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    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "The Waking"
    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "The Waking"
    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "The Waking"
    Ebook31 pages21 minutes

    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "The Waking"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "The Waking," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535840347
    A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "The Waking"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "The Waking" - Gale

      10

      The Waking

      Theodore Roethke

      1953

      Introduction

      The Waking is by American poet Theodore Roethke (pronounced RET-kee). The poem was first published in 1953 in the volume of the same title, The Waking: Poems 1933-1953. It is available in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1974) and Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems (2005).

      Roethke is one of the most notable of American poets who were writing from the 1940s to the 1960s. He belongs in the romantic and transcendentalist tradition of literature, and The Waking might be understood as a poem of spiritual awakening in which the speaker describes his insights into life and how to live well. He describes an approach to understanding based on feeling and intuition, honoring the sacred element in life and savoring each moment of it, accepting the reality of things without argument or protest. The poem is written in the form of a villanelle, a complex poetic form that relies on only two rhymes and utilizes two lines as refrains.

      The Waking is notable not only as one of the best of modern villanelles but also because it gives an introduction to Roethke's main themes, which involve the quest to understand the nature of the self and its connection to the cosmos as a whole.

      Author Biography

      Theodore Roethke was born on May 25, 1908, in Saginaw, Michigan, the son of Otto and Helen Roethke. His father and uncle owned a large greenhouse, and Roethke grew up with a deep knowledge of various plants and flowers that would later inform his poetry. His father died of cancer in 1923, when Roethke was fourteen; his uncle committed suicide in the same

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