SOURCE: "The Words of Their Roaring: Roethke's Use of the Psalms of David," in The David Myth in Western Literature, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, Purdue University Press, 1980, pp. 156-67.

In the following essay, Lewandowska claims that the poems in Praise to the End! evince the influence of the Bible's Psalms.

Theodore Roethke's long Praise to the End! sequence is probably best approached through Roethke's own guide to perception: "We think by feeling. What is there to know?" Indeed, it is one of the few long sequences in modern poetry that can be read aloud, dramatically, and erupt into meaning solely by means of its sounds and images. Yet, for those of us who must know as well as feel, the sequence is extremely complex and thus difficult to explicate. Though Roethke insisted he did not "rely on allusion," he suggested many of the ancestors for...