What were they trying to say?

As I sat down to write today, I came to a block. After reading Hart Crane’s poem titled, Chaplinesque I had no real insight into what Crane was trying to say. I know the poem was written after Crane’s viewing of The Kid which was a Charlie Chaplin film, but that didn’t help me too much since I’ve never seen The Kid. I did end up watching a short segment from the film but that didn’t even do me any good. I was still stuck looking at Crane’s poem without the slightest idea of what he was trying to say. I ended up doing a little research on the poem and found that various people saw Crane’s poem as a reference to life and the world. The life of a man that was contented with whatever the wind brought him, because he didn’t have anything in his pockets to begin with. Life is a game (v.19), and there are different instances in life where you experience loneliness, but also times of laughter.

I don’t really have too much else to say about Crane’s poem, because I just don’t fully understand what he was trying to convey. I think it is interesting that Crane wrote this poem in response to watching The Kid, because the clip I saw didn’t seem to have anything to do with what Crane wrote. I may be extremely dense to these things though.

From my short viewing of Charlie Chaplin in class yesterday, I saw Modern Times as entertaining and enjoyable. Not until we started talking about the social aspects of the movie did I notice that something bigger was going on. We talked about how the film portrayed that the big business motto would be: bigger bang for the buck. They didn’t view their workers as people, but rather as part of the machine that needed to be used in the process of mass production. Chaplin jabs fun of this idea by making a mockery out of it. It’s clever that he takes a societal problem of the time and makes it humorous, because it gets his point out there, but does it in a non-offensive sort of way. It is a passive aggressive approach to the problems of the times.

Carl Standburg

I did not know much about Carl Sandburg so I decided to look up some information that would give me an understanding of who he was and the type of person he was as a poet. Sandburg quit school when he was young and worked several jobs. Sandburg's experiences working and traveling had an impact on they way he wrote. He was familiar with the outside world and he knew the difference with rich and poor.
Sandburg lived in Chicago and he is given us, the readers  the imagery of what Chicago was like back then. He helps you be able to see the town. He describes the negatives,but that does not out weight the good. Sandburg is proud of the city of Chicago, He write "Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning." He knows there are some not so good things in the city, but he still loves is and is truely fond of it.
 When he  talks about Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads, etc. He is breaking down the industrial jobs that were available then.
 Sandburg' poem " Chicago" is known as being one of the best works of the 20th Century. This poem is a realistic look at a city growing so fast that its population is on the rise. Sandburg calls the city of Chicago, The City of Big Shoulders. I find Sandburg expression by the use of a variety of techniques.

Returning To the Earth

After reading this poem over and over again, I was left with graphic images that left much for reflection. I saw a war torn field filled stacked with corpses, bloodied soldiers compiling the bodies of their fellow comrades, and a graveyard with no headstones bordered by railroad tracks. I really loved the intensity of this poem. I love Sandburg’s choice of words; specifically the verbs pile, shovel and work. I repeated these words out loud and it added to the brevity and intensity of the image of death depicted in this poem. Men had fought and died in an unnatural way and now they were being disposed into nature, into the ground.

“Shovel them under and let me work—I am the grass; I cover all” (1439)

I felt this to be very symbolic to the natural order of God’s creation in that we are made from the earth and to the earth we will return. I immediately went to Genesis 3.19 which says:

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground. For you were made from dust and from dust you will return.”

I could be reaching here but I see a contrast with Sandburg’s poem and Genesis 3.19. Adam and Eve had lived in a perfect and beautiful naturally ordered world, had just chosen sin against God and because of that choice, were thrown out into an unnatural world, or a “battlefield”. Everything that was ordered and perfect was now in chaos. Adam and every person after him would have to fight and toil and battle for survival. With their choice, sin entered into the world. All that was unnatural: Death, pain, loss, hatred, and war became a part of the once perfect world. I see the consequences of mankind’s actions when I read this poem. In every war I have ever read about it has been about power. That is exactly what led Adam and Eve to sin. They wanted power; they wanted to be like God.

In Sandburg’s poem, I see the grass speaking. It is a resting place, a healing agent; “it covers all”. The grass is mentioned in the beginning of the poem and also at the end; connecting the whole. It is covering all that has happened, every battle, every fallen man. Not erasing but covering over and healing. All of the men are lost but not forgotten and we see that in lines 7-9:

“Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this? Where are we now?”

No matter how many years have passed, the battles and the men who fought and lost their lives in those battles are remembered. They are laid to rest in the earth. For from the earth they came, and to the earth they returned.

Sandburg's Common Death & Beauty

            After spending a semester reading arguably some of the best American writers, it is interesting to finish the semester with Carl Sandburg. Sandburg deliberately set out to write poetry about common experiences and feelings for common people. This type of poetry has a large obvious contrast to that of T.S. Eliot. Sandburg does not require you to figure out 50 allusions to understand 2 lines of poetry. This sort of ease and relatable quality is much like a breath of fresh air. However, just because Sandburg writes easily about common experience does not mean that the poems lack depth in any sort of fashion. Sandburg’s Cool Tombs and Grass both address harsh human realities, but in an easy to grasp way.

