The Lost Generation
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The Lost Generation was a generation of writers active right after World War I. The Lost Generation was a group of writers who had experienced life in Europe during World War I and when going back home to the U.S. thought of their peers as a disillusioned postwar generation characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress, and a mood of futility and despair leading to arrogance and self-pride. They returned back to Europe as a way to escape mainstream America. A community of these young writers such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald formed in Paris and by looking at a America from afar, they created a new literary movement that captured the demoralized spirit of the Roaring Twenties. Ernest Hemingway made famous the term "Lost Generation" in his novel "The Sun Also Rises." F Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" captures the hedonist attitude of the Jazz Age with the exploration of the moralities of the wealthy.
"Advice to A Son" By Ernest Hemingway
Poem Analysis
Ernest Hemingway wrote Advice to a Son right after the Roaring Twenties in the early 1930's. This poem shows the many things that Hemingway had learned after fleeing to Paris from America after the Great War. Hemingway in his early thirties was writing to his son through poetry about the harsh reality of life. In his poem he spends no time being lenient on his usage of words. Hemingway in a way is belittling the way in which the youth in America after World War I would act during the Jazz Age. In line 6, Hemingway tells his son to "Never marry many wives." This could mean that he doesn't want his son to have many divorces over his lifetime and not to go around everywhere marrying someone impulsively without getting to know them well. The picture that goes to mind are two people who met a couple hours ago in Las Vegas getting married by an Elvis minister after hitting the jackpot. Hemingway seems to relate to the free and rampant youth that Hemingway saw as artificial in America. He also shows the anti-war antics and attitude shown by the rest of The Lost Generation by telling his son in lines 5 and 10, "Don't enlist in armies;" and "Don't believe in wars." Towards the end of the poem he is basically telling his son to live by morals and values and not to live a futile life. |
Literary Devices
Allusion- Hemingway repeatedly brought up situations that related with the war in which he was injured in, World War I Alliteration- Hemingway uses alliteration by using the "n" sound at the beginning of many phrases. |