Written Assignment: 20 Cen Lit - 1

 1. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ represents ‘a vision of dissolution and spiritual draught’. Do you agree? Justify your answer ? 

 Ans :-

               Thomas Stearns Eliot, one of the greatest modern English poets, has tried his best to mark his time by expressing the inherent dangers of modern civilization in his writings. He was conscious of the disordered and fragmented social condition of his time – a time of political instability, anarchy and chaos. In his exclusive poem “The Waste Land” he depicts an appalling vision of chaotic times and disturbed lives. The poem portrays a society that has been left barren – morally, spiritually, intellectually and sexually – by the First World War. The poem is an exclusive example of disappointment and spiritual vacuity of the modern civilization especially after the world entangled into a devastating war that resulted in millions of deaths. All through the poem Eliot depicts the modern waste land that represents the social anarchy and spiritual emptiness of troubled modern life which drives the individual to go deep into emotional crisis and intellectual despair. The paper intends to examine how Eliot’s “The Waste Land” explores the spiritual barrenness and physical deformities of the distressed modern people.

At once a classicist, a critic, a poet, a playwright, a mystic and a philosopher, Thomas Stearns Eliot was a myriad minded man who enjoyed a long life span of more than 75 years and whose literary contribution extended over a period of almost 55 years. With his creative spirit he tried his hand in diverse literary genres – poetry, plays, essays, literary criticism, and so on, and dominated the literary landscape of the twentieth century. Through his writings, critical essays and experiments in versification, style and diction, he regenerated English poetryand influenced the direction of modern poetry. In his writings, he has tried his best to make his time conscious of itself and expressed the inherent dangers of modern civilization. He was conscious about the social anarchy and the spiritual vacuity of his time and in his writings, he depicted the disaster, agony, horror, spiritual sterility, and alienation of modern people. His celebrated poem, The Waste Land (1922) presents a dark and gloomy picture of human sufferingsin the twentieth century. The poem is a study of a civilization doomed by its own sterility (Coote 26). It refers to the spiritual and intellectual decadence of the contemporary world. The poem is an important landmark in the history of English literature and exposes the disillusionment caused by the First World War. To cite Harold Bloom, The Waste Land can be read as “a testament to the disillusionment of a generation, an exposition of the manifest despair and spiritual bankruptcy of the years after World War I” (40). Based on the legend of the Fisher King in the Arthurian cycle, the poem portrays London as a barren waste land. The poem is built round the symbols of drought and flood which represent death and re-birth respectively, and this fundamental idea is referred to the poem.

Eliot is one of those twentieth century writers who witnessed the socio-political turmoil and transformation of the post-war England. The war had destroyed all that were traditionally good. The most dangerous effect was the loss of spirituality. People became disillusioned by the futility and impotence of the catastrophic war. The war had left many people in a state of destruction and disappointment. Millions of women lost their husbands, children lost their parents, and a sense of abandonment and loss encompassed the nation. “Europe slumped into a monumental melancholy . . . the utopian social dreams evoked by wartime rhetoric were brutally erased by inflation, unemployment and widespread deprivation, not to mention an influenza epidemic that ravaged the world in 1918-1919 and killed more people than the war itself” (Ekstein 235). It is in this aftermath of the First World War that Eliot appears with his poetic masterpiece, The Waste Land. The poem had a significant influence on his contemporaries and is regarded one of the most important documents of its time.

The poem portrays a debilitated world, a world that has declined or disregarded the spiritual life. In the poem, Eliot depicts the excruciating burden of modern city life, its lack of objective and direction, its lack of beliefs and values, reflecting the breakdown of values, total disarray and near collapse of the European civilization in the early 1920s. Many persons viewed the poem as an allegation against the post-war European civilization and as an articulation of disillusionment with the existing society that Eliot viewed as spiritually barren.

The Waste Land was written at the time when the First World War had just ended placing the world in an age of depression, loss, and ultimately death looming over everyone (Ahmed 160). The poem centers round Eliot’s reading of two contemporary influential texts – Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) and Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890). Both of Weston and Frazer discussed the myth of the Fisher King in their books. Weston’s book appeared at the very time when Eliot was seeking a coherent shape for the mass of intricate material that enters into his poem (Southam 127). Eliot makes particular use of Weston’s account of the Fisher King, a figure which recurs in a number of fertility myths, and whose story is one of obvious relevance to this poem (127). According to the legends, the land has been blighted by a curse. The crops do not grow, and the animals cannot reproduce. The trouble of the land is caused by the plight of the king of the land, the Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals (Brooks 128-129). The injury affects the king’s fertility, and his impotence is the cause of his country becoming a dried out ‘waste land’. The curse can only be lifted by the arrival of a knight who must complete several rituals, “not by pursuing advantages for himself, but by giving himself to the quest of seeking the health and salvation of the land” . Eliot picks up the legend of the Fisher King and his wasteland to describe the existing barren state of modern civilization. Eliot says he drew heavily on this legend for his poem, and critics have found that many of the poem’s allusions refer to this idea.

The title of the poem consists of the central waste land symbol and refers to the intellectual and spiritual barrenness of the modern civilization. It conveys the idea of emotional and spiritual sterility and barrenness of the world that Eliot saw after the First World War. “The ‘waste’ is not, however, that of war’s devastation and bloodshed, but the emotional and spiritual sterility of Western man, the waste of [the modern] civilization” (Southam 126). The title evokes the pictureof a waste land devastated by drought and famine which leads to large-scale starvation, predicament and death. Through the waste land symbol, Eliot shows that the twentieth century civilization is just an infertile, arid world with no genuine retrieving characteristics. The land is barren, and therefore, unable to let anything grow. This barrenness signifies the intellectual and spiritual decadence that has occurred in the contemporary world, where no new hope of faith can develop. Eliot relates the waste land symbol to the ‘Unreal City’ such as London, the “arid plain”(l. 424)*, where the readers get a sense of the “mountains of rock without water” (l. 334) and “the dry stone no sound of water” (l. 24). They see “a heap of broken images” (l. 22) made up of dirtyroads, dead trees, desert rocks, dry bones, rats scurrying in sewers, empty cisterns, and exhausted wells. Thus, the waste land pertains to the contemporary scenario of anguish and waste following the bloodshed of World War I.

