SOURCE: "Closing in on the Self," in The Nation, Vol. 188, No. 12, March 21, 1959, pp. 258-60.

In the following review, Rosenthal offers tempered criticism of Words for the Wind.

Pick up one of Theodore Roethke's longer poems and you are confronted with a stunning mishmash of agonized gibber, described by the poet himself in an essay written some years ago as "the muck and welter, the dark, the dreck" of his verse. The same essay ("Open Letter," published in Ciardi's Mid-Century American Poets) asserts that he nevertheless counts himself "among the happy poets." And indeed, Roethke at his best throws all kinds of dissimilar effects into the great, ceaseless mixer of his sensibility, stirring together notes of driving misery and hysterical ecstasy, of Rabelaisian sensuality and warm, wet regressiveness:

     Believe me, knot of gristle, I bleed like a tree;
     I dream of nothing but boards;
     I could love a duck...