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Essay on Dramatic Fashion of Father-Son Relation in "My Papa's Waltz"

Confessional in spirit, viewing madness as a transforming force, Theodore Roethke's poetry explores the depths of the self, attempting to achieve wholeness through destruction. His verse is finely-crafted, full of stunning images and chant-like rhythms, which echo the poetry of T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats. From his Modernist masters, along with others such as Gerald Manley Hopkins, Roethke learned to find objects in nature which crystallized his poetic emotions. He drew upon his early childhood in Michigan, where his father owned one of the largest and most beautiful greenhouses in the state -- thus his work is rich in natural imagery of the garden. The luxuriant plant life of his father's greenhouses symbolized for Roethke both abundant life and death -- often the wet soil and the curling garden slugs became associated with decay and loss of self, while flowers could spark a mystical sense of oneness in the poet. At the center of Roethke's universe -- as well as his garden -- was his father, a rough and stern man of Prussian descent who often grew irate at his son's delicate nature. The death of the father engendered enormous guilt in his teenage son, and the shadow of the father lo

Quotes talked about in this paper

  • Roethke as both a refuge, a source of protection from the father's violence, and as repressive force.With the utmost poetic economy the third and fourth stanzas offer a portrait of his father rich in contradictions -- by focusing on his hands, injured from working in the garden, Roethke demonstrates how he was drawn to the earthiness and the power of his father, and by careful use of parallelism the father becomes almost a force of nature in himself, inflicting wounds upon the son: "The hand that held my wrist / Was battered on one knuckle; / At every step you missed / My right ear scraped a buckle."

Names mentioned in this research paper
Theodore Roethke,

Keywords talked about in this research paper
Roethke, Theodore Roethke, stanza, Gerald Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, iambic tetrameter, early childhood, life and death, image, plant life, greenhouses, waltz, stern, whiskey, rhythm, captures, self, poet, loomed, exorcise, poetry, moralism, courting, understatement, censure, wholeness, authoritarian, Confessional, Prussian, utmost, transcend, slugs, stunning, knuckle, Modernist, contradictions, Eliot, Papa, drunken, wrist, Puritan, crystallized, shirt, spark, a haunting, luxuriant, curling, demolishing, remarkable, teenage,

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Dramatic Fashion of Father-Son Relation in "My Papa's Waltz". (1969, December 31). In DirectEssays.com. Retrieved 19:09, May 22, 2013, from http://www.directessays.com/viewpaper/88187.html
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