For Roethke there is no such well-defined path, nor are there signposts or prominences to indicate his destination. His journey is through a particularly American wilderness, and although the general direction of the journey is never in question, Roethke must make his groping way relying on his instincts or intuitions, "feeling" and learning by the very act of "going" itself, as he was to articulate the process in his poem "The Waking." Nevertheless, Roethke's quest is a religious one, just as Christian's is. In America, however, the order of European Christianity has given way to a pantheism, the structure of which is as uncertain as that of Nature itself. The American pilgrim makes his way westward through the wilderness toward discovery and self-realization: this is the movement of both Roethke's poetry and his life.
Roethke's journey is also an evolutionary one, essentially that described and speculated on by his contemporary Loren Eiseley in The Immense Journey (1957). In his second published book, The Lost Son (1948), Roethke returns to his evolutionary past, where he joins the worms, slugs, and snails in the slime of primordial existence.
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