Ernest Hemingway: almost invariably satirical

• Advice to a Son
• Never trust a white man,
• Never kill a Jew,
• Never sign a contract,
• Never rent a pew.
• Don’t enlist in armies;
• Nor marry many wives;
• Never write for magazines;
• Never scratch your hives.
• Always put paper on the seat,
• Don’t believe in wars,
• Keep yourself both clean and neat,
• Never marry whores.
• Never pay a blackmailer,
• Never go to law,
• Never trust a publisher,
• Or you’ll sleep on straw.
• All your friends will leave you
• All your friends will die
• So lead a clean and wholesome life
• And join them in the sky. 

• The Age Demanded
• The age demanded that we sing 
• And cut away our tongue. 

• The age demanded that we flow 
• And hammered in the bung. 

• The age demanded that we dance 
• And jammed us into iron pants.

• And in the end the age was handed 
• The sort of shit that it demanded. 

• Captives
• Some came in chains
• Unrepentant but tired.
• Too tired but to stumble.
• Thinking and hating were finished
• Thinking and fighting were finished
• Retreating and hoping were finished.
• Cures thus a long campaign,
• Making death easy. 

• Neo-Thomist Poem
• The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not
• want him for long.

• 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.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American novelist whose terse yet implication-laden style almost singlehandedly reshaped American prose, both fiction and non-fiction. This style was not only a strategy for writing but reflected his view that man was measured by actions uncluttered by words and by achievements shorn of pretensions. Winner of the 1954 Novel Prize in Literature, he published seven novels and an ample collection of short stories. His verse, which was occasional and almost invariably satirical, exhibits perhaps more clearly than his prose the influence that fellow American writers (and fellow expatriates in Europe at the time of their meeting), Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), had on his body of work.