Streetcar Named Desire and the Snows of Kilimanjaro

The epigraph of Tennessee Williams' classic play A Streetcar Named Desire contains a quote from Hart Crane's poem The Broken Tower: "And so it was I entered the broken world / To trace the visionary company of love, its voice/An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)/But not for long to hold each desperate choice" (1947). Ernest Hemingway also elected to preface his timeless short story The Snows of Kilmanjaro with an epigraph, but rather than quote the elegiac poetry of his predecessors, the quintessential American author provides his own cryptic musings on the tallest peak in Africa, before concluding "close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude" (1938). Although writing from uniquely different perspectives, Williams and Hemingway both employed the...
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