SOURCE: "Theodore Roethke: 'In a Slow Up-Sway'," in The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, edited by Warren French, Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1970, pp. 199-207.

In the following excerpt, Jaffe highlights Roethke's strengths as a poet.

It has become a cliché of the modern poetry class to point out how divided critical and anthological opinion had become by the end of the 50s. The so-called academic anthologies excluded the Beat poets; the Beat collections excluded the academics. Roethke might well have been included in either kind of collection, it seems to me. Perhaps that's one reason why he was not sufficiently appreciated. Both camps probably found him suspect. During the 50s Roethke had three books: Praise to the End (1951), The Waking, Poems 1933-1953 (1953), and Words for the Wind (1958), the last, a collection of new and earlier work. Poems like "The Shape of the Fire," "Praise to the End," "I Cry, Love...