Parent-child relationships are always a complex and controversial topic as parents or guardians are the most influential people in any person’s life. Children’s love is usually unconditional and unreasonable, so the actions of adults can cause both endless admiration and unbearable pain in them. Often, the relationship between fathers and children is conflictual, problematic, and toxic due to parental mistakes or children’s misunderstandings. Alienation, authoritarianism, dependence, anger, and fear are the feelings that pervade the poems of Theodore Roethke, W.S. Merwin, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman who talk about fatherhood, which highlights the existence of this conflict and tension, and reveals different sides of family relationship complexities. All authors cover the topic in different ways, showing their complicated feelings and telling the story. However, the poems of Roethke, Merwin, Plath, and Berryman are united not only by the theme of fatherhood but also by the unspoken question ‘why?’, in which each author puts his or her own meaning. The Confessional Poets’ works have similarities, themes, and a rhetorical question that has not been asked and will never be answered. All poems tell about a person’s relationship with his or her parent, and although they have different main lines and all the narrators have different ages, they all express the child’s feeling of dependence on the father. All authors in their works ask why the father acted this way, why their relationship was complicated like that, and why they make them feel pain. Theodore Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz” uses images and comparisons to describe the violence and cruelty of fatherly love. At first glance, it seems that the narrator, a boy, is only playing and fooling around with his father. Roethke (1997) says that the boy and father “romped” and compares their interaction with a waltz dance, which shows the harmlessness, naivety, and even tenderness of their relationship. However, many details hint that the fight is not a game, but a manifestation of abuse. The father is drunk, his knuckle is damaged, he “beats time” on the boy’s head and holds his wrist, and the mother just glares at them in the corner of the kitchen (Roethke, 1997). However, the boy clings to his father, tries to keep up with him, and, in fact, seeks approval. Hence, the tone of the verse demonstrates that despite the cruelty of the father, the son does not stop loving him and tries to win his love. The author asks why his father treats him this way despite his best efforts. This question and the theme of childhood love and dependence on parents are fundamental to Roethke’s verse. A similar motif has a poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath, although in it the adult author turns to her father and her past. As in Roethke’s verse, Plath reveals the image of a brutally oppressive father, but her main way of showing his character is to compare and refer to the cruelty of Nazi Germany and its military. Although the narrator’s father died when she was ten years old, his influence was reflected throughout her life and decisions, as if she lived under the pressure of his power all this time (Plath, 1997). This issue is revealed through a variety of images,