1908 - 1963
"He invented a vocabulary of metamorphosis. He uprooted his environment for unfolding images, replayed light, objects, emotions back to us in juxtapositions never seen or heard before. Inside that darkly blooming world where he debated with God, death and all things green, lovely visions struck him...
We have appointed our kids and our artists keepers of our flattened, post-industrialized consciences. Our poets are lasers of sensibility, feeling, seeing, perceiving with an intensity we don't dare. And they become in this transaction the victim of their own awareness and our staggering unawareness. Thus Theodore Roethke."
--Life magazine, 1972
