SOURCE: "On Theodore Roethke's Collected Poems," in First Reactions: Critical Essays 1968-79, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, pp. 59-62.

James is an Australian-born English critic, poet, and novelist who has written extensively about British culture and national politics but is perhaps best known for his commentaries on television and broadcast programming. Joseph Epstein, of The New York Times Book Review, has judged James "one of the brightest figures in contemporary English intellectual journalism" and the humourous and satirical qualities of his writing—including his poetry—have attracted many readers. In the following review, which was originally published in 1968, he states that a minority of Roethke's poems are highly original and accomplished, though most are derivative.

When Theodore Roethke died five years ago, his obituaries, very sympathetically written, tended to reveal by implication that the men who wrote them had doubts about the purity and weight of his achievement in poetry...