Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night : Historical Context

Dylan Thomas wrote in such a fiercely personal style about such narrowly personal themes that there is hardly any relationship at all to be found between his poetry and the times in which he lived. Critic Jacob Korg noted in a 1965 study of Thomas’s work that “he was occupied with introspections that lie outside of time and place ... his style owes comparatively little to tradition or example.” Thomas grew up in a middle-class family, in a seaside town in the south of Wales; his father was the senior English master in the local grammar school; he lived in London during the Second

World War; he was a chronic alcoholic, who stole from his friends and lied to them, was loud and offensive in public, and died of poisoning from drinking too much too fast one day. These facts of his life are well known and often repeated, but they can only be found in his poetry — if one looks for them — with a loose imagination.

Welsh Tradition: Like the traditional poetry of Wales, Thomas’s work displays two tendencies that might seem to the casual reader to contradict each other: an intuitive, mystical religious sense and a strong controlling hand. Wales, along England’s western border, has a traditional poetic form known as the eisteddfod, which was used by druidic cults and in religious worship of nature. It has a strong structure and, like any prose written primarily for recitation and not reading, has a strong, elaborate meter. These facets are not directly noticeable in Thomas’s work, but a reader can find in his work a deep strain of very personal religious beliefs, often attributing mystic powers to natural objects; also, Thomas frequently wrote in regular rhythm and meter and often employed recognized forms, as evinced by the use of the villanelle in “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”

World War II: In the years immediately following Great Britain’s entry into the World War in 1939, Germany bombed strategic points of England, particularly London, on a regular basis. Wales was under constant watch from a naval invasion from Germany or its allies. During those years, Thomas lived in several places around Wales, mostly settling around the quiet fishing village of Laughame, and in 1941, when he landed a job writing scripts and reciting poetry on the British Broadcasting Company’s Program 3, he and his wife moved to London. When the United States entered the war in 1941, German resources were diverted somewhat, but infrequent air raids continued until the end of the war in 1945. Living through the dangers of war helped define the sensibilities of a whole generation of poets, who recognized the wastefulness of mass destruction and saw the shame of demolishing sites across Europe that had stood for centuries. Still other British poets acknowledged how the war reduced the United Kingdom to a second-class power, and the pity and frustration is reflected in their poetry. It only very rarely shows itself in Thomas’s work.

Compare & Contrast

• 1946: The postwar demand for consumer goods gave workers the edge in bargaining for wages: 4.6 million workers held strikes against the manufacturers they worked for, including Westinghouse, General Motors, the meat packers, and the railroads.

  1981: 13,000 air traffic controllers went on strike and were fired by President Ronald Reagan, marking the start of a new era of pro-employer “union-busting.”

  Today: Labor unions have the lowest membership since the 1940s and, in many cases, have little effect on wages and benefits being offered.

• 1947: The first casino was built in Las Vegas, Nevada — the only state to allow legalized gambling.

  1978: Atlantic City, New Jersey, legalized casino gambling in order to bring in tax revenues.

  Today: Most states have some form of legalized casino gambling

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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.

mother to son : Historical Context

By 1926, when Hughes published this poem in his book The Weary Blues, the artistic movement that we know as the Harlem Renaissance was at the height of its fame and productivity. The Harlem Renaissance, an informal gathering of writers, painters, musicians, and philosophers who worked in the Harlem section of New York City in the 1920s, started soon after World War I ended in 1918 and withered away by the time the Great Depression began with the stock market crash of 1929. To some extent, we can say that it is a happy coincidence that some of the world’s greatest talents all ended up in the same place at the same time. Looking more deeply, though, we see that the outpouring of expression during the Harlem Renaissance was driven not just by talent but by an urgent need to express a cultural identity. Harlem in the 1920s was the place where the artistic sensibilities of black America were inevitably destined to attract the attention of the world.

In the nineteenth century the majority of African Americans lived in the South because they were descendants of slaves who had been brought here to farm the massive plantations in that region. After the Confederate Army of the South surrendered in 1865, bringing an end to the Civil War, slavery was abolished in this country. The Southern legislatures, however, passed laws that made it impossible for blacks to become socially or economically equal to whites. These “Jim Crow laws” (named after an offensively stupid and lazy black character from a 1832 minstrel show) blocked voting or land ownership by blacks by holding them to nearly impossible “intelligence tests” or “economic criteria” that most whites would have also failed to meet if they had been required. In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court gave its approval to these discriminatory laws by deciding in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that states could offer “separate but equal” facilities to blacks for education, transportation, and public accommodations. The pretense toward fairness in this ruling ignored the fact that the accommodations were almost never equal: less government money found its way to black hospitals, bus lines, parks, etc., and private enterprises certainly offered blacks only their worst. It was not until 1954 that the Supreme Court ruled the “separate but equal” doctrine unfair, in a case called Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

