Introduction to Literature
Lesson FIVE: Roethke and plath
Family Relationships
Margarette Connor
Outline
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Theodore Roethke
“intentional fallacy”
“My Papa’s Waltz” discussion
Sylvia Plath
“Daddy” discussion
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
• Considered by many critics to be one
of the most important American poets
of the 20th century.
His influence
• “Roethke's pioneering explorations of nature,
regional settings, depth psychology, and
personal confessionalism--coupled with his
stylistic innovations in open form poetics and
his mastery of traditional, fixed forms--have
secured his reputation as one of the most
distinguished and widely read American poets
of the twentieth century.”
– American National Biography.
Early life
• Born in Saginaw, Michigan.
– Son of Otto Roethke and Helen Huebner
• As a child, he spent much time in the greenhouse
owned by his father and uncle.
– impressions of the natural world contained there would
later profoundly influence the subjects and imagery of his
verse.
 When he was 15, his father died of cancer
 would powerfully shape Roethke's psychic and creative
lives.
Education
 1925 to 1929 at the University of Michigan at
Ann Arbor, graduating magna cum laude.
 Resisting family pressure to pursue a legal
career, he quit law school after one semester
 1929 to 1931, he took graduate courses at the
University of Michigan and later the Harvard
Graduate School, where he worked closely
with the poet Robert Hillyer.
 The Great Depression forced Roethke to leave
Harvard and to take up teaching at Lafayette
College from 1931 to 1935.
Beginning career
 In the fall of 1935 Roethke assumed his second
teaching post at Michigan State College at
Lansing
 soon hospitalized for what would prove to be
recurring bouts of mental illness.
 Throughout his subsequent career Roethke used
these periodic incidents of depression for
creative self-exploration.
 They allowed him, as he said, to "reach a new
level of reality.”
 Taught at Pennsylvania State Univ, 1936 - 1943,
publishing in Poetry, the New Republic, the
Saturday Review, and Sewanee Review.
First book
 Open House (1941), took ten years to write
 Critically acclaimed upon its publication.
 Many poets influenced the work, including TS
Eliot, but the book's subjective focus on
personal experience marked an important
departure from T. S. Eliot's doctrine of poetic
impersonality, stated in "Tradition and the
Individual Talent," (1917), and from what the
New Critics W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe
Beardsley later deplored as the intentional
fallacy.
Intentional fallacy:
• “Many modern critics regard a literary work as a
public document, complete in itself, and the writer’s
intention of writing the work, if he had one other
than the invariable intentional of writing the work,
an external irrelevance. The
error in
judging a work by the
author’s
success or failure in
achieving his
intention these
critics call the
‘intentional’ or
‘generic’ failure.
(con’t)
TS Eliot
More on intentional fallacy
• In The Verbal Icon, Wimsatt and Beardsley wrote,
‘The poem is not the critic’s own and not the
author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and
goes about the world beyond his power to intend
upon it or control it). The poem belongs to the
public….What is said about the poem [such as the
poet’s statement of intention] is subject to the same
scrutiny as any statement in linguistics or in the
general science of psychology.”)
– definition from Beckson and Ganz, Literary Terms, a
Dictionary
Bennington years
 In 1943 he left Penn State to teach at
Bennington College,
 a major arts school in America, known for
the number of writers who teach/attend
Important second book
 1948 published second, pivotal, volume, The
Lost Son and Other Poems.
 Includes “My Papa’s Waltz”
• In the so-called "greenhouse poems," the
metaphor of the open house passes into the
figure of the glasshouse as the dominant
symbol of the self's interior, existential
world.
Roethke on his work
 In "An American Poet Introduces Himself and
His Poems" (BBC broadcast, 30 July 1953),
Roethke described the glasshouse, as
 "both heaven and hell.... It was a universe,
several worlds, which, even as a child, one
worried about, and struggled to keep alive."
Last ten years: height of his popularity
 worked last at the University of Washington, where
he was mentor to a generation of Northwest poets
 1953 married Beatrice O'Connell, whom he had
met during his earlier stint at Bennington
 reputation grew with each new collection,
including The Waking which was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize in 1954.
 1955 and 1956 Roethkes traveled in Italy, Europe,
and England on a Fulbright grant.
 1957 published Words for the Wind, which won all
sorts of prizes for poetry
 Died in 1963, at the height of his popularity.
My Papa's Waltz (1)
• The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
 We see family dynamics here; the little boy is
clinging to his father, he’s a little bit afraid; her
mother is not happy
My Papa's Waltz (2)
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
a painful memory for the little boy but also
NOT a painful memory
My Papa's Waltz (3)
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
The title “Papa,” the author chooses the familiar
and the affectionate; and Waltz is the loving
dance; there’s pain and fear here, but there’s also
love and affection.
 other interpretation of this poem the child is
being abused?
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
• Mixed reactions to her poems
– her suicide and relationship with her husband
Ted Hughes, who later became Britain’s Poet
Laureate, often color reaction to her works.
Parents
 Daughter of Otto Plath and Aurelia
Schober, German immigrants to the US.
 Father an entomologist who taught at Boston
University
 Mother later taught secretarial skills there
Father’s early death
 1940 Father died when Plath was 8 of
diabetes mellitus, which at the time was a
very curable disease.
 Upon his death a friend only asked, "How could
such a brilliant man have been so stupid?"
