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PLACE AND LANDSCAPE IN KIDWESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURE
BY

William David Barillas

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English
Program in American Studies

1994

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ABSTRACT

PLACE AND LANDSCAPE IN’IIDWESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURE

8y
William David Barillas

Certain authors of the American Midwest, including Willa Cather,
Aldo Leopold, James Wright, and Theodore Roethke, are part of a contin—
uing American neo-Romantic tradition of literary place and landscape.
These writers do more than merely describe their beloved landscapes,
though they do that with poetic brilliance. Their deeper concern is how
individuals and groups become or fail to become intellectually and
emotionally attached to local landscapes. Asking why the land is as it
now appears, they find answers in historical documentation, personal
exploration of terrain, and Wordsworth's ”spontaneous overflow of power-
ful feelings recollected in tranquillity." They share, in other words,
sense of place.

My first chapter deals with the larger American tradition of
literary place and landscape, which true to its Romantic roots, values
nature as a source of spiritual enlightenment and as a basis for demo-
cratic culture. This connection of nature, spirit, and culture lies at
the heart of my second chapter, on the American Midwest and its defining
myth or ideology: the pastoral ideal of a rural landscape inhabited by
free—holding individuals, particularly farmers. Midwestern authors of
the classic period, including Hamlin Garlin, Willa Cather, Sinclair
Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and Carl Sandburg, censured utilitarianism and
materialism while celebrating the region's natural beauty and cultural
heritage. Since the Midwest is relatively level and non-sublime, their

sense of place is subtle and picturesque, attentive to juxtapositions of

 

 

 

 

 

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human and natural elements and to enclaves of wild nature within the
agrarian landscape. There is an implicit environmentalism in these
authors' criticism of modern industrial society. They express the
perennial desire of pastoralism for a balance between society and
nature, sophistication and the bucolic.

Subsequent chapters examine the writings of individual authors in
relation to Midwestern place, landscape, and the pastoral ideal: Willa
Cather, Aldo Leopold, and James Wright. Chapter 6 considers four poets
with strong attachments to the landscape of the state of Michigan:
Theodore Roethke, Jim Harrison, Judith Minty, and Dan Gerber. The
conclusion re-examines regionalism and sense of place as conceptual

approaches to American literature.

 

 

Copyright 0 1994

by William David Barillas

 

 

 

For Teresa

who lives
in earth, air, fire, and water
in our dreams, in our hands and hearts

This is our body. Drawn up crosslegged by the flames
drinking icy water
hugging babies, kissing bellies,

Laughing on the Great Earth

Come out from the bath.

-—Gary Snyder, "The Bath“

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first like to recognize the gentlemen constituting my
dissertation committee: David D. Anderson (University Distinguished
Professor of American Thought and Language), Roger Bresnahan (Professor
and Associate Chairperson of American Thought and Language), Justin L.
Kestenbaum (Professor of History), and James I. McClintock (Professor of
English and Director of the Program in American Studies). Each exempli-
fies the ideal of what an academic should be--scholar, teacher, and
mentor. I take their self-effacing good spirits as a model for my own
right practice, attitude, and understanding. They treated me as a peer
and equal, though I wasn't, and always heard out my thoughts, however
tentative. My scholarship is a result of their wisdom and patience.

I particularly wish to thank Dr. McClintock, author of White
Logic: Jack London's Short Stories (1975) and Nature's Kindred Spirits:
Aldo Leopold, JOseph wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary
snyder (1994), director of this dissertation, who fostered its inception
in the Michigan poets essay that I wrote for his graduate seminar on
American responses to nature. I owe to him the career I have under-
taken, and the confidence to succeed at it.

Gratitude also to my parents, Guillermo and Caroline, for every-
thing, of course. Also deserving recognition for services rendered and
random smiles and good words: Denise Grucz in the American Studies
office; Sharon Tyree, Lorraine Hart, and Rosemary £220 in the English

office; Peter Berg, Head of Special Collections at the M.S.U. Library.

vi

 

 

Finally, thanks to poet Marcus Cafagna, my first and enduring friend at

M.S.U., who is giving the world something well worth reading.

 

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INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter
1. PLACE AND LANDSCAPE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE . . . .
2. PLACE AND LANDSCAPE IN MIDWESTERN LITERATURE
3. PLACE AND PLACELESSNESS IN WILLA CATHER'S NEBRASKA
NOVELS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4. ALDO LEOPOLD: ECOLOGIST AND MIDWESTERNER .
5. THE JADED PASTORALISM OF JAMES WRIGHT
6. A WATER WITH SOME LAND RUNNING THROUGH IT: MICHIGAN POETS
OF PLACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

TABLE OP CONTENTS

WORKS CITED

viii

37

67
105
129

164
196

208

INTRODUCTION

When we speak of an author's I'sense of place,“ we usually mean
that the writer in question evokes setting in a particularly vivid or
accurate manner. The expression is applied to travelogues because of
the generic expectation that such writings will describe exotic loca-
tions that the reader--an “armchair traveller”--will likely never visit.
Novels are most often said to have a "sense of place“ when the physical
circumstances of events, whether rooms in a building or places outdoors,
bear heavily on narrative conflict. A sense of place in all cases
implies a use of imagery that enables readers to imagine themselves in a
location, seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting what is there
to be sensed. (Such writing sensually transports its readers through
real geographies by imaginative means.