Early in the twentieth century, though, Southern blacks found some form of relief from the unequal conditions with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of major manufacturing centers in Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and New York. There was still terrible discrimination in the North, but it was not formally established in the laws. In addition, the factories of the North, producing steel and automobiles, needed laborers, and they paid good wages to workers with no prior experience. When World War I began in Europe in 1914, the push to provide munitions made the North even more inviting to African Americans. A laborer making $1.10 per day in the South could make $3.75 in a Northern factory, while a woman working as a domestic in the South for $2.50 per week could make $2.10 to $2.50 a day in the North. The war also opened manufacturing opportunities for blacks by narrowing the number of immigrant workers coming from Europe. The black population in Northern cities ballooned; in New York City alone, the number of blacks went from 60,666 in 1900 to 152,467 in 1920, growing throughout the twenties to 327,706 by 1930.

The urban African Americans began to seek their own identity in ways that they never had a chance to when they were dispersed on farms throughout the South. During the war, approximately 367,000 blacks served in the Armed Forces. Although still facing considerable discrimination in the military, black servicemen brought home a new awareness of how small and temporary many American prejudices were. Military service exposed many white Americans to blacks for the first time, and they learned respect. The characteristics that racists had claimed about in blacks in order to oppress them for decades — claiming that they were simple, naive, ignorant and primitivistic — ironically started looking good to intellectuals, in light of the sophisticated and rational war that had just taken so many lives barbarically.

After the war, the Harlem section of New York City, where blacks comprised over 90 percent of the population, became recognized as a center for artistic and intellectual activity. It offered blacks both the security of a small, self-contained community and, at the same time, as part of America’s publishing and entertainment capital, it offered access to national and international audiences. At night, New York’s wealthiest went “up to Harlem” in search of clubs that served liquor, which had been made illegal in 1920 by the Constitution’s Eighteenth Amendment. Rich intellectuals rubbed shoulders with poor intellectuals: Hughes himself was in fact “discovered by” prominent poet Vachel Lindsay when he slipped some poems to Lindsay while waiting on his table. Together, writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance raised the world’s consciousness of what life was like for Americans of African descent.

Compare & Contrast

• 1922: A. E. Staley of Decatur, Illinois, opened the first soybean refinery in the United States. Previously, soybeans had been used for livestock feed.

  1940: The U.S. soybean crop reached 78 million bushels, up from 5 million bushel in 1924.

  1944: 12 million acres of U.S. farming land were devoted to growing soybeans. Products created out of oils derived from soybeans included livestock feed, enamel, solvents, plastics, insecticides, steel hardening agents, and beer.

  1945: Soybean production reached 193 million bushels, almost three times the level of just five years before.

  1966: Bac-Os were developed by General Mills. Made from isolate soy protein, they taste like bacon.

  Today: Soybeans will soon outpace wheat as the United States’ second largest crop. (The nation still, however, grows more than three times as much corn as either soybeans or wheat.)

• 1922: Twenty-eight-year-old Angelo Sicilano won a contest sponsored by Physican Culture magazine, naming him the “World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man.” Taking the name Charles Atlas, he opened his own gymnasium in Manhattan in 1926, and by 1927 his corporation was charging $1,000 per student for mail-order body-building lessons.

  1956: The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sport was established.

  1985: Starting with the motion picture Rambo: First Blood, Part II, Hollywood produced a string of movies with muscle-enhanced male action stars. Health clubs became more popular than discos as places for young adults to meet. By the end of this trend former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarznegger had become the most popular movie star in the world.

  Today: Despite increased awareness of the importance of physical fitness and the multi-billion dollar fitness industry, more than 60 percent of all adults are more than twenty percent over their body weight.

• 1922: States were allowed to establish laws that required blacks and whites to live in separate places, stay in separate hotels and motels, ride separate sections of buses, use separate drinking fountains, sit in separate areas of movie theaters, attend separate churches, seek treatment at separate hospitals, etc.

  1955: Rosa Parks, an African-American bus rider in Montgomery, Alabama, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man. The boycott that followed her arrest, organized by Dr. Martin Luther King, brought the matter of segregation to the Supreme Court, who ruled in 1956 that segregation of public transportation was illegal.

  1964: The Johnson administration passed the Civil Rights Act that President Kennedy had been working on before he was assassinated. Among other provisions, the Act required that schools should be desegregated, so that African Americans would not be left to receive inferior educations in second-rate schools.

  Today: Despite laws that legislate against discrimination, blacks and whites in America usually live, shop, and attend school in different places.

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