Theodore Roethke (1908–1963), poet, was born in Saginaw, Michigan. His father and uncle owned greenhouses, which taught the young boy a reverence for nature. The greenhouse appeared as a frequent subject in his poetry. Roethke once wrote that the greenhouse "is . . . my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth."

Roethke attended the University of Michigan, where he was a reputed athlete. He dropped out of law school there and went to Harvard for graduate work. After graduation, he supported himself by teaching English at different universities. He was known for his public readings, which were enormously successful with students. Struggling to balance his vocation with his avocation, poetry, Roethke exhausted himself and suffered from mental breakdowns. Diagnosed with manic-depressive illness, he spent time in mental institutions. Roethke belied the stereotype of the conventional poet: a bear-like man, he weighed over two hundred pounds.

Roethke's first book, Open House, which appeared in 1941, was reviewed by the poet W. H. Auden, who said that Roethke had the ability to transform personal humiliation into something beautiful. The volume introduced the rich music, bitter wit, and dramatic themes that would characterize his work. The "greenhouse" lyrics of The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) reveal the poet's empathy and search for oneness with all animate life: "I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,/In my veins, in my bones I feel it." Praise to the End (1951) presented a sequence of dramatic pieces. Other collections of poetry included The Waking (1953), which won the Pulitzer Prize, Words for the Wind: The Collected Verse (1958), and The Far Field (1964). The publication of Collected Poems, published posthumously in 1966, brought renewed interest in Roethke, who counted himself "among the happy poets."