman year. At the time it was an illegal high school fraternity known as Beta Phi Sigma. Theodore was a substitute on the basketball team for two seasons and also a member of the track team.
-1923: In February, his uncle, Charles committed suicide and in April his father, Otto, died of cancer.
-1925: Theodore went to The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the first in his family to attend a university.
-During college he joined the Chi Phi fraternity and played tennis.
-As a senior he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
-For his summer job he worked at the Heinz Pickle factory.
-1929: Theodore graduated from The University of Michigan and entered Michigan Law School.
-1930: He dropped out of law school to pursue a master's degree in literature.
-In the fall he entered the Harvard Graduate School.
-As the Depression continued it weighed heavily on his family's finances and he was forced to withdraw from school and take on a teaching position. He accepted at Lafayette and stayed there for four years.
-Here he fell in love with Mary Kunkel, and they briefly considered marriage but eventually drifted apart.
-Three of his poems were published in a small magazine known as the Harp, they were slightly criticized but viewed as a start.
-1935: Theodore went to Michigan State College.
-In November he had the first in a series of mental breakdowns and was placed in a local hospital for three months. Afterwards he returned to Saginaw to recuperate.
-1936: He took on another teaching job at Pennsylvania State.
-While at Penn State he fell in love with the librarian, Kitty Stokes. With her encouragement of his poetry he felt he had enough to compile a book. She even suggested the book's title.
-1941: Published the Open House, consisting of forty-seven poems.
-1943: Roethke decided to leave Penn State to teach at Bennington College. This school was structured in a less hierarchial system and classes were run in an informal manner. Roethke's teaching skills flourished in this atmosphere. He developed a number of intimate relationships; one of his affairs was brought to the attention of the administration by the girls' parents. This nearly caused his dismissal, but he decided to leave.
-While at Bennington he felt pressured to complete and produce poems that would make up his second book, The Lost Son.
-1945: This frenzy of activity caused another one of Roethke's depressions and he was admitted into a hospital in Albany where he received shock treatment therapy.
-He also finally received a long-awaited Guggenheim Fellowship which allowed him to relax while he worked on his next collection of works.
-1947: In the spring he returned to Penn State for a brief teaching position. During the summer he was offered a position at the University of Washington and in September he went west to Seattle.
-Here he found an interest in Jerry Lee Willis, an established teacher from the English department and a widow.
-1948: The Lost Son and Other Poems was published. It had actually been completed in 1947 but he delayed publication until the following March.
-1949:During the summer Theodore returned to Saginaw in order to concentrate on his poetry uninterrupted.
-Theodore had concentrated so hard on his poetry during the summer that upon his return to Seattle in the fall he had to be submitted to a local sanitorium.
-1950: Theodore applied for and received his second Guggenheim Fellowship.
-1951: He published Praise to the End! which he worked hard to complete while working in Seattle.
-1952: Roethke went to New York to give a poetry reading and it was here that he crossed paths with Beatrice O'Connell, a former Bennington student. They had a short courship and married within a month on January 3,1953.
-For their honeymoon they went to Europe and stayed in W.H. Auden's villa at Ischia. They remained in Europe March through May. Afterwards they traveled to Rome, Geneva, then on to Paris.
-In September they returned to Washington, rented a house on the banks of Lake Washington and settled down into married life.
-1953: Theodore published The Waking, Poems. He had worked mainly on these poems while in Europe.
-In November Roethke had a minor mental breakdown from which he recovered quickly, but he suffered another shock no less than three months later when his mother died.
-Good news did not come until a few weeks later when he was notified of the Pulitzer Prize he had won for The Waking.
-1956: Roethke resumed teaching at the University of Washington after traveling in Europe again.
-1957: He began to have symptoms of another mental breakdown and remained hospitalized for three months.
-The Exorcism was published.
-1958: When he recovered he returned to teaching and in the fall he published Words for the Wind. For this publication he received the Bollingen Prize and the National Book Award.
-1959: In January Roethke had another mental breakdown was had to be admitted into the Halcyon Sanitarium in Seattle.
-1960: The Roethke's went to New York so that Theodore could give several readings and afterwards continued on to Europe.
-1961: Theodore returned to America for the publication of his children's collection of poems, I Am! Says the Lamb.
-1962: He was presented with and honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Michigan.
-In October he gave a reading for the Seattle World's Fair.
-1963: He finished the first manuscript of The Far Field, unfortunately he was never able to revise it.
-Theodore never returned to The Far Field because of a coronary occlusion he had while swimming at a friend's pool on August 1st. He was buried with his mother and father in Oakwood Cemetary in Saginaw.
-Party at the Zoo was published.
-Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical was published.
-1964: The Far Field was published.
-1965: On the Poet and His Craft was published.
-1966: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke was published.
-1969: Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems was published.
-1972: Straw for the Fire, From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke was published.
-1973: Dirty Dinky and Other Creatures: Poems for Children was published.
-1982: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke was published.
My Favorite Roethke Poem:
A few other sites on Theodore Roethke worth noting are:
Ted Tapia's Page- Roethke' works
Ted Tapia's Page- Roethke's biography
Jim Nash's Scraping Space- (a good link for other poets as well)