The Waste Land is divided into five sections, each with a title like ‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’ and ‘What the Thunder Said’. The poem is preceded by an epigraph which comes from the Satyricon, a satire of the poet Petronius (27 BC - 66 AD). The satire implies the endless world-weariness, blindness and absence of redeeming joy which characterizes The Waste Land (Coote 30). In English translation, the epigraph means, “For I once saw with my own eyes the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered, ‘I want to die’.” (Eliot 3) In Greek mythology, Sibyls were women endowed with prophetic power, the power to see into the future. The Cumaean Sibyl had been famous both for her prophecy and for her beauty. She was loved by Apollo who offered her immortality. She accepted the offer but forgot to ask for perpetual youth. Hence, as she grew older, both her memory and prophetic power faded. Trapped in the present she was only slightlyaware of her mythical, magical past and quite indifferent to the future. As such, living in anapparently eternal present, her fate anticipated the fates of the inhabitants of The Waste Land(Saunders 35). Her death-wish is related to her wish to throw away the archaic life, just as the walking dead of the modern “Unreal City” have nothing to expect in life but death. Death alone offers escape; death alone promises the end. In this way the epigraph implies the theme of the poem– Life in the modern waste land is a living death or a life in death, like the life of Sibyl. In the story of the Cumaean Sibyl Eliot found an image which both encapsulated the dislocation of present, past and future time which he saw as symptomatic of the cultural plight of modern people (Saunders34-35). The prophecy of Sibyl sets the tone for The Waste Land as a poem that harshlyfocuses on the numbness and absolute barrenness of the post-war European civilization. The Sibyl’s affliction reflects what Eliot perceives as his own–Eliot lives in a society that has degraded and dried up but will not perish, and he is bound to live with memories of its previous glory. Like the Sibyl the modern people have life but not the youthful vigor and productivity.

conclusion:-

Throughout The Waste Land, Eliot holds a mirror to the society and the mirror reflects the predicaments of modern life in a physical, moral, emotional and spiritual waste land where promiscuity, materialism and corruption were widespread and where there was a lack of communication and interaction between individuals. Beginning with the section one entitled ‘The Burial of the Dead’ that portrays a physical wasteland and buried human consciousness, Eliot continues to the section five titled ‘What the Thunder Said’ to find out a probable way out to the problem that afflicted modern life. Throughout the journey up to section five, the readers observe some serious problems of modern life like ignorance, sexual abuse, lust, hypocrisy, futility, the vain purpose of life, and so forth. The poem deals with the whole post War generation referring to the spiritual and intellectual decay of the modern world. The poem portrays a society that has been left barren – morally, spiritually, intellectually and sexually – by the war. Eliot takes the readers into the very heart of the waste land which is post war Europe and makes them realize the plight of a whole generation. That generation is effectively symbolized by the withered Cumaean Sibyl of the epigraph, with her desperate wish to die; by Madame Sosostris, the deceitful fortune-teller who knows nothing of the mysteries of life; by Mrs. Equitone to whom life has lost all variety and distinction; by Mrs. Porter and Sweeney, an old procuress and her crude client; by the lady of situations, a victim of her own nerves and of the hysterical relationship with her lover; by Lil, who looks so antique while she is still thirty-one; by the typist and her seducer going through the sex act in an indifferent, mechanical, routine-like manner; by the demobilized Albert who wants a good time, as do the loitering heirs of city directors; by Mr. Eugenides, the dubious merchant; and so on. All these characters convey the idea of emotional and spiritual barrenness as well as the physical deformities of the world that Eliot saw after the First World War. That world is the Waste Land of the poem’s title: motionless, sexually impotent, and spiritually barren.

word :- 2216

Works Cited

1. Ahmed, Fatima Falih, et al. “Rejuvenation in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land”. European Scientific 
Journal. Vol. 11, No. 35 (2015). Web. 30 April 2018. 
2.Bloom, Harold. T. S. Eliot: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Broomall P.A: Chelsea 
House, 1999. Print. 
3.Brooks, Cleanth. “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth”. T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land. Ed. by 
C. B. Cox and Arnold P. Hinchliffe. London: Macmillan Education Ltd, 1968 (7th reprint 
in 1986). Print. 
4.Garg, Mamta. “Whispers of fallen Women in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land”. New Man 
International Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies. Vol. 1, No. 5, May 2014. Web. 14 
May 2018.
5.Southam, B. C. A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot. 6th Ed. San Diego, New York, and 
London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. Print.
6.Wheeler, Willy. “Death by Water”. Community & Collaboration - NYU’s Web Publishing. 06 
October 2015. Web. 21 May 2018.

Auden's Poems

 1) Which lines of 'September 1, 1939' you liked the most? Why?

“September 1, 1939,” one of Auden’s most famous and oft-quoted poems, gained new prominence after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Curiously, though, Auden came to dislike this work, finding it “dishonest” and a “forgery.” He had his publisher include a note that the work was “trash he was ashamed to have written”; he also tried to keep it out of later collections of his poems. It is unclear why he felt so embarrassed by the poem. It has remained a staple of Auden’s work as well as an inspiring call to speak out in hope for justice and brotherhood despite times of war or terror.The poem was written in 1939, just as German troops invaded Poland and began the Second World War. It was published in The New Republic that year and included in the collection Another Time the following year. Hitler’s invasion of Poland declared his military strength and flouted the agreement of the Munich Conference, shocking the entire world. The United States did not enter the war until 1941.

Auden begins his poem with the speaker sitting in a dive bar in New York City. Hitler’s actions have brought the “low dishonest decade” to a close, bringing “the unmentionable odour of death” to the September evening. He contemplates Hitler’s psychology using a Jungian concept a “huge imago,” a psychological concept of the idealized self and he imagines that historians will explain how German culture, perhaps starting with Martin Luther’s Protestant shakeup of Christianity hundreds of years earlier, led Germans to go along with Hitler’s psychopathic evil.

