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The motif of the journey is more crucial to the poetry of Theodore Roethke than to that of any other major American poet since Whitman. Perhaps it is more important to Roethke than it is to Whitman. Certainly it is more coherent. Whereas Whitman's journey, if it can be called that, is outward, in all directions, until the fragmented poet achieves reintegration by becoming the cosmos itself, Roethke's is a simple journey, a journey from beginning to destination. But to say that it is simple is not to imply that it is easy. The journey, as it is recorded in The Collected Poems (1966), is that of a modern-day Pilgrim's Progress, fraught with its own temptations of vanity and pride, its own sloughs of despond. But Roethke's journey is essentially more difficult than Christian's. For Christian there is a road, worn, and thus defined, by those who have gone before him, and always in the distance stand the Delectable Mountains to mark his destination and draw him onward.
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