SOURCE: A review of Praise to the End!, in The New Yorker, Vol. XXVII, No. 53, February 16, 1952, pp. 107-08.

In the following excerpt, Bogan compares Roethke's poetry to that of Richard Eberhart and applauds the symbolism that Roethke employs in Praise to the End! to suggest the journey from childhood into mature consciousness.

When Goethe stated that the shudder expressed mankind's best side, he was thinking not of the Gothic atmosphere fashionable in his day so much as of the general feeling of awe at the mysteries of the universe, to which the most hardened materialist is not entirely immune. In modern poetry, this larger emotion is rare indeed; the whole emotional set of the period is against it. The Gothic shudder, on the other hand, appears with fair regularity. The Surrealists revived it while exploiting the dark marvels of the subconscious, and traces of Surrealist influence continue to...