Yet, even the average person perceives the basic human patterns in the story: doing evil to someone leads that person to do evil in return. More than 2,000 years ago, Thucydides saw how dictators abuse an apathetic population to accomplish their ends, even in a democracy like Germany . The same pattern keeps occurring. Perhaps this is a reason why Auden’s nine stanzas all have the same pattern of eleven lines that, while they do not rhyme, tend to repeat vowel and consonant sounds at the ends of lines (for example, the last four lines of stanza 1: earth/lives/death/night; stanza 2: know/learn/done/return; stanza 3: away/pain/grief/again). The story told here is not new.

In the fourth stanza the poet focuses on New York City, a paragon of modern capitalism, which has yielded “blind skyscrapers” that “proclaim / the strength of Collective Man” via competition and diversity rather than coordinated socialistic efforts. Yet, one cost of this social blindness is isolationism. People cling to their average lives; they are content to pursue their happy dreams, and they keep the music playing and the lights on so that they never see how morally lost they are. They trust “Authority” , which fits their selfish and sensual desires to fulfill their goals regardless of what is happening in Europe.

What is missing is awareness of this basic human jealousy that privileges oneself over others, leading not only to evil but also complacency and apathy when evil is happening elsewhere, as in Europe. Meanwhile, politicians inevitably take advantage of these tendencies as the geopolitical “game” plays out.

In the last two stanzas the poetic voice tries to overcome the problems identified in the previous stanza: “Who can reach the deaf, / Who can speak for the dumb?” Auden scholar James Persoon notes that the speaker only has one voice with which to “undo the folded lie” that humans are too jealous to seek justice.

Yet, the speaker is one of many people who provide “points of light” like this poem. In contrast to the points of light that come from a firing gun, the poem’s rhetorical points “flash out” as a message exchanged with other members of “the Just,” those who seek justice. Although each person writes selfishly and separately, “dotted everywhere,” poems about solidarity and justice create a kind of solidarity. In this way, the network of poems “ironically” emerges spontaneously, mirroring the network of New York skyscrapers which emerge without coordination and make the city.

The poet knows he is just like everyone else, “composed like them / Of Eros [alluding to the god of love, representing the passions] and dust [alluding to Biblical passages about human mortality and returning to the natural dust of the earth upon death].” It is a time of “negation and despair” for anyone who is paying attention to Europe. Nonetheless, the speaker hopes his words can show “an affirming flame” of human connectedness and concern.

If Auden’s speaker is speaking against apathetic neutrality in the face of German aggression, is he calling for the United States to go to war? Or is the role of such a poet to affirm common humanity and justice along with the others who are “Just,” taking a prophetic route while hoping that people will turn from their selfish ways? When Auden changed the key line from the idealistic “We must love one another or die” to “We must love one another and die,” the meaning seems to have changed to express that going to war in the name of love was, in the case of the Second World War, perhaps in hindsight, justified.

2) What is so special about 'In Memory of W B Yeats'?

William Butler Yeats died in winter: the brooks were frozen, airports were all but empty, and statues were covered in snow. The thermometer and other instruments told us the day he died “was a dark cold day.”

While nature followed its course elsewhere, mourners kept his poems alive without letting the poet’s death interfere. Yet, for Yeats himself, mind and body failed, leaving no one to appreciate his life but his admirers. He lives through his poetry, scattered among cities and unfamiliar readers and critics, who modify his life and poetry through their own understandings. While the rest of civilization moves on, “a few thousand” will remember the day of his death as special.

In the second section of the poem, Yeats is called “silly like us.” It was “Mad Ireland” that caused Yeats the suffering he turned into poetry. Poetry survives and gives voice to survival in a space of isolation.

In the third, final section of the poem, the poet asks the Earth to receive Yeats as “an honoured guest.” The body, “emptied of its poetry,” lies there. Meanwhile, “the dogs of Europe bark” and humans continue their “intellectual disgrace.” But the poet is to “follow right / To the bottom of the night,” despite the dark side of humanity somehow persuading others to rejoice in existence. Despite “human unsuccess,” the poet can sing out through the “curse” and “distress.” Thus one’s poetry is a “healing fountain” that, although life is a “prison,” can “teach the free man how to praise” life anyway.

Along with his piece on the death of Sigmund Freud, Auden's tribute to the poet William Butler Yeats is a most memorable elegy on the death of a public figure. Written in 1940, it commemorates the death of the poet in 1939, a critical year for Auden personally as well as for the world at large. This was the year he moved to New York and the year the world catapulted itself into the Second World War.

Yeats was born in Ireland 1856 and embraced poetry very early in his life. He never abandoned the traditional verse format of English poetry but embraced some of the tenets of modernism, especially the modernism practiced by Ezra Pound. He was politically active, mystical, and often deeply pessimistic, but his work also evinces intense lyrical beauty and fervent exaltation in Nature. He is easily considered one of the most important poets of the 20th century, and Auden recognized it at the time.

The poem is organized into three sections and is a commentary on the nature of a great poet’s art and its role during a time of great calamity as well as the ordinary time of life’s struggles.

The first, mournful section describes the coldness of death, repeating that “The day of his death was a dark cold day.” The environment reflects the coldness of death: rivers are too frozen to run; hardly anyone travels by air; statues of public figures are desecrated by snow. These conditions symbolize the loss of activity and energy in Yeats’ death.

At the same time, far away, wolves run and “the peasant river” flows outside of the rest of civilization , keeping the poetry alive. The implication is that the poems live even though the man may be dead. The difficulty with this situation, however, is that the man can no longer speak for himself; “he became his admirers.” His poems, like ashes, are “scattered” everywhere and are misinterpreted . The ugly fact of bad digestion modifies the poems as “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.”

Furthermore, as in “Funeral Blues” and “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the events of the average day go on—a trader yells on the floor, the poor suffer for most people, the day goes unmarked. It takes a special soul to mark the importance of the day of the death of a great poet, and only “a few thousand” have such a soul. As scholar James Persoon writes, “These two elements the poet's death as national and natural crisis and the poet’s death as almost completely insignificant describe a tension within which Auden explores the life of the work after the death of the author.” Thus, in addition to the thermometer telling us so, the speaker of the poem tells us that it is a “dark cold day” with respect to the popular reception of Yeats’ poetry.

