A constellation of essays that reanimates the work of this pivotal twentieth-century American poet for a new century.

This volume is the first to reconsider Roethke’s work in terms of the expanded critical approaches to literature that have emerged since his death in 1963. Editor William Barillas and over forty contributors, including highly respected literary scholars, critics, and writers such as Peter Balakian, Camille Paglia, Jay Parini, and David Wojahn, collectively make a case for Roethke’s poetry as a complete, unified, and evolving body of work. The accessible essays employ a number of approaches, including formalism, ecocriticism, reader-response, and feminist critique to explicate the poetics, themes, and the biographical, historical, cultural, and literary contexts of Roethke’s work.

William Barillas is the author of The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland, also from Ohio University Press, as well as many essays in scholarly and literary journals. His areas of focus include American literature, particularly literature of the Midwest, with special concern for poetry, environmental literature, and Latinx literature.