By the time Theodore Roethke arrived at the University of Washington in the fall of 1947, he was nearing forty and had more than a dozen years of college-teaching experience. His first book of poems, Open House (1941), had been favorably reviewed, and he had established a modest reputation as a poet. He was about to publish his second collection, The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948). Yet, his best poems and the general recognition that he was one of the great poets of the twentieth century were years ahead of him. When he got to Seattle, Pacific Northwest poetry was still in its infancy. Northwesterners such as Vardis Fisher of Idaho, A. B. Guthrie Jr. of Montana, and H. L. Davis of Oregon were writing novels of some importance, but before Roethke reached Seattle there was no poetry of consequence being written in that region (William Stafford arrived in Portland...