“My Papa’s Waltz” is included in Roethke’s critically acclaimed collection of poems The Lost Son and Other Poems, in which his father, predictably, figures as one of the main subjects. Divided into four parts, the set of poems outline the growth of the poet’s consciousness from childhood to adulthood. “I am nothing but what I remember,” Roethke wrote in his notebook, and “I do not wish a sense of the past; only a sense of the continuous.” It was the continuity of his own life and his evolving awareness of himself experiencing it that served as Roethke’s true subjects. This particular experience, however, was more of the heart and the body than of the mind. Intent on using poetry as a tool for describing the rhythms of emotions, Roethke did not fear the intellect so much as distrust it. In his poem “The Waking,” from his 1953 volume of the same title, he writes, “We think by feeling. What is there to know? / I hear my being dance from ear to ear.” Of Roethke’s poetry Mark Doty says in his article “The Forbidden Planet’ of Character: The Revolutions of the 1950s”:
Thus, with the insistence of one returning to examine a wound or replaying the circumstances of an unresolved conflict, the poems circle around the nature of guilt, identify the anger and loss inherent in the experience of love, and obsessively investigate the poet’s relationship with his father. It is a mark of the poems’ contemporaneity, within their decade, that despite their carefully controlled formal designs they are enactments of the process of coming to terms; they resist easy resolutions, the consolations of distance and irony.
Critic and poet Brendan Galvin notes that Roethke’s contradictory feeling toward his father is rooted in the fact that Otto Roethke died when the poet was only fourteen. “Theodore Roethke had lost his whole meaningful world at a time when a boy could still believe that his father was more than a man — perhaps even a God. Who can say how deeply the loss of his father affects a boy of fourteen? There is the possibility that the awakening of sexuality at puberty and the subsequent death of the father were in some way coupled in the boy’s mind. Thus the tremendous guilt and the howling ghost in these poems” [from The Lost Son and Other Poems].The Lost Son is also a chronicle of his own development as a poet. In his article “Blake and Roethke: When Everything Comes to One,” critic Jay Parini calls the sequence of poems in which “My Papa’s Waltz” appears “tough, sensual, and concrete” and claims that they “recreate the texture of experience in the manner of [William Blake’s] The Songs of Experience. It is only by going back to the roots of his own emotional and linguistic beginnings that Roethke the poet can go forward in his own poetic work.” But Roethke’s chronicle of his own movement from innocence to experience in
What works for one reader, however, doesn’t work for them all. Robert Pinsky, for example, takes Roethke and other romantic poets to task — in his book The Situation of Poetry — for their over-reliance on intuition, for their relative lack of rationality, which he believes should be an inevitable part of poetic activity. James Applewhite, however, notes in his essay “Death and Rebirth in a Modern Landscape” that “We must also remember that intellectual self-consciousness has become, in our time, a potential imprisonment, a bell jar or bottle enclosing the ship of the psyche. Having fled from abstraction to childhood and the particular, he must assert his ultimate values through symbols rather than concepts.”
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