You not only made sense but also made a very good point. Some amazing poetry has come from the trenches, as it were. And the majority of it has been anti-war, or at least nostalgic for home and peace and family.
In addition to cutting down others rather than simply raising the one, there's also the tendency for people to be given a single label which is supposed to sum up all that they are. A soldier, then, is just a soldier and nothing more; a poet is just a poet and nothing else. You make the important point that in truth people are much more complicated than that.
I've noticed that a lot of other-wise good NCIS fanfic will refer to Gibbs as "the marine" or occasionally "the sniper" but I've never seen him referred to as "the craftsman" or whatever the appropriate word is for maker-of-boats, which he also is. Even relatively good authors have trouble with this, though, because people just are complicated and even if you have a novel, it's not really enough space to truly encompass a whole person.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-11-12 07:56 pm (UTC)In addition to cutting down others rather than simply raising the one, there's also the tendency for people to be given a single label which is supposed to sum up all that they are. A soldier, then, is just a soldier and nothing more; a poet is just a poet and nothing else. You make the important point that in truth people are much more complicated than that.
I've noticed that a lot of other-wise good NCIS fanfic will refer to Gibbs as "the marine" or occasionally "the sniper" but I've never seen him referred to as "the craftsman" or whatever the appropriate word is for maker-of-boats, which he also is. Even relatively good authors have trouble with this, though, because people just are complicated and even if you have a novel, it's not really enough space to truly encompass a whole person.