 The disease contributed to gangrene in his
toe, which turned black from the disease.
 This appears in “Daddy”.
Early education
 Excellent and hardworking student, had already
published some of her stories and poetry before she
left high school.
 Her first poem appeared when she was eight in the
Boston Herald (10 August 1941, page B-8)
 Scholarship to Smith College, an excellent woman’s
college in Massachusetts. Entered in September
1950.
Schoolgirl Plath
Early successes
 Beginning in 1950 began publishing in national
periodicals.
 "Youth's Appeal for World Peace” published Christian Science
Monitor ,16 March.
 Short story "And Summer Will Not Come Again" appeared August
Seventeen
 Poem "Bitter Strawberries" appeared Christian Science Monitor
,11 August .
 Throughout 1951-2 published quite a bit.
 1953 also writing articles for local newspapers like the
Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Springfield Union as
their Smith College correspondent.
Important experiences
 Her short story, 'Sunday at the Mintons' won first prize
in a Mademoiselle contest.
 From this story, she also won a one-month, summer
Guest Editorship at Mademoiselle.
 She spent June 1953 in NYC, and was hoping to be
admitted to Harvard’s Summer Writing Program for
the rest of the summer.
 She did not get accepted.
Plath around this time
First suicide attempt
 24 August 1953, Plath left a note saying, "Have
gone for a long walk. Will be home tomorrow."
 Instead, she swallowed a bottle of sleeping
pills in the family’s basement in a suicide
attempt.
 She was found and spent many months
hospitalized, receiving many treatments,
including shock treatments.
The Bell Jar
 The novel, The Bell Jar , written
under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas,
is a thinly disguised memoir of the
period in her life from the
Mademoiselle internship
through her recovery.
Back to school
 Readmitted to Smith in the Spring 1954
term and went on to graduate summa cum
laude.
 Won a Fulbright Scholarship Newnham
College, Cambridge University, a lifechanging event.
The River Cam, Cambridge
Ted Hughes
 February 1955, at a party she met
Ted
Hughes, a young English poet
whose
works she had just read and memorized.
 The attraction was intense and instant.
 They married June 1956 in London.
 The partnership with Hughes, while eventually
personally destructive, was a strong and positive
influence on Plath’s development as a poet.
Back to America
 1957, Hughes won first prize in the New
York Poetry Center contest judged by
Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden and Stephen
Spender for his book The Hawk in the Rain.
 Plath was offered a teaching job at Smith
College.
 She studies hard to finish her graduation exams
 In the fall, they go to America.
Teaching Experience
 Plath was very unsure about her own
teaching ability, and was extremely
frustrated by the lack of time for her
own writing.
 At the end of one year, the couple
decided to focus on their writing and
give up academia.
Yaddo
 Fall 1959, Hughes and Plath stayed at Yaddo, a
famous writer's colony in Saratoga Springs, New
York,
 Plath finally had a breakthrough in her writing.
 During this time, she had been closely reading the
poetry of Theodore Roethke.
 Plath was also pregnant, and Hughes wanted the
child born in England. In December 59 they went
back
Major output on two levels
 1960, settled in London.
 In April, Frieda Rebecca, was born.
 Plath's first collection of poetry, The
Colossus and Other Poems published in
October.
 Demands of motherhood limited her writing
output.
Illnesses and writing
 February 1961 Plath had a miscarriage
followed closely by an appendectomy, which
left her hospitalized for a number of weeks
 The illness led to a writing frenzy. According
to the only authorized biography, Bitter Fame,
she began The Bell Jar in March 1961 and
wrote it in 70 days.
Joy and sadness
 January 1962 had a son, Nicholas Farrar
 She starts another frenzy of writing around
April of that year.
 May 1962, Plath discovers Hughes is
having an affair.
 Tried to patch up their relationship on holiday
in September, but it deteriorates.
 He moves out.
Major writing frenzy
 October 1962 and January and February
1963 she created
an incredible output
of poems,
including “Daddy”.
Plath with her children, Frieda and
Nicholas
The End
• On February 11, 1963, Plath commits
suicide, though some think it may have just
been a cry for help that went awry.
Misguided critics
• The critic Elizabeth Hardwick writes that
Plath’s father died “of a long illness, but
there is no pity for his lost life” adding that
“he did not kill anyone and the ‘fat black
heart’ [of the poem] is really Plath’s own”
and concluding that to bring “strangers, the
town…into the punishment of her father. .
.is somehow the most biting and
ungenerous thought of all.”
Daddy (1)
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy (2)
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time-Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
Daddy (3)
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
she’s remembering praying to have her
father back
Daddy (4)
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
feel unprotected after her father died; after
the war, anti-German feeling going on; We
can feel the girl’s hatred , anger, and shame.
Daddy (5)
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root.
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
Daddy (6)
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
Daddy (7)
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of
Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
Daddy (8)
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—
Daddy (9)
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.  her father
abandon her emotionally
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you
Daddy (10)
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
 She replaced her father with another man
Daddy (11)
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
she’s talking about a new man, not her
father anymore. The new man is her
husband.
Daddy (12)
If I've killed one man, I've killed two-The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy (13)
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
Daddy (14)
• When we read closely, we see that she’s
dealing with her emotions that she had with
her father and moved it (the emotion) to her
husband.