Theodore Roethke's childhood home at 1805 Gratiot Avenue in Saginaw is filled with family furniture and possessions that local supporters have tracked down and returned. On the back porch, the day I visited, his father's galoshes stood next to a chair where you could imagine he'd just sat to take them off. At the Hoyt Library in Saginaw are boxes of Roethke memorabilia including a photograph of Ted and his sister, June, sitting on the ground in front of his parents and ranks of other nurserymen at a convention.

But for happy discovery, nothing equaled the contents of the folder brought to me at the Special Collections room in the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan: not only letters concerning some of the five attempts made either by the University or by Roethke himself to obtain a teaching position for him, and letters back and forth about the honorary degree he was awarded in 1962, but also copies of four poems that have never been published—until now.

Two were in typescript with words struck through and replaced, x'd out punctuation and misspellings; two others, clean copies but still with misspellings, appeared to have been mimeographed. Roethke had sent the poems to his friend Otto Graf, a professor of German at the University of Michigan. Graf kept them for fifty years and donated them in 1977 and 1983. (He also gave copies of four other poems that had been published: "The Summons," "Vernal Sentiment," "Ballad of the Clairvoyant Widow" and "In the Time of Change.")

The four poems probably date from around 1929, the year Roethke graduated, at twenty-one, from the University of Michigan with high distinction and a Phi Beta Kappa key. We know that he was writing seriously at this time because his first known published poems were the three that appeared in the May/June 1930 issue of The Harp, a literary magazine. Among them was the brief "Method": "Sweep up the broken dreams of youth! / (The broom to use is utter truth)."

When Roethke arrived in Ann Arbor in 1925 from Saginaw, at seventeen, he registered for "Lit-Law." He wound up as a literature major and enrolled in Michigan's law school for a single, disastrous semester. By January 1930, he was back in the English department as a graduate student taking courses in Victorian, Restoration, American, and Russian literature and the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and D. H. Lawrence.

One bit of evidence that these four poems date from Roethke's undergraduate years is on the reverse side of the typed sheet containing "Barrier Broken," where Roethke wrote a note to Graf: "Really I am not screwy in this letter, but yours invited such prose. This verse explains where the gal's enticing charm broke through my, 'You gals can't even touch me.'"

The "gal" was most likely his Michigan classmate Eleanor Taylor Holt, whom Roethke dated in college and wanted to marry, according to his widow, Beatrice Roethke Lushington. As a result of his mother's pressure, however, "He called it off," Lushington said. "Why? Because if you can write poetry, you can't marry. He wanted to please his mother. It was very sad."

Eleanor Holt came from Beaver, Pennsylvania, and, according to Eugene Huff, a childhood friend of Roethke, her father was the head of the law department of the Pennsylvania Railroad. After Ted and Eleanor graduated, perhaps as a gesture of spite, Roethke had his bachelor's degree mailed to Eleanor rather than to his mother. It can be found in Saginaw's Hoyt library. Holt's letters were closed for twenty-five years, but Lushington recently gave them to the Roethke collection at the University of Washington.

Roethke was always ambivalent about Michigan. After two semesters in the English department he decamped to Harvard. He called Michigan "a place of death," Lushington recalled in a 2001 interview. "That was a joke of course—he meant as a place to learn creative writing."

But he ran out of money at Harvard and had to take a teaching job. When he finally did receive a master's degree in 1936, it was from Michigan. It was the University of Michigan Press that published the first of his poems to appear in a book: ten in New Michigan Verse, in 1946.

We don't know whether Roethke tried to have these four "lost" poems published, but he never included them in his collections. Should they be published, then? "They're interesting," Lushington said, when she graciously gave permission for them to be published. "You can see the style." But she was concerned that it be made clear that Roethke "might not have considered these good enough to publish—they weren't mature work."

In addition to the four poems in the Special Collections folder are notes Roethke made on the back cover and inside page of some sort of paperback book or notebook that Graf also donated. There is no indication when they were written, but they show the way the poet worked, grabbing a pencil or pen to capture a word or a couple lines as they came to him: "dew-dazzled" "the blue spheres tilt," "he cannot shake the eye of day." The scribblings are random, intriguing and haunting and, like these early poems, lead us forward to the poems he wrote at the height of his powers.