SOURCE: "Theodore Roethke," in A Literary History of the American West, Texas Christian University Press, 1987, pp. 447-55.

In the following essay, Vanderbilt considers evidence of regionalism in Roethke's poetry.

Since Theodore Roethke's sudden, untimely death in summer of 1963, his work has been the subject of a steadily rising flood of critical assessments. The consensus of most of them is that his career can best be explained as an intense search for identity, wholeness, and grace. He shaped his private meditations into increasingly powerful esthetic forms that are at once original and charged with echoes from his various American and English poet-masters. A further aspect of Roethke's imaginative vision, however, remains to be adequately explored, namely his significant response to a regional America—the Midwest of his youth and, climactically, the Pacific Northwest where he lived his final sixteen years.

Roethke arrived in the Northwest in autumn of 1947 to...