SOURCE: "From Open House to the Greenhouse: Theodore Roethke's Poetic Breakthrough," in ELH, Vol. 47, No. 2, Summer, 1980, pp. 399-418.

In the following essay, Bogen studies the evolution of Roethke's poetry as illustrated in the representative poems "Genesis," "On the Road to Woodlawn," and "Cuttings."

My first book was much too wary, much too gingerly in its approach to experience; rather dry in tone and constricted in rhythm. I am trying to loosen up, to rite poems of greater intensity and symbolical depth. [Theodore Roethke, Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke, edited by Ralph J. Mills, Jr., 1968. Subsequent correspondences cited in this essay are reprinted in this volume.]

On Roethke's accomplishment as a poet:

During the last years of his life, Roethke was still writing ardently, leaning on his belief in the authority of the poetic act to carry him through several illnesses. His famous class in "Verse Form" at the...