PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

In January, 1975, my junior year in high school, I wrote a long (50 pages) paper on the life and death of Adolf Hitler.  For me, at that time in my life, it was the most scholarly paper I had done (footnotes, full bibliography, etc.).  My teacher said it did not deserve an A but something far higher, but an A was the best she could give.  While working on the paper, I was not wise enough to realize that my thesis should have been the nagging impression that pestered me throughout the paper:  that the two world wars were actually two acts of one event, with a long (20 year) intermission between.  That would have been a better paper, as that statement would be a hypothesis, than the rote recitation of the events in the life of Hitler.  But I was naive and inexperienced.  However, I can, to this day, remember the thrill of that thought coming to me the first time, as if I had discovered something very unusual.