animalize, vegetablize, and mineralize

Unlike most of his prominent-poet peers, Roethke sought a kind of salvation and surrender of the individual self in the physical world. While the others were agonizing over their social status, Roethke was attempting to "animalize, vegetablize, and mineralize" himself-to borrow a phrase from a Galway Kinnell elegy to James Wright-and hurl himself headlong, on the momentum of his poems, from agony to ecstasy. There was something truly atavistic and primal in his impulse, because "going back to nature" wasn't quite yet the thing to do.