Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway never set out to become a poet, but like many other novelists he composed a certain amount of verse while he was becoming an established fiction writer. However, he continued to experiment with poetry after he had achieved literary fame. Discounting juvenilia, Hemingway published only twenty-five poems during his lifetime, but he was more productive as a poet than is commonly known. Of the eighty-eight poems in this volume, seventy-three were completed by 1929. The international author emerged, and the public's interest has been devoted to Hemingway the myth and Hemingway the fiction writer. Hemingway the poet is a contradictory figure-irascible and profane; a wit whose sense of humor was probably best appreciated by himself; a man outside of his generation, yet a writer for his time; and, in his middle and late years, a lonely man whose vigorous life of action was gradually overwhelmed by his memories, his illnesses, and his despair. In these poems a real man, not a myth, takes shape. Like the cumulative effect of sketches in an artist's notebook, the poems reveal Hemingway himself, rather than a fictional counterpart.