SOURCE: "Deep, Lyrical Feelings," in The New York Times Book Review, December 16, 1951, p. 4.

Eberhart is a highly regarded lyric poet whose verse examines fundamental questions about the nature of existence. His poems typically evoke quotidian images that illuminate conflicts between emotion and intellect, innocence and experience, chaos and order, and the spiritual and physical realms. Below, Eberhart uses the occasion of a review of Praise to the End! to extol Roethke's skill as a poet.

Theodore Roethke joins the ranks of the pure poets. His power is that his offering is clean-cut. His verse is pure. It is totally sensuous, totally personal, and his vision is totally contained. His poetry is not based on schematized intellectualism but on blood-felt reports of sense experience known in memory, transmuted by imagination.

The limitation of his work makes for its purity and acts as a conscious good. The out-thrust and the...