Theodore Roethke Home museum in Michigan asks owners of hand-numbered copies of Open House to get in touch, for ‘census’ to mark 75th anniversary of poetry collection

A quest to find as many as possible of the 1,000 hand-numbered copies of the great US poet Theodore Roethke’s debut collection, Open House, has been launched to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the work’s publication.

The Theodore Roethke Home museum in Saginaw, Michigan, is describing the project as a census, and is asking anyone who owns one of the 1,000 first editions to get in touch. “The fact that each copy of Open House is hand-numbered gives each a unique personality. We’d like to hear about the books from their owners and what Roethke poem most resonates with them,” it said as it launched the search on Facebook.

Fine Books & Collections magazine, which first reported the project, said the museum would be featuring a story a week about Open House over the next year, to mark 75 years since Roethke’s debut was first published to largely positive reviews.

In his biography of the award-winning writer, described by James Dickey as “the greatest poet this country has yet produced”, Allan Seager quotes WH Auden’s write-up of the collection. “Mr Roethke is instantly recognisable as a good poet,” wrote Auden in the Saturday Review of Literature. “Many people have the experience of feeling physically soiled and humiliated by life; some quickly put it out of their minds, others gloat narcissistically on its unimportant details; but both to remember and to transform the humiliation into something beautiful, as Mr Roethke does, is rare. Every one of the lyrics in this book, whether serious or light, shares the same kind of ordered sensibility: Open House is completely successful.”

In the poem Open House, Roethke wrote:

“My secrets cry aloud.

I have no need for tongue.

My heart keeps open house,

My doors are widely swung.”

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The collection, published in 1941, took Roethke 10 years to write. He would go on to win the Pulitzer in 1954 for The Waking, and also won two US National book awards.



Mike Kolleth, vice president of the museum, said the project had been inspired by “scholarly efforts to track and document the Shakespeare First Folios and the 560 first and second editions of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.

“In both of those cases, the bibliographic information gleaned was interesting but the people and the stories behind the copies are fascinating,” he said. “Open House clearly doesn’t rise to the level of import of those two world-changing books; we absolutely understand that. This is more about storytelling than scholarship. But with the networking power of the internet at our disposal and the fact that all copies of the book are hand-numbered, we thought a census would be a great way to bring readers together to discuss Roethke’s poetry and learn where the books ended up.”

Kolleth admitted that the census was unlikely to be completely successful. “We can’t find them all – frankly they are not all there to find anymore. Time takes its toll. But we’ll give it our best and see how the numbers role up by the end of the year,” he said.

“Our goal is to locate at least 200 copies – or 20% of the original population – and hear some great stories along the way. We’re off to a good start. I’m confident that we will make it and in the process ignite some interesting conversations around books and poetry.”