Understanding a poem’s cultural context can often help our understanding of some aspect of the work itself. The social, political, and economic currents surrounding a writer can, and usually do, affect the writer’s literary creation. Sometimes this influence is direct, as evidenced in the title of John Milton’s sonnet "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont." Sometimes it is more allegorical, as is the case for "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. Sometimes it seems so slight that the cultural context of a work may be important only because it seems reasonable to assume that all writers are to some degree products of their time.

We have collected the following documents to help you to broaden and deepen your understanding of this poem. There are interactive questions at the end of each piece some of these refer to previous documents in the collection, so we recommend that you look through them in order.

>Document Collection: “My Papa’s Waltz” as Autobiography

>Document Collection: Draft Versions of “My Papa’s Waltz”