SOURCE: "The Idiom Is Personal," in The New York Times Book Review, September 13, 1953, p. 14.

Carruth is a well-respected and prolific American poet whose verse is frequently autobiographical, varied in mood and form, and noted for its unadorned and precise language. His literary criticism, which is collected in such volumes as Working Papers (1982) and Effluences from the Sacred Cave (1983), is recognized for its directness and tolerance. In the following review, Carruth declares Roethke's poetic voice in The Waking original.

Above all others, Theodore Roethke is a poet to encourage and comfort us in our valley of literary conformism. He leads us back to the surprising upland. He makes us realize how rapidly our literature is flowing toward a dead center of accredited modernity. Worse, he makes us acknowledge, with a disconcerting twinge, that the grand oldsters, the experimentalists of the Twenties and the decade before, have been living on...