            Cool Tombs begins with three notable historical figures, who were all dead at the time of writing (and are still dead).  Lincoln is often thought of as one of the most influential presidents, but he still had enemies. Grant also accomplished much in office, but lost everything because of his corrupt dealing. Pocahontas has become idealized for her helping of the settlers, but at the same time leaving her own people. All of these people had built a strong legacy that was not perfect, but in many senses admirable. However, they all also died and forgot all of their successes and failures “in the dust, in the cool tombs.”  Sandburg seems to be reminding all of us that we cannot take our legacies, good or bad, with us. The fourth stanza takes a slightly different and more personal tone for all of us – it turns directly to the common person. In this stanza Cool Tombs forces each of us to re-evaluate our lives and realize the brevity of it. We do not “get any more than the lovers” and just like the three historical figures before us nothing is left or matters “in the dust . . . in the cool tombs.”  Life is what it is, and we need to make the most it while we still can.

            Sandburg’s Grass is actually written from the perspective of grass. Grass seems to grow nearly everywhere it is allowed to grow, especially in the Midwest, where Sandburg was from. Yet, rarely do we ever consider the restorative work that this plant does.  The narrator in the poem asks for the dead from five different battles, and in this implies that it takes the dead of the whole world. The dead, who according to Cool Tombs no longer remember their lives or have accomplishments.  The grass asks for the dead, so that it may be allowed to ‘work.’ In life, we bury the dead and then from their burial place grows grass; this is a common event. Sandburg is reminding all of us of the redemptive work that one of the most common plants – grass, does for all of us every day. The grass takes the old, dead, and now useless bodies and turns them into beautiful landscaping. Through this view we are able to find beauty in death as well as redemption in nature.  It is this type of beauty and redemption, which is not afforded to us by Cool Tombs, because we cannot achieve it. It is not us, but nature that makes and creates the beauty and redemption of death.

            Sandburg definitely had skill at being able to take a mundane everyday object, such as grass, and use to create a poem with much more depth than it would originally seem.  The Norton Anthology does a great job pairing Cool Tombs and Grass. Both of these poems deal with death, the brevity of life, and the after-effects, but from two very different perspectives. Cool Tombs shows a more personal perspective, where we see historical figures, and ourselves, remember and retain nothing from this life in death.  On the other hand, Grass shows us how our deaths, even in the most brutal of forms from war, can bring about beauty through nature and the growing of grass.  Much of the growing in nature is dependent upon the circle of life. Instead of stacking the bodies we ought to let nature take its’ course and do its’ work creating beauty and thereby redemption through death, but in the mean time we ought to make our lives worthwhile.  While these Sandburg poems focus on death, they also serve to remind us about life. 

Leaving Things Behind

The character of Harry in The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a complex one. I think Hemmingway wrote him (and the whole story) brilliantly, but I cannot like him. Despite the fact that he is dying of infection throughout the whole story it was hard for me to even feel sorry for him after a while.

All of Harry’s reminiscences and his present dialogues with Helen and the servant are thoroughly drenched in bitterness. It is evident when he thinks about his lost loves, his affairs, his aspirations, and experiences. He is most bitter of all when he thinks about his lost writing talent.

“It was his duty to write of it; but now he never would….That was one story he had saved to write. He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?”

The sting Harry experiences when remembering the decline of his talent is doubled in that he lost it by becoming just what he had planned to write out clearly for everyone to see. He had planned to write a sort of scoop on the rich from the perspective of an inside-outsider, but he became a part of the system himself, dependent on the rich women he lived with. He is aware of this double standard in his life, of hating the thing he depends on for his comfort, but he does not have the fortitude to completely remove it and return to his writing. The Africa trip is an attempt in that direction, but even he has to admit that it could not succeed in “burning the fat from his soul” because of the presence of Helen and Helen’s money, which, while not extending to luxury on the trip, at least prevents any hardship.

Hardships and luxuries aside, Harry still contracts an infection and gangrene in his leg. Knowing that he is dying, he begins to self-destruct in a way, drinking alcohol despite Helen’s advice, intentionally wounding her, and giving up generally.

“Do you have to kill your horse, and your wife and burn your saddle and your armour?...Stop it, Harry, why do you have to turn into a devil now?” “I don’t like to leave anything,” the man said. “I don’t like to leave things behind.”

