[major American lyric poet whose darkly romantic verse is characterized by her use of traditional structures, concise language, and vivid description, Bogan is recognized particularly for her honest and austere rendering of emotion. She was also a distinguished critic who served as poetry editor for the New Yorker from 1931 to 1970 and was known for her exacting standards and her penetrating analyses of many of the major poets of the twentieth century. In the following excerpt, Bogan praises The Lost Son as an exploration of emotion and "primordial experience. "]

Theodore Roethke's The Lost Son gains a good deal of coherence by sticking to a few absolutely personal themes. In the long poem that gives the book its title, he plunges into his subconscious as into a pond, and brings up all sorts of clammy and amorphous material. He often frames it in the language of the adage, the proverb, the incantation, and the nonsense rhyme. He is made, that is to say, almost inarticulate by the fears and pressures in which he has submerged himself. Where [Randall] Jarrell frequently only describes, Roethke relives. The Lost Son is written with complete conscious control. The effects have been manipulated, as all art is manipulated, but the method aids in the understanding of the material instead of befogging it. Throughout, true emotion gives the chosen style coloration and shape. The pattern of The Lost Son is ancient and satisfying as well—the pattern of light-found-after-darkness. The poet rises, at the end, to the surface of his obsessive dream to see the world in the light of day. This exploration of primordial experience is surely more effective than the putting down of detached items on the "state of the world." Roethke's complete documentation of his childhood and of his father's florist trade also proves fruitful in emotional reference. And he never pads poems out to conventional size or shape.

Jarrell and Roethke should be read together. Few seasons bring us works in which the virtues and faults of our enlightened younger poetic generation appear in such sharp relief. Roethke is full of virtues that are instinctive, or that can be acquired only with great difficulty. Jarrell also displays innate talent, but he is occasionally full of brilliant tricks that can be learned all too easily. Even in the new style, it is the temperament of the individual that counts. Young talents should not be pushed by the snobberies of the academic and the "intellectual" worlds into dealing with subjects that involve them only partially, or into too much adherence to too many poetic texts, no matter how admirable those texts, by themselves or in combination, may be.