In 1925 the poet went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the first in his family to attend a university. In 1929 he graduated from the University of Michigan and entered the Law School. But in 1930 he dropped out of law school to pursue a master's degree in literature, and in the fall that year he entered the Harvard Graduate School. Soon he became a professor of English. He taught at several universities, among them Lafayette College, Pennsylvania State University, and Bennington College. In 1935, he was expelled from his position at Lafayette, which brought him back to Michigan. Just prior to his return, he had an affair with established poet and critic Louise Bogan², who was later to become one of his strongest early supporters.

While teaching at Michigan State College in Lansing, he began to suffer from depression, which he used as a creative impetus for his poetry. It was in November 1935 when he had the first of a series of mental breakdowns and was placed in a local hospital for three months. Afterwards he returned to Saginaw to recover. In 1936 he took on another teaching job at Pennsylvania State.

In 1941 Roethke published the Open House. This first book recreates a first step into what may be considered as Roethke's confessional aesthetic: "My secrets cry aloud. / I have no need for tongue. / My heart keeps open house, / My doors are widely swung. / An epic of the eyes / My love, with no disguise." ("Open House"). Belonging to the so called "Middle Generation" or the "Wrecked Generation", he does not really identify with the "urban" poetry developed by fellow poets such as Robert Lowell or John Berryman. M.L.Rosenthal has been a hard critic for Roehtke's work, but in his final reflection in the seminal The New Poets (1967), he declared:

An essential influence on Roethke's poetry is obviously that of the romantic interpretation of nature (Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman are evident powerful influences), and the expansion of that aesthetic projection in Robert Frost's poetics, together with poets who Roethke much admired such as the English poet Gerald Manley Hopkins, and the English Romantics William Blake and William Wordsworth, even though it has been argued that his early influences have been John Donne, Léonie Adams, Louise Bogan, Emily Dickinson, Rolfe Humphries, Stanley Kunitz, and Elinor Wylie. However, Open House was an important beginning for Roethke as it was favourably reviewed in the New Yorker, the Saturday Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Atlantic. The book's subjective focus on personal experience marked an important departure from T. S. Eliot's doctrine of poetic impersonality, searching for an empathy with Frost's imagination. M.L.Rosenthal puts it as follows:

In 1943 Roethke decided to leave Penn State to teach at Bennington College. While at Bennington he felt pressured to complete and produce poems that would make up his second book, The Lost Son. In revisiting the landscapes of childhood, the lyrical I searches for connections between a child's consciousness and the adult world presided by the poet's father. Roehtke proceeded to an ongoing recasting process arranging and rearranging his early poetic sequences under the idea of a spiritual autobiography that would expand from The Lost Son up to Praise to the End! (1951), and The Waking (1953). The "greenhouse world" is invoked as a "reality harsher than reality" in order to merge the individual psyche - the poet's romantic ache of looking - with organic life-forms and growth. The metaphor of the "open house" shifts into the figure of the "glasshouse" as the dominant symbol of the inner self. Roethke described the glasshouse, in "An American Poet Introduces Himself and His Poems" (BBC broadcast, 30 July 1953), as "both heaven and hell.... It was a universe, several worlds, which, even as a child, one worried about, and struggled to keep alive."

In 1945 Roethke suffered another depression and he was admitted into a hospital in Albany where received shock treatmet therapy. He also finally received a long-awaited Guggenheim Fellowship which allowed him to relax while he worked on his next collection of works. In the spring of 1947 he returned to Penn State for a brief teaching position. During the summer he was offered a position at the University of Washington and in September he went west to Seattle.

In 1948 The Lost Son and Other Poems was published. It had actually been completed in 1947 but he delayed publication until the following March. In this poetic sequence and his next one, Praise to the End! (1951), Roethke seems most influenced by William Blake's poetics (especially the sequence Songs of Innocence and Experience) and William Wordsworth's The Prelude, where we discover an intense journey into the word, into pre-rational speech, into the regenerative capacity of language in its tribal ritualistic senses: "I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, / In my veins, in my bones I feel it, - / The small waters seeping upward, / The tight grains parting at last. / When sprouts break out, / Slippery as fish, / I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet" ("Cuttings").