This seems to indicate a pattern of Harry’s life, then. He never leaves things behind. From his recounted stories it seems that he is constantly on the move: Germany, Paris, Constantinople, rich woman to rich woman. He is convinced that “no thing could hurt him if he did not care,” so he refuses to care, simply pulling everything down around him as he leaves. Only as he is dying he realizes that this pattern of leaving nothing behind, of doing “anything…too bloody long,” means that at the end of his life, there is nothing for him to turn to, no chance for “the company that he would like to have.”

He’s worn everything out—his love, his talent, his life—and since he has left nothing behind, he has nothing left ahead of him but his curiosity and his bitterness.

Harry is convinced that everything is easier and better if you just do not care, and thereby avoid pain. But as he is dying he does not seem content with what that has brought him to, in the end.

Is Harry a Failure?

Hemingway’s character in The Snows of Kilimanjaro is complex and puzzling enough to create confusion and possibly even frustration within the reader as we learn of his habits, successes and downfalls. He drinks, cannot be committed to one woman and admits to himself that he has been unable to write many of the stories he has in his head. But do all these things make Harry a failure?

Initially, I wanted to say yes. He does not have ambitious goals for himself and depends on the wealth of women he’s with to live. Most importantly, Harry has created an entire false persona full of deception in hopes of finding success in that way. Yet as he lies at the base of the mountain with gangrene eating away his life, he begins to reflect on himself as an individual, in which his true character is revealed.

We sit with him as he realizes his faults in love, the reality that he felt more comfortable when “he no longer meant what he said, and that lies were more successful than telling the truth.” We get the impression that he dislikes this conclusion about himself, pointing to his current wife as the “caretaker and destroyer of his talent.”

As Harry lapses into thoughts of stories he could have written about, it becomes evident that he regrets not taking more effort to write about what he wanted to. One big question he continues to ask himself as he nears death is ‘why?’ “He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?” “He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.”

We begin to see Harry not as a failed writer, but as an artist who is struggling with his art form. Hemingway uses Harry to show just how damaging the loss of one’s muse is to a writer, just as he also went through the same struggles in his own life. Hemingway is able to communicate just how deceptive that muse can be, and once infected, he can no longer be in control over his art. It is also important to note that although Harry sees the top of the mountain in his dream right before death, we have no indication that the couple has ambitions to climb to the top of Kilimanjaro; it seems they are only there to hunt.

From first look, it may be concluded that Harry is a failure simply because he never wrote what he most desired to. But when taking a step back and examining the piece from all angles, it is better to conclude that Harry, although not triumphant in any way, is not a failure. He is simply a tragic result of striving for pleasure and success by taking one direction, only to realize that he had taken the wrong path.

Writers and Writing in "Kilimanjaro"

The biography section on Ernest Hemingway in Norton’s Anthology of American Literature discusses two new themes that became apparent in Hemingway’s writing. According to the anthology, “The second new theme, obviously autobiographical, was that of the successful writer losing his talent in an atmosphere of success, celebrity, and wealth.” It goes on to say that this theme is conveyed in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, which also has some biographical elements, as Hemingway used to go on safaris in Africa.

Well, using these words as my guide, I went into the story on the lookout for this ‘fallen writer’ theme. While I could see a little bit of a fallen writer theme, I could see quite a bit of commentary on just writing in general. An example of this is the flashbacks of Harry, the writer and protagonist. At first, I found the flashbacks confusing and I wasn’t sure what purpose they served in the plot. Looking at them again, I found a recurring topic in many of the flashbacks. In one way or another, his writing comes up. In one particular flashback, there’s a neat paragraph on Harry as a writer, which says:

“He had never written any of that [the quarrels] because, at first, he never wanted to hurt any one and then it seemed as though there was enough to write without it. But he had always thought that he would write it finally. There was so much to write. He had seen the world change… He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” (1992)

Harry seems to have this duty to write about the things he sees and experiences. Yet something stops him from writing it, whether it’s unwillingness to hurt people or a hesitation in presenting his stories, or whether it’s just getting caught up in his lifestyle. This is one example of how Harry is shown as a writer who fails not because his writing style is poor, but because other factors get in the way of his writing. Another flashback says, “He knew at least twenty good stories from out there [Paris] and he had never written one. Why?” (1996) Why indeed?

Another thing the anthology noted was how Harry blames his wife for his loss of talent, when deep down he acknowledges that it was his own fault. This and the idea of how you can lose your talent is expressed in the following paragraph:

“He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook.” (1988)

I found it interesting that Harry partly attributes his loss of writing talent to not using his talent. Basically, writing isn’t something that can be lost the same way a pencil can be lost-you can’t just accidentally drop it on a sidewalk and misplace it. Instead, you choose not to refine your craft, you choose to do something else instead or you simply get too busy. When you look at it that way, it actually seems quite easy to lose a talent for writing, which is a little scary to think about.

The theme of the writer in The Snows of Kilimanjaro makes me wonder: Are Harry’s reflections on writing also Hemingway’s personal thoughts on writing? It seems like it, but I could be totally mistaken.