In the second section the speaker briefly reflects on the generative power behind Yeats’ poetry. It was “Mad Ireland” that “hurt” him and inspired his poetry as a form of survival. For Yeats, “silly” like other poets or, more broadly, like other Irishmen or humans, poetry was a “gift” that survived everything other than itself even Yeats’ own physical degeneration, the misinterpretations of “rich women,” and Yeats’ own failings. Poetry itself, from this perspective, survives in the midst of everything, not causing anything, but flowing out from isolated safety and providing voice  to that deep level of raw and unassailable humanity.

The third and final part brings the reader back into more familiar territory, with six stanzas of AABB verse, every line in seven-syllable trochaic verse.

The body of Yeats  rests in the ground, the warring nations fight, people misinterpret his work (“intellectual disgraces”), yet somehow, his poetry retains a place somewhere. The true poet, like Yeats himself, will “follow right / To the bottom of the night”, to that fundamental human freedom where an “unconstraining voice” can “persuade us to rejoice” in our existence.

True enough, the human “curse” remains; death awaits. This is all too true in a time of war. But the poet can turn the curse into a “vineyard” where sweet poetic drink can form. On the one hand there are “deserts of the heart” and human distress, yet on the other hand, with this wine a “healing fountain” can release a man from “the prison of his [mortal] days.” A poet like Yeats, despite everything, can “teach the free man how to praise” that fundamental spark of existence that survives in one’s poetry.

3) Is there any contemporary relevance of 'Epitaph on a Tyrant'?

‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ is one of Auden’s short masterpieces. In just six lines, W. H. Auden (1907-73) manages to say so much about the nature of tyranny. You can read ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’ here, before proceeding to our short analysis of this powerful poem that remains all too relevant today.

Wyston Hughes Auden, or WH Auden, was a British poet, often considered by critics to be one of the best England has ever produced. Auden’s work is known, not only for its remarkable poetic calibre and craftsmanship but also for his skilful portrayal of myriad themes- ranging from the political, social, ethical, to the moral and even the individual. One of Auden’s best known poems and written, interestingly when Adolf Hitler was at the peak of his power in Europe, is a short, six line piece entitled- “Epitaph on a Tyrant” The poem talks about a man- an anonymous “he”- a perfectionist whose poetry was understandable and who, himself, understood “human folly” and the human psyche like “the back of his hand”. He was most interested in “armies and fleets” and when he laughed “respectable senators” burst out in cackles of laughter. Then in a sudden drastic change of atmosphere, Auden says- “When he cried, little children died in the streets”.

One of the significant factors that lends Auden’s poetry a rare kind of brilliance is its ability to appeal to the reader in different sorts of ways. Therefore, there are various different interpretations of this one short poem- the most obvious one being that of an allusion to Adolf Hitler- the Fuhrer of Germany, which rings true on almost every count. Hitler was a man yearning to establish a Pan German empire- a perfect pure Aryan race, he was man whose “poetry”- whose thoughts, beliefs, charisma, all reflected in his oratory which was considered brilliant and inspired millions to support him.

W B Yeats - Poems

W B Yeats :- 

Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Irish Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also, a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats , she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.

Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservativism of his American counterparts in London, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision and imagery, but Yeats never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms. He had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy, and his poetry continued to grow stronger as he grew older. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright, and as one of the very greatest poets in any language of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of seventy-three.

Video recording of online class  :-

'The Second Coming as a Pandemic Poem' :-

‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), written in 1915 and published the following year. It’s one of Yeats’s shortest well-known poems, comprising just six lines, and sets out why Yeats chooses not to write a ‘war poem’ for publication. Before we analyze ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’, here’s a reminder of the text of the poem.

‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem about refusing to write a war poem when asked to produce one. This odd act of refusal-as-assent writing a poem, but a poem which takes a stand against writing a certain kind of poem has the air of irony about it, and Yeats probably intended his poem to be taken as a brief ‘thanks, but no thanks.

In terms of its form, the poem is written in iambic pentameter, rhymed ABC ABC. The final two lines are the only ones which might cause some real head-scratching from readers enjoyed: young girls might enjoy his romantic verses about old Ireland, while an old man might enjoy the ballads.

It was the American novelists, Henry James, and Edith Wharton – who were good friends and who both came to live in Britain – who approached him: Wharton was editing an anthology, The Book of the Homeless, the profits from which would go towards helping refugees of the war. That anthology appeared in 1916, complete with Yeats’s contribution, which appeared under the alternative title ‘A Reason for Keeping Silent’.

Yeats had written to his friend Lady Gregory: ‘I suppose, like most wars it is at root a bagman’s war, a sacrifice of the best for the worst. I feel strangely enough most for the young Germans who are now being killed.’ Yeats goes on to say that the ‘bespectacled’ Germans he has seen remind him more of himself than the English soldiersor the French troops.

In a letter of the same year, sent to John Quinn, Yeats wrote that the First World War was ‘merely the most expensive outbreak of insolence and stupidity the world has ever seen and I give it as little thought as I can.’ These remarks leave us in little doubt about how Yeats viewed the conflict, and help to explain why he wrote ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’.

‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ could be productively analysed alongside ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, for this reason. Yeats objected to the war, and could not imagine using poetry to wave the flag for the right ‘side’. His line ‘We have no gift to set a statesman right’ is a forerunner to Auden’s famous line that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, and the similarity is no coincidence: Auden makes that well-known statement in his elegy for W. B. Yeats, written in 1939.

'On Being Asked for a War Poem :-

Today’s post returns to the issue we touched on last month with “Acting.” What is an artist’s proper role regarding politics and social issues? And why do artists who engage in politics draw especial condemnation for doing so?

This may be the wrong question. Does anyone ask, what’s the proper role of a lawyer, real estate tycoon, school teacher, doctor or fry cook in politics? None that I’ve heard of lately. My working answer to this possibly disingenuous question is going to be long, so if you can, bear with me.

Probably the only other profession that has its participation in politics questioned in any way would be clergy, and I think there are a pair of oddly similar issues with artists and clergy speaking on politics.

