Free Term Paper
on the TitanicThe Literature about the
Titanic
The Titanic sunk April 14, 1912
after crashing into an iceberg. More than 1,500 lives were lost. The sinking of
the Titanic made a great impact in history. It was thought to be the fastest
ship and to be unsinkable. Although the sinking of the Titanic was so long ago,
lots of literature has been written about the ship. Three pieces of literature
are a poem by David R. Slavitt entitled “Titanic”, a folk song published by Carl
Sandburg in a book named The America Songbag entitled “De Titanic” and an essay
on the James Cameron film, Titanic by Katha Pollitt entitled “Women and Children
First.” The literature written at the time of the sinking is different in
content from that written much later.
To begin, the poem “Titanic” by
David R. Slavitt has five stanzas. The first one starts off with the sentence
“Who does not love the Titanic?”. Which of course gives us the appression that
the “Titanic” was a well known and loved ship. “If they sold passage tomorrow
for that same crossing, who would not buy?” This statement is very true, who
wouldn’t want to be aboard the fastest, biggest and unsinkable ship. The answer
is: everybody. “To go down….We all go down, mostly alone.” “….with crowds of
people, friends, servants, well fed, with music,….Ah!” Also, anyone would know
these lines represent the strike of tragedy. This is when everything went
happened and unfortunately lives were taken. “And the world, shocked mourns….”
With loved ones gone, the world is in a state of shock and wonders what is the
cause of the sinking. And the end “We all go: only a few, first class. The
meaning of this sentence is that people died but only a few were first class
because they were the majority put on the life boats.
Next, the folk
song published by Carl Sandburg “De Titanic” is a song whose content is very
different from a song that you maybe use to hearing or singing. However, what
made this different was how it was pronounced. An example of this would be “De
rich folks ‘cided to take a trip.” As you see, reading this may come as a
difficulty to some. This folk song has eight stanzas. Although the pronunciation
of the song is different, it is found that if you change the
misspelled/pronounced words to those of the regular English language, you will
find that it is a mistake in the song “On de fifteenth day of May
nineteen-twelve” this is referring that the ship sunk on May 15. This is totally
wrong because the “Titanic” actually sunk on April 14.
Lastly, an essay
on the James Cameron film “Titanic” by Katha Pollitt entitled “Women and
Children First” was about how unreal the move seemed in her point of view. Ms.
Pollitt found several things wrong with the movie in the way that things were
different from how things would had actually been in 1912. An good explanation
of this would be probably because the movie was made in modern times which was
the year of 1997. However, I do also agree with Ms. Pollitt, the movie may had
been even better if it was more realistic to the way things actually were. For
example the character Kate from the movie wore bright red lipstick and of course
fell in love with the poor man known as realistic and went more in depth with
history then any of those would had been shown in the movie. Also, Katha Pollitt
referred to the movie as “romantic feminism”, which appealed generally to woman
that to men.