SOURCE: "Poets and Critics on Roethke," in "The Edge of What I Have": Theodore Roethke and After, Bucknell University Press, 1977, pp. 13-36.

In the following essay, Williams provides a survey of Roethke's critical reception among contemporary poets and reviewers.

Throughout Theodore Roethke's middle and late career and after his death in 1963, poets have enthusiastically praised his work, while major critics have generally ignored or slighted him. Not until the fifth edition of the well-known anthology, Sanders, Nelson, and Rosenthal's The Chief Modern Poets of England and America (1970), was Roethke included; and only recently in a collection of essays, Profile of Theodore Roethke (1971), the editor, William Heyen, pointed out that nine of his ten contributors were themselves poets (the single exception being Roethke's biographer, the late novelist Allan Seager), thus again reminding one that Roethke is essentially a poet's poet.

What later poets particularly admired in Roethke's work was...