Roethke remains, despite shadows of doubt about his ultimate value, a seminal voice in contemporary poetry. He must be one of the most uneven poets ever called "great" in serious critical writing. He consistently explored new territory only to retreat into the security of old and often secondhand styles. He could be as false to his deepest visions as he was to his unique voice. But if his poetry sounds with echoes from the past it also reverberates into the future. For all his occasional clumsiness Roethke is a poet's poet…. [He was] a dominant influence on most of our recent mystical or oracular poets, poets of transcendent landscapes and magical transformations. (p. 267)

The rivers of [Roethke's] "North American Sequence" appear in such physical detail that we wonder at first whether physical description is the whole aim of the poetry. In a way it is; Roethke wants us to feel the objects in his poetry as he leads us to the revelations he will not always articulate, or cannot articulate, lacking … precision with abstract language.

If some critics have understood "North American Sequence" too much in terms of a traditional mystical opposition between spirit and matter, Roethke's imprecision is at least partly to blame…. Actually Roethke seeks an interpenetration of sense and spirit. "A body with the motion of a soul" …, the body fully itself with its own spiritual grace, immersed in the flow of being where "All finite things reveal infinitude."… Like Bly and Dickey, Roethke is an earthbound mystical poet, a champion of the senses…. Final knowledge is to be sensed, not spiritually intuited. In describing the end of the mystical progression in "The Far Field," Roethke suggests something like Eliot's "still point of the turning world"; but he does it with a realistic physical image: "I have come to a still, but not a deep center,/ A point outside the glittering current."… (p. 273)

Roethke is not, however, always so firm in his resistance to that transcendence which implies separation from the physical…. Eliot may have intruded more upon his consciousness than he liked. Often, especially in his last poems, he seems to accept the tenets of Eliot's other-worldly mysticism, and the concomitant tendency toward abstraction, the use of purely symbolic terms to define a non-sensual state. But his abstractions lack the subtle force of Eliot's. In Four Quartets the image of the rose, though it lacks any real sensual referent, concentrates the force of the entire poem. When Roethke, in "The Rose," writes of "the rose in the sea-wind," the image not only derives too obviously from Eliot's symbol, it seems contrived and flat, an oddly dead flower in the otherwise beautifully vital sequence.

Roethke's problems with abstract language and symbolism cannot, of course, all be blamed on Eliot, who is too often held personally responsible for the academic excesses of modern American poetry. Roethke's tendency toward abstraction and symbolic overload appears even in the Williams-influenced flower poems of The Lost Son—for instance, "Cuttings (later)," which unlike the first "Cuttings" loses a rich suggestiveness when Roethke plugs it into theological concepts both trite and vague. Even without Eliot's influence, the temptation toward vitiating symbolism would probably have increased as Roethke's theological imagination became more complex, more pedantic. But he remained, partly because of Williams's influence, at least theoretically aware of the dangers of abstraction. (pp. 273-74)

Some of Roethke's finest lines can be as abstract as anything in Eliot. But in general he is less comfortable with logical argument than Eliot, a weakness especially evident in his final poetry, in the highly "lit'ry" and artificial language of the "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" in The Far Field. Since his abstractions tend to accompany an uncharacteristic yearning for transcendence from the world of sense, it is hardly surprising to find Eliot's ultimate abstraction, "God," in much of this poetry. (pp. 274-75)

Despite his history of mental illness Roethke was not usually so much a manic depressive as such an orthodox mystic as St. John of the Cross, who experiences first the absolute despair of the dark night, then the sudden, absolute ecstasy of union. For Roethke, such a dichotomy, like the opposition between "God" and the world, could not convincingly be sustained. The imagery of his most effectively mystical poetry, poetry not of transcendence but of physical immersion, combined darkness and light in a union ambiguously beautiful; and it was that dark revelation which Roethke's poetic descendants had begun to explore even as he himself fell away from its difficult truths. (pp. 275-76)

When Roethke's final poems fail it is often because they seek—through abstract statement and the clichés of orthodoxy—too easy a resolution of his ambivalence toward the mystical experience. But the final abstractions of "In a Dark Time" are partly redeemed by its deeply resonant closing phrase, "free in the tearing wind."… Roethke explains this passage by saying that the mystical experience is "no moment in the rose garden," that "God himself, in his most supreme manifestation, risks being maimed, if not destroyed." The mystic who participates in the divine consciousness must suffer the same danger. This [is an] unusually contemporary version of mysticism, in which dark night and ecstatic vision have become simultaneous, inextricable from each other…. Unlike the traditional transcendent mystic, the contemporary visionary often locates himself not in an imagined area of cosmic peace but at the center of a storm. This is Roethke's "steady storm of correspondences" but also the storm of irreducible particulars. The locus of vision is the point of maximum tension among all the world's dualities, the breaking point of a pattern constantly threatening to fly apart. The turmoil that characterizes Roethke's vision here anticipates Bly's plunge "Into the wilds of the universe" … or Plath's electroshock revelation in "Mystic": she is "Used, utterly, in the sun's conflagrations."

