SOURCE: "Theodore Roethke: The Lyric of the Self," in Poets in Progress, Northwestern University Press, 1967, pp. 3-23.

An American poet and critic, Mills has published several volumes of verse and studies of such poets as Richard Eberhart, Edith Sitwell, and Kathleen Raine, in addition to Roethke. As well, he is the author of the studies Contemporary American Poetry (1965), Creation's Very Self: On the Personal Element in Recent American Poetry (1969), and Cry of the Human: Essays on Contemporary American Poetry (1975). The following essay, published in 1962, is a revised version of an article that first appeared in Tri-Quarterly in 1958. Here Mills outlines the exploration of selfhood and existence in Roethke's verse.

One of the dangers of any age that has produced important writers and literary revolutions such as our own is that the artists of generations immediately subsequent to the seminal one may not receive the attention they deserve. The...