Artists, at least good ones, by their nature tend to be “progressives.” Please, if you can, skip by any associated political stances you attach to that label, it’s honestly the best word I could come up with. By “progressives,” I mean that artists naturally seek change, novelty, and the advancement of new ideas even if they are built on older ones. Scientists and technologists have a similar bent, but artists like to think of themselves as ahead of even the sciences in this regard. Religious leaders, teachers, preachers, tend to be “conservative.” Please apply the same caution to that word as I asked for “progressives.” By conservative, I mean that they see the values in cultural traditions as possibly being given by supernatural forces that are of a higher order than mere human thought, or at the very least, that traditions are time-tested in such a way that they need to be honored, and to extent that seems reasonable to them, for those traditions to remain unchanged.

Are there “conservative” artists. Yes, they are. It’s quite possible to be artistically progressive (important for good artistic work) and politically conservative. Shakespeare presents himself as conservative politically, but was a culture changing artist. And it’s easy for me to think of some 20th century artists who are not “conservative” but “reactionary,” Ezra Pound for one. Caution again, just a label, let me explain: I use reactionary as a label here to denote people who believe that some important elements have failed to have been conserved, and that change is necessary to return to that state or set of values that no longer effectively exist.

Are there religious “progressives.” Yes indeed. Remember that religious people overwhelmingly believe that certain values are given by superhuman forces, ones that exceed what humans themselves might honor. There has always been a large part of religious thought that says that mankind is “fallen” and so therefore is in constant need for change toward the good, a good that might never be properly illuminated by fallen human thought.

So for both our “conservative” label (clergy) and “progressive” label (artists) we’re talking associated tendencies, not absolute dictates. Humans are complicated after all; but I think that’s one thing that strangely joins concerns about artists and clergy in the political arena. Opponents to conservative clergy and progressive artists see these groups as respectively prejudiced, temperamentally oriented toward resistance to necessary change or moving toward too broad and untested change. In this outlook, their self-selected temperaments that lead to their professions blind them, and so they aren’t viewing things fairly or deeply enough because of who they are. One proof we can see in this is that it’s rare for conservatives to criticize conservative artists in politics, or for progressives to criticize religious leaders who champion progressive causes. The belief here would be that those who go against natural tendencies in their professions must be significantly immune to that issue of characteristic prejudice.

You might next think or ask: well doesn’t a fry cook or a real-estate tycoon have their own prejudices based on their livelihoods? What’s different about artists or clergy?

My answer to that moves to another thing those two professions have in common: they are both pretty much in the same business. When a religious leader gives a spell-binding sermon, or a writer moves us to tears, when a religious visionary tells us what the angels said to them, or the musician brings sounds together in a way that moves us, when the crowd rises as one, with one hosanna on their lips, does it matter here who is at the front of the house?

What is important to our question comes after these remarkably similar experiences. Are we in that crowd, and yet not moved to rise in praise like the others? Is there often a let-down, however vague and hard to explain afterward? A way in which we feel unworthy, a way in which we feel we thought we were changed and yet we are not changed? Do we ever feel tricked: fearing, or perhaps even knowing, that the artist or preacher has engineered this with the techniques of their craft, techniques that might work regardless of the content they convey

Now what if the person at the front of the room is not an artist or a preacher, but a political figure

So all this is a prelude to a very short, yet puzzling piece, with words by William Butler Yeats: “On Being Asked for a War Poem.”

Bob Dylan and Robert Frost

1.)  Which song of Bob Dylan has made an impact on you? Why? Can you find a song similar to the same theme in other language?

 Bob Dylan:-

Bob Dylan was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. He grew up in the city of Hibbing. As a teenager, he played in various bands and with time his interest in music deepened, with a particular passion for American folk music and blues. One of his idols was the folk singer Woody Guthrie. He was also influenced by the early authors of the Beat Generation, as well as by modernist poets.

Dylan moved to New York City in 1961 and began to perform in clubs and cafés in Greenwich Village. He met the record producer John Hammond, with whom he signed a contract for his debut album, Bob Dylan (1962). In the following years, he recorded a number of albums which have had a tremendous impact on popular music: Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, Blonde On Blonde in 1966 and Blood On The Tracks in 1975. His productivity continued in the following decades, resulting in masterpieces like Oh Mercy (1989), Time Out of Mind (1997) and Modern Times (2006).

Dylan’s tours in 1965 and 1966 attracted a lot of attention. For a period, he was accompanied by film maker D. A. Pennebaker, who documented life around the stage in what would come to be the movie Dont Look Back (1967). Dylan has recorded a large number of albums revolving around topics such as: the social conditions of man, religion, politics and love. The lyrics have continuously been published in new editions starting in 1973, under the title WritingsandDrawings, subsequently changed to Lyrics. As an artist, he is strikingly versatile; he has been active as a painter, actor and scriptwriter.

Besides his large production of albums, Dylan has published experimental work like the prose poetry collection Tarantula (1971). He has written an autobiography, Chronicles (2004), which depicts memories from the early years in New York and which provides glimpses of his life at the center of popular culture. Since the late 1980s, Bob Dylan has toured consistently, playing over 3000 concerts during the last 20 years. Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on contemporary culture is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of literary and musical analysis.

"Blowin' in the Wind" :-

Dylan claimed he wrote the lyrics of "Blowin' in the Wind" in 10 minutes in a NYC cafe, and they've gone on to inspire poets and activists for decades. Its lyrics are a series of questions with no answers. They allow for multiple interpretations, making the song, as Rolling Stone wrote in their "500 Greatest Songs of All Time," an "all-purpose progressive anthem suggesting that things must and will change." Because of this, it served as the center of several protest movements in the '60s.

Dylan released his version in 1963 on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan right as the civil rights movement was reaching its peak. He performed the song at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. Peter, Paul and Mary, who recorded a popular version that same year, performed it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial just hours before Martin Luther King told the world, "I have a dream."

Later, due to the song's "cannonballs" and "doves," it lent itself to anti-Vietnam protests. According to activist and musician Peter Yarrow, the all-purpose applications of the song are a major part of its appeal. "You can hear in this a yearning and a hope and a possibility and a sadness and sometimes a triumphal proclamation of determination," he told NPR. "So it's a matter of interpretation and, frankly, I think Bobby was probably right and legitimate in not giving a specific interpretation."

 yes I find a song similar to the same theme in other languages " Tera Hone Laga Hoon"

2.)  Which poem of Robert Frost has made an impact on you? Why? 

