A Necessary Order: Theodore Roethke and the Writing Process
Ohio University Press, 1991
Based on detailed analysis of the drafts and manuscripts in the Theodore Roethke papers at the University of Washington, A Necessary Order: Theodore Roethke and the Writing Process explores the development of the poet's ways of writing over the various stages of his career, as he progressed from his "metaphysical" poetry of the 1930s, through the powerful experimental sequences of the 1940s, to the love poems and the Whitmanesque North American Sequence that cap his work. For Roethke, more than for most poets, what he wrote was deeply interwoven with how he went about writing. This book illuminates his distinctive and fascinating methods.