Roethke can endow his brief lyrics with intensity of action. Nor is the effect got, as so often in short forms, merely by a new spurt in the last line. No matter how brief the poems are, they progress from stage to stage. Reading them, you have strongly the sense of entering at one place, winding through a series of internal developments, and coming out somewhere else. (pp. 69-70)

Thus, though you'd never look to Roethke for the rationalistic, the expository steps are … ticked off as strictly as in the successive steps of a well-formed argument. And thanks to the developmental structure of such poems, one never thinks of them sheerly as descriptive: they have the vigor, and the poetic morality, of action, of form unfolding. (pp. 70-1)

[You] will rarely find in his verse a noun ending in "-ness" or "-ity." He goes as far as is...