From the Dust Jacket: With each passing year the stature of Theodore Roethke grows. The Glass House documents the exuberant and highly successful career that brought him two National Book Awards, and the Bollingen and Pulitzer Prizes in poetry. From his surprisingly "average" childhood in a small Michigan town to his untimely death in 1963, Roethke's life is presented with grace, wit, and warmth, for Allan Seager was one of his closest friends. But it is Seager's insights into the drama of a soul in conflict with itself-into the entire passionate process of artistic ferment and creation -that make this book uniquely important. Theodore Roethke was a complex, self-contradictory, gently, mysterious, ruthlessly honest man. In The Glass House (the title refers to the greenhouse the poet's father kept, which became the dominant symbol in his son's work) the truth Roethke sought has been captured by a biographer of uncommon sensitivity. Allan Seager writes from a profound understanding of both Roethke the man and Roethke the creator. His access to the voluminous notes the poet left enable him to strip away the many masks Roethke felt compelled to wear before the world. Moreover, Seager was able to talk in a way that no "interviewer" ever could with Roethke's widow, his family and friends, and many of the students his teaching inspired. In The Glass House Roethke's peers-such people as W.H. Auden, Rene Char, Stanley Kunitz, Louise Bogan, and Rolfe Humphries-speak of the man whose friendship they valued and whose work they esteemed. The result is the first detailed biography of a great contemporary American poet.