The chapters that follow are concerned with literary place in a
representative region--the American Midwest--particularly in regard to-
external nature. That the terms "place“ and “landscape” share emphasis
in the title of this dissertation indicates its ecological and geograph-
ical focus. Just as humanistic geographers ”read” the landscape,
interpreting human history by the signs of change on the land, I view
poems, stories, and essays as landmarks on the scene, part of the human
presence on the planet and this continent. Chapter 1 establishes a
broad, national context for American literature of place and landscape.
I find the origin of American localism in the Transcendentalists of New

England, whose spirituality of nature we hear echoed time and again

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among their literary descendants across America. Chapter 2 treats the
development of Midwestern literature within and parallel to the larger
national tradition, describing the response of major writers of the
Midwestern classic period to changes in their region's society and
landscape. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the
economic center of Midwestern life moved from the farm to the town, and
then from the town to the city. Agrarianism gave way to commerce, which
in turn was superseded by modern industrialism. Midwestern writers of
this period, like modernists in America and abroad, were deeply affected
by the recent flux in cultural values. Writers looked to the past for
answers to new dilemmas, and ahead to further changes in relationships
of individuals to society, society to nature, and individuals to nature.
Subsequent chapters give close readings of individual authors—-
Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, and James Wright--as Midwestern American
writers of place and landscape. The sixth and final chapter looks at
the poetry of one of the United States, Michigan. Any other Midwestern
state, Iowa perhaps, or Nebraska, would have served equally well as a
sub-regional focus in this dissertation. That, however, is a chapter
for another to write: Michigan is my state of origin and I feel
particularly well suited to relate the role of poetry in its natural and
cultural geography. The literature of any state dwells like a Chinese
doll within that of the region at large, which exists in turn within
American literature, one tradition in a world of cultures, each with its
own story to tell. If there is any abstract lesson to be drawn here, it
is the inexorable connection of the local and the universal. What goes
around, comes around: an image of circles within circles, arcs inter-

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Place and Landscape in American Literature

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Every continent has its own great spirit of place.

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different chemical exhalation,
different polarity with different stars: call it what
you like.

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D.H. Lawrence
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universal. . . .

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William Carlos Williams (1952)

A central theme in American studies is the role of the natural

environment in the formation of American culture.

Scholarly interest in
the subject has resulted in writings on a number of related topics,

including landscape, place, nature, wilderness, pastoralism,

regional-
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frontier and environmental history, ecological science,

and the
genre of nature writing usually traced back to Henry David Thoreau.

John Conron, editor of The American Landscape (1973), an anthology of
key primary sources——essays, fictions, and poetry--relevant to these

topics, argues that the I'growing body of critical scholarship in

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in no culture has the spatial construct of landscape been more
indispensable [than in the United States], for we seem to see

ourselves as a people living in space more than in time,
environment more than in a history.1

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such as landscape and place are actually abstract and ambiguous, holding

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movements and trends, while emphasizing the art and philosophy of

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authors who directly address place and landscape as philosophical and

spiritual concerns. The objective is a vision of place and landscape as

consistent and continuing concerns in American thought and letters.

The term ”landscape" has three connotations.2 It first refers to

the depiction of natural scenery in painting and other visual arts,

exemplified in the American tradition by Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and

 

more recently, Russell Chatham. Landscape next means the topography of

a geographical region, including forests and cities, hills and

buildings, rivers and roads. Finally, by landscape we mean “vista” or

'prospect,‘ that terrain which a person can see at a single view from a

single position. In speaking of landscape in one or more senses of the

term, we allude to human agency in a natural context. Landscape is the

 

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earth as depicted, described, modified, or simply viewed by human
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Thus contemporary scholars refer to “literary landscape,”

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suggesting not only written descriptions of the beauty and vagaries of
nature,

but the social contexts of history and ethics in the creation of
national, regional, and local identity.

In Spirit of Place: The Making
of an American Literary Landscape (1989),

Frederick Turner describes
certain American authors,

including Henry David Thoreau, Willa Cather,
and William Carlos Williams as

men and women who learned in loneliness and silence and deprivation
how truly to see where on the American earth they were: to see

their specific places in such full and luminous detail that a
radically native art, a literature,

arose.4
One important concern of these authors is how individuals and groups

become or fail to become attached-~emotionally,

intellectually,

and
practically-~to the landscapes they inhabit.

