The purpose of this essay is to take representative poems from the first three books Roethke wrote, Open House (1941), The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948), Praise To The End (1951), and demonstrate what he called, in "The Renewal" "the shift of things." What he means by the phrase is shown in an article he wrote in 1950 entitled "Open Letter." His method is "cyclic," he says, and he believes "that to go forward as a spiritual man it is necessary first to go back. Any history of the psyche (or allegorical journey) is bound to be a succession of experiences, similar yet dissimilar. There is a perpetual slipping-back, then a going-forward; but there is some 'progress.' Are not some experiences so powerful and so profound (I am not speaking of the merely compulsive) that they repeat themselves, thrust themselves upon us, again and again, with variation and change, each time bringing us closer to our own most particular (and thus more universal) reality?"
What resolution there is in Roethke's poetry is achieved by constantly refining the same materials, same situations, same imagery. Some critics have complained of this tack as being too narrow and restrictive. But it is my purpose to show that the shape of the work is not a closed circle, but an open one ("Open House," "Open Letter," "Where Knock is Open Wide"). It is not the snake with the tail in its mouth, but a spring, a spiral, a coil, and—a Yeatsian analogy not being out of place when discussing Roethke—a gyre. That is, the poet ends at a higher level but remains directly over and in contact with the early coils. This spiral idea is popular with Roethke…. [We] have to beware of being too mechanistic or simplistic in defining progress…. [If] we go to the body of the work expecting a clearly defined, unambiguous upward movement, we will have to twist and strain the poems for what isn't there. (pp. 269-70)
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