Education Quote by Theodore Roethke

Roethke compresses an entire philosophy of making into a sentence that sounds almost sheepishly obvious, then keeps unfolding the longer you sit with it. "I learn by going" flips the usual classroom logic: knowledge isn’t something you receive, it’s something you enter. The verb "going" matters because it’s bodily and risky; you don’t learn by hovering near experience, you learn by moving through it.

The real charge is in the second clause: "where I have to go". That phrase drags in compulsion, not choice. It suggests the psyche has its own itinerary, and the poet is less a free agent than a reluctant traveler following necessity. You can hear Roethke’s lifelong preoccupation with inner weather and inherited pressure: the greenhouse childhood (his father’s work), the intense attention to growth and decay, the bouts of mental illness that made "having to go" feel literal. The line reads like a survival tactic disguised as a creative credo: if you’re going to be pushed into certain rooms of your life, you might as well turn the light on and take notes.

It also doubles as ars poetica. Poetry, for Roethke, isn’t decorative language applied after the fact; it’s a method of discovery that happens mid-stride. The syntax enacts it: no ornament, no scenic detour, just the plain admission that insight arrives late, after the self has already committed. The subtext is bracing: you don’t get to understand first and proceed later. You proceed, then you understand.