During the summer of 1949 Roethke returned to Saginaw in order to concentrate on his poetry uninterrupted, but in the fall he had to be submitted to a local hospital. In 1950 he received his second Guggenheim Fellowship. Two years later Roethke went to New York to give a poetry reading and it was here that he crossed paths with Beatrice O'Connell, a former Bennington student. They had a short courtship and married within a month on January 3, 1953.

In November that year the poet had a minor mental breakdown from which he recovered quickly, but he suffered another shock no less than three months later when his mother died. Good news did not come until a few weeks later when he was notified of the Pulitzer Prize he had won for The Waking. In 1956 Roethke resumed teaching at the University of Washington after travelling in Europe again. In 1957 he began to have symptoms of another mental breakdown and remained hospitalized for three months. When he recovered he returned to teaching and in the fall of 1958 he published Words for the Wind, which received the Bollingen Prize and the National Book Award. In reviewing this poetic sequence Delmore Schwartz described the essential nature of Roethke's method and matter: "These poems appear, at first glance, to be uncontrollable and subliminal outcries, the voices of roots, stones, leaves, logs, small birds; and they also resemble the songs in Shakespearian plays. . . . Roethke uses a variety of devices with the utmost cunning and craft to bring the unconsciousness to the surface of articulate expression." A good example to illustrate these words may be the poem "The Exorcism": "The grey sheep came. I ran, / My body half in flame. / (Father of flowers, who / Dares face the thing he is?) // As if pure being woke, / The dust rose and spoke; / A shape cried from a cloud, / Cried to my flesh out loud. // (And yet I was not there, / But down long corridors, / My own, my secret lips / Babbling in urinals.)"⁵.

In 1959 he had another mental breakdown and was admitted into the Halcyon Sanitarium in Seattle. In 1960 the Roethke's went to New York so that the poet could give several readings and afterwards continued on to Europe. In 1961 they returned to America for the publication of his children's collection of poems, I Am! Says the Lamb.

In 1962 he was presented with an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Michigan. In 1963 he finished the first manuscript of The Far Field, but unfortunately he was never able to revise it. Theodore Roethke suffered a coronary occlusion while swimming at a friend's pool on August 1st. He was buried with his mother and father in Oakwood Cemetery in Saginaw. Eileen Simpson, John Berryman's former wife, resumed their relationship with Roethke as follows:

The Far Field is composed by four sections, each one focusing on a specific area of personal experience and sensibility as a path towards spiritual insight. The first section is formed by several sub-sequences under the following general significant title "North American Sequence", and the titles of each specific sub-sequence: "The Longing", "Meditation at Oyster River", "Journey to the Interior", "The Long Waters", "The Far Field" and "The Rose". The voices that flow along these sequences project what may be considered as a "Northwest sensibility" as Roethke has put it. The Romantic I delves into nature in order to exorcise sophisticated feelings of suffering. Schopenhauer's philosophy should be recovered to interpret these sequences from the perspective of understanding suffering as a way of knowledge. This is M. L. Rosenthal on Roethke's poetic sequence:

Roethke's previous symbol for the psyche, "the glass house", shifts now into the powerful symbol of the "field of glass": "In my mind's eye I see those fields of glass, / As I looked out at them from the high house" ("Otto"). Time becomes subjective in its most oneiric sense. Wordsworth's Prelude is noticed between Roethke's spots of time along these sequences. These spots of time identify in a very deep way with North East America: "What do they tell us, sound and silence? / I think of American sounds in this silence: / On the banks of the Tombstone, the wind-harps having their say, / The thrush singing alone, that easy bird [...]" ("The Rose"). The journey becomes a major symbol: "I dream of journeys repeatedly" ("The Far Field"). Spatial references such as "in" and "out" determine the triple motif of the outer-inner journeys that characterize the poetic sequence. The symbols of the sea and the field stand for the passages to death and infinity, to the greenhouses and the childhood years, to the interior, and to the possibilities to transcend one's mind.