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 Burke, in one of the earliest and best essays we have, to celebrate Roethke's "vegetal radicalism" [see excerpt above]. Roethke himself spoke of "the greenhouse, my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth" confirming what would be evident enough without such corroboratory evidence: that from Roethke's childhood experiences around a greenhouse in Michigan, run by his father, he evolved a set of poetic images and symbols, a vocabulary, a tone, a way of apprehending the natural world, which were to serve him steadily (some would say obsessively) through the rest of his career. (pp. 409-10)
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