Robert Frost was born on March 26th, 1874. One of the most celebrated poets in America, Robert Frost was an author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes and a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony. Robert Frost's work was highly associated with rural life in New England. The poet often uses the New England setting to explore complicated philosophical and social themes. As a well-known and often-quoted poet, Robert Frost was highly honored during his presence on earth, receiving 4 Pulitzer Prizes.

Robert Frost's father was a former teacher who later turned newspaperman. His father was also known to be a gambler, a hard drinker, and a harsh disciplinarian. For as long as he allowed, he had a passion for politics. Robert Frost resided in California until the age of eleven. Frost moved with his mother and sister to eastern Massachusetts, after the death of his father.

Frost's mother later joined the Swedenborgian church and had the poet baptized in it. As an adult, Frost left the faith of his mother. As a city boy, Frost grew up understanding so many things in life and had his first poem published in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In 1892, he attended Dartmouth College for just less than a semester. While at Dartmouth College, Frost joined the fraternity called Theta Delta Chi. Frost went back to his hometown to work and teach at various jobs including newspaper delivery and factory assignment. Robert Frost sold his first poem titled My Butterfly in 1894 to The Independent at the rate of 15 dollars.

Frost was proud of the success the poem brought to him and went on to ask Elinor Miriam White's hands in marriage. Both Elinor and Frost had graduated co-valedictorians from their high-school and remained in contact with one another. However, Elinor Miriam White refused the notion to marry Frost, mentioning that her education was important first. Robert Frost felt another man was occupying his position in White's heart and went on an excursion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. He came back in 1895 and asked Elinor White again to marry him. The same year, both of them became happily married.

The couple taught school together until the year 1897. Robert Frost later entered Harvard University for 2 years. His records were good, but he decided to go back home because Elinor is expecting her second child. Frost's grandfather bought a farmer in Derry, New Hampshire for the young couple. Frost remained there for a space of 9 years and wrote so many of the poems that will make up his first works. While attempting to pick up the poultry farming business, the whole thing went unsuccessful. Frost was forced to settle for another at Pinkerton Academy, a secondary school.

Roberts Frost went to Glasgow with his family in 1912 and later lived in Beaconsfield. In the next year, Frost published his first book titled A Boy's Will. In England, Robert Frost made important contacts including T. E. Hulme, Edward Thomas, and Ezra Pound. The mentioned names were the first Americans to write a favorable review of Robert Frost's work. Some of the first pieces of his poet work were written while living in England. In 1915, Robert Lee returned to America and purchased a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire. That same year, Frost launched a career of writing, lecturing and teaching.

Frost became an English professor at Amherst College from 1916-1938. While a professor at Amherst College, he advised his writing students to always bring the notion of the human voices to their craft. From 1921 and the next forty-two years of his life, he had three great expectations. During summers, Frost spent time teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College in Ripton, Vermont. Nevertheless, Middlebury College still owns and managed Frost's farm. Middlebury College as managed his farm as a National Historic Site located near the Bread Loaf campus. He also represented the United States of America on several official missions. On January 20th, 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, Frost recited a poem titled The Gift Outright.

Over the course of his career, he became popular for poems involving the interplay of voices such as Death of the Hired Man or dramas. To be factual and upfront here, Frost's work was highly well-known among so many people and it remained so. Among Frost's popular shorter poems are Mending Wall, Directive, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken, Nothing Gold Can Stay, Fire and Ice, Birches, After Apple Picking. Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize at 4 different times. This is an achievement unequaled by any other American poet.

Robert Frost finally died in Boston on January 29th, 1963. He was happily buried in the Old Bennington Cemetery, Vermont. Harvard's 1965 alumni archive dictates that Frost had an honorary degree in the university. He also received honorary degrees from Oxford, Bates College, and Cambridge universities. History records that Robert Frost was the first person to receive 2 honorary degrees from Dartmouth College. During his lifetime, the main library of Amherst College and as well as the Robert Frost Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia were named after him.

Since the nineteenth century, American poetry has developed in two main streams; the first began with the free, pulsating, incantatory verse of Walt Whitman, while the second started with the experiment and innovation of Emily Dickinson. Frost owes a little to both traditions, though he has, on the whole, tended to work from and continue an earlier tradition and thus create a tradition of his own. Records have shown that Frost was a farmer, a poet, a rare combination. As a farmer, Frost only spent ten years in the occupation. Frost's works have been perfectly divided into 9 collections or books. There are several great poems found in the list such as Mountain Interval, North of Boston, and New Hampshire. Frost usually displays the life occurring in New England and showcased it via his poems. With the comprehensive explanation of this article, you are sure to discover Robert Frost's life and his achievement in poems. Frost is worth calling a legend after reading through the great work of his hand.

Interpretation Challenge: Breath: The Shortest Play by Samuel Beckett

Here is a blog post about giving an interpretation of a thirty-second play, 'Breath'. It is the shortest play written by Samuel Beckett. Martin Esslin first gave the term 'Theatre of the Absurd.' He was awarded Nobel Prize in 1969. A few of his notable works are Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, and other 

If we look at the script of the play, it is as follows:-

CURTAIN Up:-

1. Faint light on a stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold about five seconds.
2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum - together in about ten seconds. Silence and hold for about five seconds.
3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in 1) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold about five seconds.

CURTAIN Down:-

The title of the play Breath is very significant. It refers to life. The script of the play contains miscellaneous rubbish. This suggests boredom and anxiety. The brief cry also signifies life but it also suggests disgust, anguished, stressed, haphazard, pessimist, and gloomy thinking. The play is very short so, this also significantly suggests that life is very short. All we have to do is just breathe and cry. Crying for status, power, money, recognition, attachment, acceptance, and whatnot. The beginning part of the script suggests birth, as the light inspires and grows. The end part suggests death as the light and the sound gradually decrease. But the setup is very rubbish, so it suggests that life is nothing but rubbish stuff, spread hither and thither. No matter how human tries to decorate the life, it will remain rubbish and coarse.

