西奥多·罗特克（Theodore Roethke，1908—1963）出生于密歇根州萨吉诺。当他还是个孩子的时候，他花了很多时间在他父亲和叔叔拥有的温室里。他对那里的自然世界的印象后来深刻地影响了他诗歌的主题和意象。罗特克1929年以优异成绩从密歇根大学毕业。后来，他在密歇根大学和哈佛大学上了几门研究生课程，但在学校里并不快乐。他的第一本书《开放之家》（Open House，1941）花了10年时间写成，一经出版便广受好评。他后来很少发表作品，但他的声誉随着每一部新作品的问世而提高，包括1954年获得普利策奖的《觉醒》（The waking）。
他欣赏爱默生、梭罗、惠特曼、布莱克、华兹华斯、叶芝和迪伦·托马斯等诗人的作品。在文体上，他的作品从严谨韵律的诙谐诗歌到充满神秘和超现实意象的自由诗，应有尽有。然而，自然世界的一切神秘、美丽、凶猛和淫荡，在任何时候都是近在咫尺的，而且这些诗中充满了强烈的抒情性。罗特克与W.H.奥登、路易斯·博根、斯坦利·库尼茨和威廉·卡洛斯·威廉斯有着密切的文学友谊。他在不同的学院和大学任教，包括拉法叶、宾夕法尼亚州立大学和本宁顿学院，最后在华盛顿大学工作，在那里他是包括大卫·瓦格纳、卡罗琳·基泽和理查德·雨果在内的一代西北诗人的导师。
Theodore Roethke hardly fits anyone’s image of the stereotypical high-minded poet-intellectual of the 1940s through 1960s. Born in Saginaw, Michigan, his father was a German immigrant who owned and ran a 25-acre greenhouse. Though as a child he read a great deal and as a high school freshman he had a Red Cross campaign speech translated into 26 languages, he suffered from issues of abandonment and loss, and his lack of self-esteem led him to strive to be accepted by peers. When he was 14, his father died of cancer and his uncle committed suicide. He attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he adopted a tough, bear-like image (weighing over 225 pounds) and even developed a fascination with gangsters. Eccentric and nonconformist—he later called himself “odious” and “unhappy”—Roethke yearned for a friend with whom he could talk and relate his ambitions. Poet and writer James Dickey once named Roethke the greatest of all American poets: “I don't see anyone else that has the kind of deep, gut vitality that Roethke's got. Whitman was a great poet, but he's no competition for Roethke.” His difficult childhood, his bouts with bipolar disorder, and his ceaseless search for truth through his poetry writing led to a difficult life, but also helped to produce a remarkable body of work that would influence future generations of American poets to pursue the mysteries of one’s inner self.
Roethke’s awareness evolved at Michigan into a decision to pursue teaching—and poetry—as a career. He earned his BA and MA from the University of Michigan. The fascination with nature he explored so deeply in his later poetry compelled him to write in an undergraduate paper: “When I get alone under an open sky where man isn’t too evident—then I’m tremendously exalted and a thousand vivid ideas and sweet visions flood my consciousness.” In addition to the stories, essays, and criticism commonly expected of English students, Roethke began writing poetry at this time. “If I can’t write, what can I do,” he said, and though Richard Allen Blessing claimed he “wrote a reasonably good prose,” it still would “have taken a keen eye to detect the mature poet beneath the layers of undergraduate baby fat.” The direction towards his eventual career cleared somewhat when Roethke dropped out “in disgust” after a brief stint as a University of Michigan law student: “I didn’t wish to become a defender of property or a corporation lawyer as all my cousins on one side of the family had done.” The attitude evident in this decision supported biographer Allan Seager’s conclusion that it was more than an unsuppressible awareness of life that led him to choose poetry as a career: “It would be flattering to call it courage; more accurately it seems to have been an angry, defiant, Prussian pigheadedness that was leading him to his decision.”