The imagery that attends such mystical experience is properly ambiguous, more dark than light…. Phrases like "dark water" occur throughout [poets such as Roethke, Bly, and Plath], and the idea of immersion in that water informs their mystic imaginations…. [Often], as in Roethke's "A Field of Light," it must be read as literal. In "dead water," under "a fine rain," the speaker falls into "a watery drowse."… Roethke characteristically uses such terms to describe his gentler visionary states. Though the end of "Field" announces a vision not of unity but of "the separateness of all things," the description carries an overriding sense of union: "I moved with the morning." Variants of this line (like "I rock with the motion of morning" …) occur frequently in Roethke…. (pp. 276-77)

Often the solid world is imagined wholly as water…. But the sense of earth in watery flux is not always soothing, especially when the poet confronts the final implications of unifying immersion. (p. 277)

Throughout "North American Sequence" water that does not already surround the poet threatens and promises to submerge him, as he correspondingly internalizes it; in "The Far Field," as the water approaches the poet feels within himself "a weightless change, a moving forward / As of water quickening before a narrowing channel," and there follows the meditation on the "thought of my death."

This immersion, the flow into water or into earth, "flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel" … implies a new mysticism, one opposed to the mysticism of transcendence not only because it is described in immediately physical terms and because it suggests a deep ambivalence in its imagery of darkness and its more literal suggestions of death. Because the water which receives the poet has usually become internalized, the image of movement into watery darkness also suggests, unlike images of transcendence, a movement into the depths of the self, and "down into the consciousness of the race."… (pp. 278-79)

Jung's influence on Roethke has been misunderstood, or understood too much in terms of logical dualities by critics who emphasize the orthodox aspects of Roethke's mysticism…. Except in his last and most theologically conventional poems Roethke seldom falls into … simple progressions. Because he tends to discover a paradoxical light within the darkness, not beyond it, his poetry, like Bly's and Dickey's, constantly involves images of dark light, "bright shade," "shimmering" illuminations in shadow. Like Plath and Bly, Roethke's favorite light seems to be the shimmering moon, as coldly dark as it is light. (pp. 279-80)

Sometimes stones are made animate, like the laughing stones in "A Field of Light," but more often stones remain stones, dead but paradoxically heavy with spiritual resonance. Confronting this lithic preoccupation, critics tend to discover death wishes in Roethke as well as Plath. But to identify with stones is not necessarily escapist or self-destructive; it can be the logical end of a particularly visceral sort of mysticism, mysticism which depends on physically experiencing spiritual abstractions. Though the lithic experience seems as close to the experience of unchanging timelessness as the resolutely earthbound poet can come, at the same time stones, especially Roethke's and Plath's stream-washed stones, are physically part of the constant flow of matter, dissolving and dissolving in accord with the earth's deepest reverberations….

[Stones] form part of a constellation of images (often surrealist) of darkness, dim moons, water, death, and transformation. (p. 280)

Roethke's women often play a mythic and implicitly mystical role…. [But they] often seem ill-suited to the task of guarding dark secrets. Rather than being powerful they appear childishly vulnerable, soft and furry like the baby animals and plump birds which quiver about them. Though some of Roethke's love poems are evident triumphs, many, especially toward the end, degenerate into pop love-song cliché, frequently involving the wind. As his words go limp, heavily precious sentimentalism takes over. Like the "essayistic" language of much of the philosophical poetry, here sentimental language creates the effect of excessive abstraction; the vitality of individual experience becomes lost in generalizing triteness. It remains fairly clear … [that] Roethke uses women—as he uses animals in his meditations—as "mediators" in his journey to the spiritual heart of nature. But to succeed in this aim—even disregarding the idea that women may be less appropriate for such an instrumental role than animals—requires more control of tone, and more psychological self-assurance, than Roethke usually possesses.

The second stanza of "The Pure Fury," which could be offered in evidence of the awkwardness of Roethke's philosophical abstractions, also exemplifies the inadequacy of his abstract women, though here the problem is not exactly sentimentality…. [The] woman described in this poem [has been called] an anima figure, but she seems too foolish and insignificant for that rather heavy role, more stereotype than archetype…. (pp. 281-82)

Perhaps inevitably, Roethke's most forceful and enlightened woman is not the figure of a lover but an intelligent mother-figure. "Meditations of an Old Woman" not only contains an attack (in "Fourth Meditation") on spiritually pretentious clichés about women but it creates a clearly female being who is fully individuated and as human as Roethke…. She is a convincing representation, partly because not simply archetypal, of a basic female force that Roethke successfully evokes in few of his poems…. Reduced to archetype, this woman is related to the fulfilling natural force Roethke will later seek in "North American Sequence" where, as W. D. Snodgrass has written, the final aim is entry "into water as woman, into earth as goddess-mother." The actual means of that entry remain ambiguous; as "Enshroud" and "Terrible" suggest, Roethke's female is as potentially ominous as she is enlightening, when he confronts her fully. In this respect she resembles Bly's women who guard the secrets of dark waters under the earth, the Great Mothers whose current violent reappearance in our racial psyche he describes at length in his essay "I Came Out of the Mother Naked." (pp. 282-83)

Roethke could not, of course, be expected to travel so far into [the] surrealist vision [as Bly and Plath]…. His unique value lies partly in his ability to develop much of the poetic and spiritual vocabulary they have carried further and to articulate the vision at a time when it seemed far more eccentric than it seems now. That vision—the animism, the "body consciousness," the particularly corporeal approach to mystical contact, with the evolutionary and apocalyptic imagery that logically follows—has become almost commonplace in poetry now. This happens not entirely because of Roethke's influence; the vision is at least in its large outlines collective; fragments of it keep turning up…. In the darkness beneath the waters Roethke saw something extensive enough to touch us all, something ancient that calls forth terror and ecstasy, but something at the same time new, and newly come to the deep dreams of our deepest poets. (pp. 287-88)