[Carruth is a well-respected and prolific American poet whose verse is frequently autobiographical, varied in mood and form, and noted for its unadorned and precise language. His literary criticism, which is collected in such volumes as Working Papers (1982) and Effluences from the Sacred Cave (1983), is recognized for its directness and tolerance. In the following review, Carruth declares Roethke's poetic voice in The Waking original.]

Above all others, Theodore Roethke is a poet to encourage and comfort us in our valley of literary conformism. He leads us back to the surprising upland. He makes us realize how rapidly our literature is flowing toward a dead center of accredited modernity. Worse, he makes us acknowledge, with a disconcerting twinge, that the grand oldsters, the experimentalists of the Twenties and the decade before, have been living on their original investments for thirty years or more, and that today experimental writing has been forfeited to juniority and dunderdom—the forlorn margin.

Roethke himself is, of course, the exception. He has turned, after a long apprenticeship in the techniques of standard English verse, to a personal idiom and a compressed, exclamatory line. He does not always avoid the pitfall of obscurity, but his writing is certainly more interesting and more provocative than any other current poetry. The Waking, which is a collection from his previous books plus a section of new poems, shows his development with remarkable clarity.

The author was forced into his later period by the demands of his subject. Among his earlier poems, the most interesting are those which evoke his childhood, his life as the son of a florist—i.e., a grower, not a seller, of flowers. These are poems of groping roots, straining tendrils, the turmoil of growth in a steamy greenhouse. From this Roethke passed to a consideration of all primitive life, the dark life of weed and minnow at the bottom of a woodland pond, the equally dark life of children.

The most interesting of Roethke's recent poems are those written from the point of view of a child. Usually children's sayings are a source of fun: when a child says something that sounds adult—or when a monkey smokes a cigar—we laugh. But Roethke's child says: "A kitten can / Bite with his feet: / Papa and Mamma / Have more teeth." This is the child's own intelligence which lives on in all of us; he is our spokesman for a fearful and murderous heritage.

Psychoanalysts have been telling us this for years, of course, but the poet has an advantage. Roethke gives us the actual experience of the child's insight. His poetry, far from being clinical, conveys the power and often the beauty that are only possible in the world of the imagination.