Even Hemingway tried a bit of poetry

Ernest Hemingway was a young man when he posed in his World War I uniform, and old before his years when he sat for the photograph shown at the right. He walked among us from 1899 until 1961.

Bitterness & vitriol were Hemingway's specialties

Just to be mean to you, I am going to toss some "macho" poetry at you.

Ernest Hemingway came into the world a generation before James Dickey, and never-ever was noted for his poetry. I assume anyone who reads this does know Hemingway primarily was a novelist and short story writer, who won both a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. In case everyone does not, it now has been mentioned.

Hemingway did have some poetry published in magazines. Most of it bitter, angry, even venomous diatribes, aimed at professional critics, governments, religions and a woman here and there. He is lucky his speciality was fiction. Some attention was turned to his World War II love poems to Mary Welsh, the woman who became his fourth wife, but again, he really has no credentials as a poet.

Just to give you a taste of "Old Ernie's" stuff, here are a couple he wrote in the 1920s – 1930s. These, I consider some of his better ones, his shorter ones and definitely some of his more mellow ones.

The Ernest Liberal's Lament

I know monks masturbate at night
That pet cats screw
That some girls bite
And yet
What can I do
To set things right?

Ultimately

He tried to spit out the truth;
Dry-mouth at first,
He drooled and slobbered in the end;
Truth dibbling his chin.

Chapter Heading

For we have thought the larger thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devil's tunes,
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.

Along With Youth

A porcupine skin
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuffed horned owl
Pompous
Yellow eyed;
Chuck-wills-widow on a biased twig
Sooted with dust.
Piles of old magazines,
Drawers of boy's letters
And the line of love
They must have ended somewhere.
Yesterday's tribute is gone
Along with youth
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach
The year of the big storm
When the hotel burned down
At Seney, Michigan.