There is a widespread emerging consensus that Roethke must be judged, along with Robert Lowell, as one of the two American poets of his generation most likely to achieve a durable, major reputation. (p. 409)

For most readers the verse which best represents this poet, and which compels one to return to him again and again, is that body of poems in which a thriving microcosm is set in motion: the poems about orchids and geraniums, about bats, night crows, field mice and summer storms, about a girl thrown by her horse, a small boy waltzed to giddy joy (or is it terror?) by his tipsy father. Above all, it is the so-called "greenhouse poems," in which one finds the special Roethkean voice. These are the poems that prompted John Berryman, in a moving elegy on the death of Roethke, to lament, "The Garden Master's gone," and led Kenneth...