20 pages • 40 minutes read
Theodore RoethkeMy Papa's Waltz
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1942A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
"Youth" by James Wright (1990)
Written by a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who studied under Roethke at the University of Washington and wrote extensively about his debt to Roethke’s poetry, this brief lyric examines the relationship between Wright and his emotionally unavailable father, who like Roethke’s, came from a working-class background and struggled to understand his son’s artistic leaning.
"Daddy" by Sylvia Plath (1965)
This poem is a controversial exploration of Plath’s own difficult relationship with her father. It draws on imagery from the Holocaust to create the feeling of tension and conflict about her father who died when Plath was only eight. The poem, written just months before Plath’s suicide, represents one of the pinnacle achievements of the school of confessional poets that came after Roethke. Indeed, Plath was vocal in her admiration for Roethke, even dedicating an unpublished poem to him.
"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden (1966)
Influenced by the groundbreaking confessional poetry of Roethke’s generation, Hayden here offers a finely-chiseled lyric memory of his father struggling one cold Sunday morning to cut wood and make the house warm and inviting, a thankless task for which the poet, looking back, regrets never acknowledging.
Further Literary Resources
"Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”: A Waltz Macabre" by Eli Merchant (2017)
This article maintains that the poem offers an unsettling vision of a child as victim of a parent’s emotional, if not physical, abuse. It looks into the poem’s use of double negatives to create the unsettling ambiguity over what the child understands against what the adult poet knows. The poem, it is argued here, leaves the reader stranded, unable to secure any sort of closure.
"Meter in Theodore Roethke’s 'My Papa’s Waltz'" by William Barillas (2015)
Originally published in The Explicator, this analysis of Roethke’s careful manipulations of assonance, consonance, alliteration, and end rhyme argues that the poem works to both create the feeling of music and upend that feeling. The essay approaches each line from an almost mathematical precision to reveal how carefully Roethke created the sonic effect of the poem.
"The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke" by Kenneth Burke (1950)
A towering (and often intimidating) study of Roethke (at more than 40 pages), this article is still indispensable as it defined for the first time the psychoanalytical approach to Roethke and his position as one of the major confessional poets. The essay uses as its organizing approach Roethke’s deep appreciation for the earthy world of his family’s greenhouse, hence the vegetal metaphor. The essay examines a number of Roethke’s domestic poems, among them “My Papa’s Waltz,” which Burke finds as an example of Roethke struggling to accept his own roots.
Listen to the Poem
Although given its position as one of the most anthologized short poems in the 20th-century American literary canon, Roethke’s poem has been recorded more than a dozen times both by students and professors. It has been set to music (it is composed deliberately to mimic both a ballad and a waltz). Perhaps the most interesting (and unsettling) recording, however, is that done by Roethke himself shortly before his death. He lingers lovingly over the poem’s succulent vowels and hangs over the lines as they move one into the next. His presentation of those last two lines is haunting. What is particularly impactful is Roethke’s pronunciation of “Papa,” at once familiar and loving, and yet full of both menace and emotional distance.
