"The book of Roethke's that I continue to think of as the great one is The Lost Son, published in 1948. Reviewing it for Poetry, I commented on one of his remarkable gifts, that of the compassionate flow of self into the things of his experience. His poems become what they love. No other modern poet seems so directly tuned to the natural universe; his disturbance was in being human. The life in his poems emerges out of stones and swamps, tries on leaves and wings, struggles toward the divine. 'Brooding on God,' he wrote near the end, 'I may become a man.' The soul trapped in his ursine frame gathered to itself a host of 'lovely diminutives.' This florist's son never really departed from the moist, fecund world of his father's Saginaw greenhouses, reputed to be the grandest in the state of Michigan." —Stanley Kunitz (Crossroads, Spring 2002)