Samuel Beckett's ‘Breath’ by Asari Bhavyang :-

The picturization revolves around the journey of Human beings from Birth to Death and in between these two polls the activities which are done.

The video begins with the clock which shows the importance of time and the clock is a symbol of human life, as when A birth of a person is seen as the arrival of happiness in other people's life while here it sounds like that Birth is so cheerful. Because now we are alone in this purposeless universe. According to Existentialism "We are thrown into the Meaningless Universe."

At the end of the video again there is a Bottle that falls down and again a faint cry which symbolizes the death of a person. So, It is a journey of human life from birth to death and in between what is the purpose of human life.

In between and end the collection of rubbish things are the different phases of development of life. 

The clock symbolizes Time. Between birth and death, we have some allocated time within which we have to live our life. And there is a time that binds every human action. 

Another significant symbol used in the rubbish stuff is Gift and spray. Now the Gift and spray symbolize the materialistic nature of a Human. Humans invest their whole life to earn a good salary and get money to live life. Within that one cannot survive. But in the end, if we count then it seems like we have wasted our whole life doing nothing except running behind money. There are many things which used in video like color bottles symbolize our childhood where we used to play, there is another phase of learning life lessons and getting knowledge which is reflected through the shattered pens in the video. Then one most important thing which highlighted staple through use sheets of paper to fasten them together. In the same way through life, we spend our days and nights in making our relationship stronger with people. And also time and again we motivate ourselves by doing something new creative in life. So, these are some of the things which are used in the video which denotes various phases in Human Life.

Dada poem

Dada poem:-

Before:-

Amid the surging Covid-19 cases, the West Bengal government on Saturday announced a complete lockdown across the state from 6 am on May 16 to 6 pm on May 30. It also imposed a night curfew, which will be observed every night from 9 pm to 5 am, beginning Sunday night.
Chief Secretary Alapan Bandyopadhyay said that strict conditions on the movement of transport and other sectors are imposed for two weeks to control the situation in the state.

 Dada poem :-

 Night government across.
May on be;
Strict cases.
Beginning 16 night;
In from sunday the;
Imposed will the sectors;
For curfew am 30 a from 9 pm which.
To the two secretary saturday;
Night on to;
Observed movement;
The on.
Bengal are bandyopadhyay may also;
West other chief complete state situation;
6 state imposed.
6 am to a 5 on.
Every conditions that it surging;
Lockdown said covid-19 control pm weeks the and of transport announced.
The alapan amid 

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hemingway's Writing Style:-

A great deal has been written about Hemingway's distinctive style. In fact, the two great stylists of twentieth-century American literature are William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, and the styles of the two writers are so vastly different that there can be no comparison. For example, their styles have become so famous and so individually unique that yearly contests award prizes to people who write the best parodies of their styles. The parodies of Hemingway's writing style are perhaps the more fun to read because of Hemingway's ultimate simplicity and because he so often used the same style and the same themes in much of his work.

From the beginning of his writing career in the 1920s, Hemingway's writing style occasioned a great deal of comment and controversy. Basically, a typical Hemingway novel or short story is written in simple, direct, unadorned prose. Possibly, the style developed because of his early journalistic training. The reality, however, is this: Before Hemingway began publishing his short stories and sketches, American writers affected British mannerisms. Adjectives piled on top of one another; adverbs tripped over each other. Colons clogged the flow of even short paragraphs, and the plethora of semicolons often caused readers to throw up their hands in exasperation. And then came Hemingway.

An excellent example of Hemingway's style is found in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." In this story, there is no maudlin sentimentality; the plot is simple, yet highly complex and difficult. Focusing on an old man and two waiters, Hemingway says as little as possible. He lets the characters speak, and, from them, we discover the inner loneliness of two of the men and the callous prejudices of the other. When Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954, his writing style was singled out as one of his foremost achievements. The committee recognized his "forceful and style-making mastery of the art of modern narration."

Hemingway has often been described as a master of dialogue; in story after story, novel after novel, readers and critics have remarked, "This is the way that these characters would really talk." Yet, a close examination of his dialogue reveals that this is rarely the way people really speak. The effect is accomplished, rather, by calculated emphasis and repetition that makes us remember what has been said.

Perhaps some of the best of Hemingway's much-celebrated use of dialogue occurs in "Hills Like White Elephants." When the story opens, two characters  a man and a woman are sitting at a table. We finally learn that the girl's nickname is "Jig." Eventually, we learn that they are in the cafe of a train station in Spain. But Hemingway tells us nothing about them or about their past or about their future. There is no description of them. We don't know their ages. We know virtually nothing about them. The only information that we have about them is what we learn from their dialogue; thus this story must be read very carefully.

This spare, carefully honed and polished writing style of Hemingway was by no means spontaneous. When he worked as a journalist, he learned to report facts crisply and succinctly. He was also an obsessive revisionist. It is reported that he wrote and rewrote all, or portions, of The Old Man and the Sea more than two hundred times before he was ready to release it for publication.

Hemingway took great pains with his work; he revised tirelessly. "A writer's style," he said, "should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous." Hemingway more than fulfilled his own requirements for good writing. His words are simple and vigorous, burnished and uniquely brilliant.

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS :-

For Whom The Bell Tolls is the novel that was supposed to win Ernest Hemingway his first Pulitzer Prize in 1941. However, like Sinclair Lewis before him, Hemingway was denied the prize by the President of Columbia University. As the story goes, the 1941 Novel Jury recommended several books for the Pulitzer Prize including, but not primarily, For Whom The Bell Tolls, but the Pulitzer Advisory Board overrode their other recommendations in favor of the critic’s choice, For Whom The Bell Tolls. Before the Board could complete the vote they were blocked by one man: the President of Columbia University, Nicholas Butler Murray. He was ex-officio Chairman of the Pulitzer also Advisory Board and he objected to the ‘lascivious’ content in the novel (Sound familiar? Nicholas Butler Murray also blocked the Pulitzer Prize from being bestowed upon Sinclair Lewis in 1921 for his novel Main Street. Instead the 1921 prize was awarded to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence).

