My Papa's Waltz : Historical Context

The decade of the 1940s can be said to be split into two by World War II. In many respects, the postwar world looked little like that of the prewar period. The war had brought devastation and death to millions of people around the world. Racism, militarism, and ideologies such as fascism had been the causes of brutality and cruelty such as the world had never before witnessed. To many, life seemed absurd after the war; traditional religions and moral codes seemed inadequate to account for the horrors of the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World capitals lay in ruins and once-dominant nations were exhausted. Two nations, the United States and the Soviet Union, rose to the status of “superpowers” in the postwar years, and they established new opposing alliances based on mutual distrust and hostility.

Many people — especially in countries such as Germany, with its record of Nazi atrocities — needed to come to terms with their past. New national as well as individual identities had to be forged from the cultural ruins of the war. In America, which had largely escaped the devastation, this process of redefining oneself took several different forms. Some rejected the past and looked instead to the present moment or to the future, seizing an opportunity to reinvent themselves as America was reinventing itself as a superpower at the center of world politics. The postwar period in America saw the emergence of improvisation and experimentation in artistic pursuits such as Beat poetry, be-bop jazz, and Abstract Expressionist painting. Others in postwar America sought to reexamine the past and to recuperate what was valuable and worthy of preservation.

Roethke displays affinities to both of these groups. Throughout his career he employed traditional poetic forms from both the European and the American past, but he reinvented these forms rather than copied or imitated them. His redefinition and synthesis of traditional elements gives Roethke’s work a feeling of an entirely new kind of poetry that has broken with tradition. “My Papa’s Waltz” and other poems in The Lost Son show Roethke engaged in a similar process with the material of his personal past, recasting it and investing it with new meaning as art.