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Courage And Anne Sexton's Courage And To Kill A Mockingbird

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Courage can be defined in many different ways as shown by Anne Sexton’s “Courage” poem and Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Anne Sexton would say courage comes in small acts and in these small acts of courage is what teaches people how to find the strength within themselves to accept things the way they are. Atticus Finch, one of the main characters in To Kill A Mockingbird, would argue that courage is perseverance and fighting till the end even though the battle has already been lost. This novel takes place around the 1930s, and is told through the eyes of Scout Finch. From her, one might learn about her father, Atticus Finch, an attorney who hopelessly aims to prove the innocence of a black man wrongly accused of rape. Both of these definitions, however, apply to three of the characters in the novel; Atticus represents both his definition and Anne Sexton’s, Scout represents Anne Sexton’s and Mrs. Dubose, an elderly woman addicted to morphine, represents Atticus’s. Atticus demonstrates both definitions of courage in many parts of the novel. Atticus was talking to Scout when he said, “‘Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win’” (Lee 76). This demonstrates Atticus’s own definition of courage because he knows he’s not going to convince the jury that Tom was innocent but he was still going to put his best effort in and fight till the end. Equally important, Atticus shows little acts of courage throughout the
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