Why did no one on the Pulitzer Advisory Board stand up to Nicholas Butler Murray? His story is worth mentioning as he was a fascinating American figure. Nicholas Butler Murray was viewed as something of an autocratic ruler at Columbia University, often wantonly dismissing staff and faculty, prohibiting entry for Jewish students, in a word – he ruled Columbia with an iron first, and yet he was also a respected American statesman. He was the former running mate of William Howard Taft in 1912. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 along with Jane Addams, for his efforts as President of the Carnegie Endowment For International for Peace. He helped to negotiate peace in Europe using his elite relationships with leaders like Kaiser Wilhelm II. Nicholas Butler Murray was also a popular cultural figure. Each year The New York Times printed his annual Christmas Greeting to the nation. He is recognized today as the longest serving President of Columbia University (43 years), a tenure which first began in the role of Interim President in 1901 before he was officially elected to the position of President, serving from 1902-1945. So when Nicholas Butler Murray stood in the doorway of the Pulitzer proceedings, refusing to move while shouting “I hope you will reconsider before you ask the university to be associated with an award for a work of this nature!” -no one dared to stand against him. The full details of the confrontation were later brought to light in 1962 by Arthur Krock, a Pulitzer Board member and New York Times journalist. As a consequence of the fight, no novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1941.

That year, the Novel Jury welcomed a newcomer: Dorothy Canfield Fisher, an impressive woman who replaced Robert M. Lovett from the previous year. Dorothy Canfield Fisher is perhaps best known for bringing the Montessori School system to the United States, but she also achieved other important milestones. She was praised by Eleanor Roosevelt as one of the most influential women in America. Alongside Fisher, two veteran Novel Jurists also reprised their roles in 1941: Jefferson B. Fletcher (Literature Professor at Columbia University), and Joseph W. Krutch (Literature Professor at Columbia University and naturalist writer). They considered several other novels aside from For Whom The Bell Tolls including The Trees by Joseph Conrad, The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Native Son by Richard Wright, and Oliver Wiswell by Kenneth Roberts. The Jury apparently reluctantly favored The Trees by Joseph Conrad before the Pulitzer Board unilaterally selected For Whom The Bell Tolls and Nicholas Butler Murray blocked its nomination.

Of course, despite being robbed the first time, Hemingway later won the coveted Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for The Old Man And The Sea (feel free to read my reflections on The Old Man and the Sea here).

For Whom The Bell Tolls is as tense a novel as it is tender. It is the story of love and war -a soldier’s duty contrasted with a lover’s embrace. The book takes us covertly behind enemy lines during the destructive Spanish Civil War of the 1930s (a war which lasted from 1936-1939). The book spans approximately four days, and within that narrow timeframe a lifetime occurs: we gain a profound and complex glimpse into the nature of heroism and cowardice among ordinary people. Amidst the chaos of war and the looming specter of death, For Whom The Bell Tolls also pulls back the curtain on a budding romance between an American soldier and an innocent Spanish girl.

Lionel Trilling's 1937 statement sounds a ring of truth today: “More than any writer of our time he has been under glass, watched, checked up on, predicted, suspected, warned” (62). By the time The Sun Also Rises (TSAR) was published in 1926, the seeds of the Hemingway legend were firmly planted, and the accompanying stream of criticism with its penchant for entanglement in E. H.'s life had begun. Edmund Wilson described the situation in 1927: “The reputation of Ernest Hemingway has, in a very short time, assumed such proportions that it has already become fashionable to disparage him” (Shores 339).

From that time and into the present, a great deal of criticism on E. H.'s works has focused on linking his personal life to his fiction and his characters to living people. Nadine DeVost says that “by 1952, when the film version of ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ appeared, Hemingway's life and the plots of his stories and novels had become thoroughly interchangeable in the public's mind …” (39). Of course, E. H. added fuel to these fires. Yet, we want to remember that although some incidents in Hemingway's life and individuals that he knew may have served as a basis for his fiction, such insights are not necessary for an enjoyment or understanding of his fiction.1 Michael Reynolds says, “After he wrote The Sun Also Rises, most of his readers and more than one biographer assumed that all of his fiction was thinly veiled biography, which it almost never was” (Paris Years 61). Also, as Peter Hays, Robert Lewis (Hemingway in Italy), Reynolds (Hemingway's First War), and others have discovered, most of the time E. H. conducted research before he wrote. It is unfortunate when guesses detract from an objective reading or analysis of his works. To Have and Have Not (THHN) particularly has suffered from conjectures and to such an extent that until recently the novel's text and its clues have not received the attention that they deserve.

As if biographical confusion were not enough, Trilling believed that derogatory criticism had a negative effect on E. H. and blamed it “for the illegitimate emergence of Hemingway the ‘man’”—meaning that E. H. attempted to respond in his works to demands put upon him by critics (62). Trilling is not the only one who believed this; as a matter of fact, this tendency—also prevalent in THHN criticism—serves as a good example of how in some respects Hemingway criticism has changed little over the years. Thirty-three years after Trilling wrote the above, Arthur Waldhorn wrote that “the confusion of sounds from within and without damaged Hemingway's artistic inner ear and contributed to the intellectual imbalance of To Have and Have Not” (153). Jeffrey Meyers wrote thirteen years later than THHN “was a half-hearted attempt to meet the contemporary demand for political awareness …” (Biography 292, emphasis added). Seven years later, Michael M. Boardman stated, “The effect of such continuous scrutiny, especially on a man of such strong aesthetic convictions, was a defensive stance toward his reader” (165, emphasis added). Again, while opinions regarding critical influence on Hemingway's writings may hold interest for some, such speculations offer no insight into his works. Instead—like biographical guesses—they obscure his artistic skill, or relegate it to second in importance. Also, while E. H. was irritated by misguided criticism, it is difficult to prove that much of it ever went so far as to influence his published work. It may, however, have influenced his first drafts, which seem to have served as release valves; it was not uncommon for him to use his own name and those of acquaintances in early drafts. Yet, I have difficulty imagining that he would have allowed anyone or anything to interrupt his search for truth in writing.