My Papa's Waltz

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1942

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

“My Papa’s Waltz” is an early expression of a movement in American poetry in which historical context is at once vital and irrelevant. The poem was initially drafted and first published in 1942, just months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor launched America’s grand war effort. Yet the poem defies that historical context and begs the question of who in 1942 America would have the interest to read a poem about a child struggling to dance with his drunk father.

The historical context in which Roethke developed as a poet was defined by two signature historical realities that account for the critical importance of Roethke’s poem. The first was the publication in the 1920s of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, more than 40 years after her death, poetry so unlike what had long defined American verse that it created a wave of enthusiasm for a kind of poetry that before was deemed irrelevant, even marginal: the excavation into the poet’s emotional experience. Dickinson’s poetry was quietly ironic, slyly subversive in its handling of rhythm and rhyme, and above all honest about the emotional conflicts and deep vulnerabilities of the poet.

The second historical reality that defined Roethke’s context was the turn in the 1930s to education as a training ground for poets. It was at Michigan that Roethke, along with other would-be poets, was actually introduced to Dickinson’s radical poetry. Poets before Roethke’s generation were presumed gifted, their facile way with the sound and sense of the poetic line intuitive and personal, the poet wonderfully untutored, something of a mystical presence. For the fledgling poets of Roethke’s generation, however, the university beckoned and, for the first time in American cultural history, a generation of poets studied verse, the mechanisms of rhythm, and the dynamics of rhyme. By the standards of any earlier generation, Roethke was hypereducated, the assumption then being that overlearning quashed creativity and originality. Roethke, himself a committed academic, thus stands among the first generation of American poets taught in the rigors of the classroom about the complex mechanics of poetry and the currents of thought that had defined American poetry historically.

Literary Context

Before Roethke’s generation, if a poet drew on personal experience, the poetry maintained a conviction that the poet was representative, a type, and that the experiences they shared were designed to elevate the persona of the poet rather than expose the private foibles and failures of the poet. These poets of Roethke’s generation, dubbed confessional poets, grounded their shared experiences in rigorous and disciplined forms yet used that forum to define their own interior lives. The confessional poets would define American poetry for more than a generation after Roethke and would include poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, W. D. Snodgrass, and John Berryman, each of whom professed admiration for the courage of Roethke’s verse.

Drawing in part on the enormous influence of Emily Dickinson, the confessional poets embraced the perception of the poet as wounded, struggling with private demons that represented challenges that each person faces. Poets, as it turned out, were human beings. They came from dysfunctional families. They struggled with sexual identity and with the vulnerability of falling in and then out of love. Poets wrestled with addictions, were haunted by psychological unease, were aware of their mortality in ways that terrified them. In this case, Roethke tangled with the implications of a haunting memory of his overbearing father. The poem does not elaborate on the context. The poem does not strain, as public poetry did a generation before, to untangle the experience and offer some tidy, satisfying lesson. The poet shares his confusion and anxiety. The confessional poets charged American poetry with an uneasy sense of bald confrontation: Poets were no longer public figures chiseling wisdom in careful lines but rather fallible and fragile fellow human beings struggling, like the rest of us, to explore, understand, and share.