How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck

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The poem “Woodchucks” by Maxine Kumin is about a person who considers himself a peaceful farmer and how he becomes the opposite of who he was. He is desensitized to the point where he can justify to himself a mass extermination of an entire population of woodchucks, but the writer seems to imply that this is a flaw of humans. The flaw among humans is that you can get so accustomed to violence that it starts to desensitize them to violence. It shows the effect hatred and evil can have on a human’s soul and how that can change their behavior. The poem begins with the man having a general prejudice against one population, the woodchucks, which finally evolves into a personal vendetta to kill the entire species. Kumin uses various literary devices throughout her poem to prove this point. The main literary devices used to help prove the poem’s point are allusion, symbolism, point of view, characterization and alliteration.
Kumin seems to use an allusion in this poem to make her point. The allusion that Kumin is trying to convey is the Hitler and the Holocaust. The poem talks about one person, the farmer, which one can see could we a portrayal of Hitler. The poem talks about the annihilation of woodchucks. This is similar to Hitler’s fascination to eliminate all of the Jews. It talks about them hiding from the farmer. Many Jews hid, ran and ultimately survived the Holocaust. The poem portrays how the people, who killed millions upon millions of innocent people, got to the state of such hatred towards another race. Hitler began as a movement. He and the German people did not immediately gas and kill the Jews. To begin they were frustrated with them. They stopped buying things and relating to them. They put them in one location and the N...

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...man race has.
It shows how one’s behavior can change throughout an obsession of getting rid of an annoyance. The prejudice the farmer has towards woodchucks becomes personal. We as humans will always have opportunities to see this and if we are not careful experience it personally. Kumin uses various literary devices throughout her poem to prove this point. The main literary devices used to help prove the poem’s point are allusion, symbolism, point of view, characterization and alliteration. This is a part of humanity that is seen all throughout history. One can only hope that just like the Jews, that others will not consent to be gassed quietly and just go away. It may have been the quiet Nazi way, however one can only hope poems such as this one can keep in the front of our minds the possible nature of man if we are not careful to be loud and notice unjustices.

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