The purpose of this essay is to take representative poems from the first three books Roethke wrote, Open House (1941), The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948), Praise To The End (1951), and demonstrate what he called, in "The Renewal" "the shift of things." What he means by the phrase is shown in an article he wrote in 1950 entitled "Open Letter." His method is "cyclic," he says, and he believes "that to go forward as a spiritual man it is necessary first to go back. Any history of the psyche (or allegorical journey) is bound to be a succession of experiences, similar yet dissimilar. There is a perpetual slipping-back, then a going-forward; but there is some 'progress.' Are not some experiences so powerful and so profound (I am not speaking of the merely compulsive) that they repeat themselves, thrust themselves upon us, again and again, with variation and change, each...