SOURCE: "Requiem for God's Gardner," in The Nation, Vol. 199, No. 8, September 28, 1964, pp. 168-69.

In the following review, Carruth judges that in The Far Field Roethke achieved qualified success.

During the past year the fashion has been to praise Theodore Roethke to the skies. But what possible good can it do the poor guy now that he's dead and in the ground? He was a marvelous poet and apparently, in some of his moods, a charming, likable person. But he was not a Yeats or a Keats—he was too unsure of himself, technically and emotionally, to write the handful of absolute poems that one needs to enter the first rank—and we do an injustice to his memory and to our own worthiness as memorialists if we say otherwise. It will be better all around if we try instead to see exactly what he was.

This book [The...