Woodchucks

“Woodchucks” was written by American poet, novelist, and memoirist Maxine Kumin. Born to a Reform Jewish family in 1925, Kumin identified as Jewish Calvinist as an adult. Kumin reached adulthood during World War II, and her future husband served in the army.

Kumin’s poetry often focuses on domestic scenes in her rural New England. Her simple and straightforward language and subject matter often result in comparisons to poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Frost. Kumin’s work is often grouped with Transcendentalism, Ethnopoetics, and Ecocriticism.

Among Kumin’s most recognizable poems, “Woodchucks” was published in 1972 and uses allegory to address questions about how the Holocaust happened. The mundanity and speed of the speaker’s turn to violence are, Kumin suggests, inherent human qualities that make widespread hate and genocide possible.

Poet Biography

Kumin was born in 1925 in Germantown, Pennsylvania to Jewish parents. Kumin was the youngest of four siblings and was the only girl. Kumin first attended a private Catholic school next door to her family's house. In third grade, she began attending a public school because her father did not think private schools prepared students for the demands of the real world.

From 1942-1946, Kumin attended Radcliffe College and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree. During her studies, the school began integrating women and men into the same courses. On a blind date in April 1945, Kumin met her future husband, Victor Kumin. He was an army sergeant who graduated from Harvard in 1943. After a year of voluminous letter writing, the couple planned to marry after Kumin graduated and Victor was discharged from the army. The couple would have two daughters and a son.

In 1948, Kumin completed her master of arts degree in comparative literature at Radcliffe College. Kumin then worked as a freelance medical writer. She worked on poetry privately until the publication of her first poem in 1953 in the Christian Science Monitor.

In 1957, Kumin studied poetry at the Boston Center for Adult Education. During these classes, she met Anne Sexton. The pair developed a friendship that lasted until Sexton’s death in 1974.

Kumin began teaching English at Tufts University in 1958 until 1961. She published a children’s book in 1960 and her first poetry collection, Halfway, in 1961. From 1961 to 1963, she was a scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. From 1965 to 1968, she taught at Tufts University again.

In 1973, Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for the 1972 collection Up Country: Poems of New England. Three years later, Kumin and her husband moved to a farm in New Hampshire. While living there, the couple bred Arabian and quarter horses. Both were riding enthusiasts.

From 1981-1982, Kumin served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During the 1980s and 1990s, she published numerous books of poetry, including Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, The Long Approach, Nurture, Looking for Luck, and Connecting the Dots.

In 1998, Kumin suffered a riding accident while competing, breaking her neck and sustaining several other serious injuries. Kumin wrote about the injury in her first memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (1999). Around the same time, Kumin served on the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. Along with poet Carolyn Kizer, Kumin resigned her position as an act of protest that sought to push the Academy to work towards a broader representation of women and diverse racial backgrounds.

Throughout her career, Kumin held positions as a visiting lecturer, a professor, and a poet-in-residence across America. She also earned many different awards and honors, including an Academy of American Poets fellowship, the Institute of Arts and Letter Award for excellence in literature, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant and fellowship. During her career, Kumin published 18 poetry collections, two memoirs, six novels, one collection of short stories, six essay collections, and 25 children’s books. After a year of poor health, Kumin died on February 6, 2014.

Poem Text

Kumin, Maxine. “Woodchucks.” 1972. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

The poem’s speaker, a gardener, describes an ongoing struggle with woodchucks who have been eating the plants in the speaker's garden. The speaker begins in the middle of the action, describing how an initial attempt to poison the woodchucks with a “knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange” (Line 2) was unsuccessful. The speaker next describes how this poison had no effect on the animals, who continued eating the crops. The animals’ destruction of the food crops causes the speaker to feel justified in killing the woodchucks with a gun. The speaker successfully shoots the first woodchuck. The speaker kills another woodchuck “[t]en minutes later” (Line 19) before then killing a baby woodchuck. The enjoyment of the tasks increases as the speaker kills them. When there is only one woodchuck left, the speaker must “hunt” (Line 27) it for days. After an unsuccessful hunt, the speaker wishes, “they’d all consented to die unseen / gassed underground the quiet Nazi way” (Lines 29-30).