Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Poet W.H. Auden was the best man at Roethke’s wedding in 1953, the year this poem appeared. Auden offered his house in Austria for Roethke to honeymoon with Beatrice O’Connell, a former student. (Source.)
The pool in which Roethke died of a heart attack in 1963 was subsequently filled in and made into a zen rock garden at Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Isle, WA. We’re sure Roethke would have approved. (Source.)
Prone to alcoholic binges and manic escapades, Roethke once went to the University Bookstore, ordered a dozen golf balls and volumes of his poetry, and sent them to the chiefs of police in Bellingham and Seattle. (Source.)
Would you name two of your children the same name? Roethke did. He wrote another “The Waking” years earlier. So much for the uniqueness of this title. (Source.)