Requirements: 200 words   |

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Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the hospital for the Criminal Insane is a poem by Knight Ethridge. The poem is centered on Hard Rock, a prisoner and is depicted as a hero by all his inmates. Due to his defiance, he is sent to the hospital for the criminally insane, and when he comes back, he was entirely into a different man. He is no longer the heroic prisoner that the other inmates heard and know about but rather a shell of what he used to be. The poem indicates the effects of lobotomy on Hard rock, who was once the voice of the inmates, and they looked up to him. The speaker in the poem is a fellow inmate, and he states that Hard rock was “known not to take no shit from nobody (Mays, 2015).” The speaker indicates that they all waited to see whether the word was accurate that he had changed to somebody else. This suggests that the speaker is an inmate. The speaker seems to have known Hard Rock before he was sent to the criminal insane hospital, he is observant, calm and he describes Hard Rock’s physical

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