SOURCE: "The Unity of the Greenhouse Sequence: Roethke's Portrait of the Artist," in Concerning Poetry, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring, 1979, pp. 53-60.

In the following essay, Spanier examines autobiographic allusions to the creative process revealed in the "Greenhouse Sequence" from Roethke's The Lost Son and Other Poems.

Simplicity is deceptive in Theodore Roethke's "greenhouse sequence," which includes the first thirteen poems of The Lost Son and Other Poems (1848) plus one other poem inserted in two later editions of the group. The works are short and descriptive. They contain few, if any, abstract or philosophical statements. On first reading, the sequence may appear to be little more than an album of snapshots—true in color and sharply focused, to be sure—taken in and around the greenhouse that Roethke's father operated in Saginaw, Michigan throughout the poet's childhood. Roethke seems to have arranged the snapshots in a careful order, though (even...