[Auden is recognized as one of the preeminent poets of the twentieth century. His poetry centers on moral issues and evidences strong political, social, and psychological orientations. In the following review, Auden hails Open House but expresses the opinion that Roethke needs to continue growing as a poet.]

Both in life and art the human task is to create a necessary order out of an arbitrary chaos. A necessary order implies that the process of its creation is not itself arbitrary; one is not free to create any order one chooses. The order realized must, in fact, have been already latent in the chaos, so that successful creation is a process of discovery. As long as this remains latent and unconscious, conscious life must appear arbitrary; one grows up in the degree to which this unconscious order becomes conscious and its potentialities developed, to the degree that one's life ceases to be arbitrary, to the degree that one becomes both conscious of and true to one's fate. An artist is someone who is able to express his human development in a public medium.

A work of art, like a life, can fail in two different ways: either, in terror of admitting that there is any chaos, it takes refuge in some arbitrary conscious order it has acquired ready-made from others or thought up itself on the spur of the moment, some order which, because it ignores the chaos that exists can do nothing with it but suppress it; or, lacking the courage and the faith to believe that it is possible and a duty to bring the chaos to order, it contents itself with a purely passive idolization of the flux. In poetry, the first attitude leads to a lifeless academic rhetoric; the second to the formless, the vague, the nonsensical and boring stream-of-consciousness.

A good poet can be recognized by his tense awareness of both chaos and order, the arbitrary and the necessary, the fact and the pattern: as Angelus Silesius says:—

Fuerwahr, wer diese Welt
Recht nimmt in Augenschein,
Muss bald Democritus,
Bald Heraclitus sein.

By such a test, Mr. Roethke is instantly recognizable as a good poet. He is well aware of "Confusion's core set deep within," "The ugly of the universe," "the menance of ancestral eyes," and their terrifying laughter rumbling in one's belly. He is willing to acknowledge the facts of suffering, "the rubbish of confusion," whether it is his own or that of others, the poor and those unfortunate ones for whom

Acceleration is their need:
A mania keeps them on the move
Until the toughest nerves are frayed.
They are the prisoners of speed
Who flee in what their hands have made

because he knows that "A scratch forgotten is a scratch infected," but he is not content to lie down and blubber, but accepts them as a challenge:

Many people have the experience of feeling physically soiled and humiliated by life; some quickly put it out of their mind, others gloat narcissistically on its unimportant details; but both to remember and to transform the humiliation into something beautiful, as Mr. Roethke does, is rare. Every one of the lyrics in this book, whether serious or light, shares the same kind of ordered sensibility: Open House is completely successful.

The only question which remains, and it concerns the poet rather than the reader, is: "Where is Mr. Roethke to go from here? Having mastered, with the help of Herrick, Marvell, and Blake, a certain style of expression, how is he to develop it, to escape being confined to short, and usually iambic, lyrics?"

It is possible, I think, that Mr. Roethke is trusting too much to diction, to the poetic instrument itself, to create order out of chaos. For poetry is only an instrument; it can be sharpened, but it cannot by itself widen the area of experience with which it deals. Poe was quite right in saying that an interest in poetry alone, can only produce short lyrics, but wrong, I think, in concluding from this that only short lyrics are poetry. It is possible that Mr. Roethke has read quite enough English poetry for a bit, and should now read not only the poetry of other cultures, but books that are neither poetry nor about poetry. For every artist must be like one of his own characters who

… cried at enemies undone
And longed to feel the impact of defeat.

Otherwise he may be in danger of certain experiences becoming compulsive, and of either, like Emily Dickinson and A. E. Housman, playing more and more variations on an old theme, or, like Rimbaud, of coming to the end of his experiences and ceasing to write.

But this, as I have said, is Mr. Roethke's problem, not ours. In Open House he has already done more than enough to make us lastingly happy and grateful.