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A Study Guide for Linda Pastan's "To a Daughter Leaving Home"
A Study Guide for Linda Pastan's "To a Daughter Leaving Home"
A Study Guide for Linda Pastan's "To a Daughter Leaving Home"
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A Study Guide for Linda Pastan's "To a Daughter Leaving Home"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Linda Pastan's "To a Daughter Leaving Home," 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
Release dateSep 28, 2016
ISBN9781535841160
A Study Guide for Linda Pastan's "To a Daughter Leaving Home"

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    A Study Guide for Linda Pastan's "To a Daughter Leaving Home" - Gale

    14

    To a Daughter Leaving Home

    Linda Pastan

    1988

    Introduction

    To a Daughter Leaving Home is a poem of two dozen lines by Linda Pastan that presents the narrator's remembrance of the time her daughter first learned to ride a bicycle. Pastan showed great poetic promise as a young woman, winning Mademoiselle's Dylan Thomas Poetry Award while completing her senior year at Radcliffe College in 1954—the runner-up was Sylvia Plath—but upon starting a family, she went some fourteen years without writing anything. Family and poetry then seemed exclusive endeavors.

    When she at last devoted herself again to crafting verse, Pastan quickly gained critical recognition, consistently producing volumes that defy formulaic feminism by finding beauty and value in traditional women's realms like domestic life and family. On a darker note, thematic hallmarks of her poetry have been the inevitable fate of everyone, death, and the twin hardships of loss and grief. The idea of loss—the loss of a daughter's dependence as well as her everyday presence—looms over To a Daughter Leaving Home, but in portraying the moment of the daughter's achievement of riding a bicycle for herself, the poem proves a celebration as much as an elegy. To a Daughter Leaving Home can be found in Pastan's 1988 collection The Imperfect Paradise.

    Author Biography

    Pastan (née Olenik) was born in New York City on May 27, 1932. Her heritage is Jewish, but her parents were freethinkers to such an extent that she did not even see the inside of a synagogue until adulthood. She was an only child, and books were, as she told Ken Adelman for the Washingtonian, her main companions. She began writing around the age of twelve partly as a means of engaging in conversation with the authors of and characters in the books and poems she read. She even submitted her earliest work to the New Yorker (which would publish its first poem of hers some thirty years later). A landmark of her childhood was Poe Cottage, a small white house where

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