[3][4] His work was characterized by a willingness to engage deeply with a multifaceted introspection, and his style was overtly rhythmic, with a skilful use of natural imagery.

Indeed, Roethke's mastery of both free verse and fixed forms was complemented by an intense lyrical quality that drew "from the natural world in all its mystery and fierce beauty.

His father, Otto, was a German immigrant, a market-gardener who owned a large local 25-acre greenhouse, along with his brother (Theodore's uncle).

[9] While teaching at Michigan State University in East Lansing, he began to suffer from manic depression, which fueled his poetic impetus.

Some of his best known students included James Wright, Carolyn Kizer, Tess Gallagher, Jack Gilbert, Richard Hugo, and David Wagoner.

"[11] In 1952, Roethke received a Ford Foundation grant to "expand on his knowledge of philosophy and theology", and spent most of his time from June 1952 to September 1953 reading primarily existential works.

Among the philosophers and theologians he read were Sören Kierkegaard, Evelyn Underhill, Meister Eckhart, Paul Tillich, Jacob Boehme, and Martin Buber.

She ensured the posthumous publication of his final volume of poetry, The Far Field, as well as a book of his collected children's verse, Dirty Dinky and Other Creatures, in 1973.

[14] In 1961, Roethke was chosen as one of 50 outstanding Americans of meritorious performance in the fields of endeavor, to be Guest of Honor to the first annual Banquet of the Golden Plate in Monterey, California.

The pool was later filled in and is now a zen rock garden open to the public at the Bloedel Reserve, a 150-acre (60 hectare) former private estate.

Beginning in 1941 with Open House, the distinguished poet and teacher published extensively, receiving a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and two National Book Awards among an array of honors.

Bloom also groups Roethke with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Penn Warren as the most accomplished among the "middle generation" of American poets.

In another review of the book, Elizabeth Drew felt "his poems have a controlled grace of movement and his images the utmost precision; while in the expression of a kind of gnomic wisdom which is peculiar to him as he attains an austerity of contemplation and a pared, spare strictness of language very unusual in poets of today."

For instance, Michael Harrington felt Roethke "found his own voice and central themes in The Lost Son" and Stanley Kunitz saw a "confirmation that he was in full possession of his art and of his vision.

[22] In addition to the well-known greenhouse poems, the Poetry Foundation notes that Roethke also won praise "for his love poems which first appeared in The Waking and earned their own section in the new book and 'were a distinct departure from the painful excavations of the monologues and in some respects a return to the strict stanzaic forms of the earliest work,' [according to the poet] Stanley Kunitz.

[The critic] Ralph Mills described 'the amatory verse' as a blend of 'consideration of self with qualities of eroticism and sensuality; but more important, the poems introduce and maintain a fascination with something beyond the self, that is, with the figure of the other, or the beloved woman.

It reveals the full extent of Roethke's achievement: his ability to perceive reality in terms of the tensions between inner and outer worlds, and to find a meaningful system of metaphor with which to communicate this perception....

[20]In 1967 Roethke's Collected Poems topped the lists of two of the three Pulitzer Prize poetry voters; Phyllis McGinley and Louis Simpson.