They ask why the land
appears as it does, finding their answers in historical documentation,
personal exploration of the terrain, and Wordsworth's "spontaneous

overflow of powerful emotions

 

recollected in tranquillity.‘5

sense of place.

share,

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in other words,

The concept of place, which geographer James M. Houston defines as

'space meaningful for man,"6 is used in widely varying ways by scholars

in different fields. Indeed,

in literary study it is possible to

discuss place without regard to the related concepts of landscape and

 

region. This is largely the case with Leonard Lutwack's The Role of
Place in Literature (1984), which employs phenomenological terminology

in commenting on the significance to literary works of spatial
properties such as extent, verticality, horizontality, and so forth.

Lutwack's categories are useful for analysis of settings both interior

(staircases in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, for example) and exterior

(forests as symbolic of sexuality, as in D.H. Lawrence's Lady
Chatterley's Lover); but his likening of topoanalysis7 in literary study

to 'the kind of reductionism long practiced in science"8 is more
accurate of his own book than of the interdisciplinary nature of less

purely literary studies. As geographer Edward Relph writes in Place and

Placelessness (1976), ”any exploration of place . . must . . . be

concerned with the entire range of experience through which we all know
and make places, and hence can be confined by the boundaries of no
formally defined discipline."9 In discussing place and landscape in
literature, therefore, we are well served in applying the insights of
scholars from many fields who have recently examined the notion of a
'sense of place,” including contemporary geographers, ecophilosophers,
scholars of religion, as well as literary theorists.

Clarence Mondale has described the recent humanistic interest in
place as 'a reassertion of the centrality of habitat to the definition
of self and culture” based upon “the conviction that modern thought has
been unduly abstract.'1° Seeking to remedy this abstraction, psychol-
ogists, for example, have studied how infants learn to distinguish

themselves from their environments and progressively to enlarge their

understanding of spatial relations.11 On the macrocosmic level,

contemporary geographers and historians study physiographic regions and

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how resident cultures have shaped and in turn have been shaped by their

geographical circumstances.12 Recent research by geographers is espec-

ially relevant to the analysis of place and landscape in literature, not
only in regional terms, but for what geographer Karl W. Butzer of the

University of Chicago describes as a "humanistic resurgence" in the

science of geography "emphasizing symbolic values, aesthetic norms, the

artistic component of landscapes, or even existential phenomenology."13

The title of a recent anthology, Geography and Literature: A Meeting of

the Disciplines (1987), illustrates this trend toward cooperation

between the arts and sciences. William E. Mallory and Paul Simpson-

Housley, the editors of that volume, state that
through their works novelists and poets foster a deeper
appreciation of the essence of places than prosaic geographical
description. Most literary landscapes, however, are rooted in

reality, and landscapes have long been the domain of geographers.

Their knowledge can help ground even highly symbolic literary
landscapes in reality.14

To understand the concept of place as well as particular places,

then, we combine knowledge of geographical "reality" with an examination

of symbols and ideas of place, which have evolved over history. A

necessary corollary to Crevecoeur's famous question "What is an

American?" is "What is America?" To answer either we must examine

mythic understandings of place, which predominate in popular as well as
intellectual conceptions of the American national identity, which tends

to abstraction.15 As Jim Wayne Miller points out, the "American nation—

al identity is essentially extraterritorial. That is, the essence of

America is found not in particular places but in an idea."16 This idea

includes popular notions of America as a new, youthful society, as a

continental nation with character traits to match the terrain's vast-

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innocence, verve, hope and so forth. It was these virtues that Ralph

Waldo Emerson celebrated in his first book, Nature (1836), "arguably the

most important statement of American attitudes toward nature,"17 as well

as the American intellectual declaration of independence.18 "Why,"

Emerson asks, "should not we . . . enjoy an original relation to the

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world."20 The continent, in his view, was new, its history yet unwrit-

ten. A poetry of insight was possible in America because the landscape

was unconquered and free of associations with a feudal past. Emerson

and his contemporaries thus rejected current European aesthetics, which
according to Roland Van Zandt "defined an ideal landscape in terms of
its rich association with the ruins and relics, myths and legends, of

all human history--a condition that could hardly be found in the raw

American wilderness.”1 Roderick Nash argues in Wilderness in the

American Mind (1982) that "by the middle decades of the nineteenth
century wilderness was recognized as a cultural and moral resource and a

basis for national self-~esteem."252 Thomas Cole, the nation's first

great landscape painter and Emerson's contemporary, noted that here was

"no gorgeous temple to speak of ostentation: but freedom's offspring-_

 

 

 

 

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peace,

security, and happiness, dwell there, the spirits of the
scene."23

Americans first distinguished their land by what it was not,
namely Europe.24

"The same logic," according to Nash, "worked to

convince Americans that because of the aesthetic and inspirational

qualities of wilderness they were destined for artistic and literary
excellence.”5

Of course, while the American nation was a new entity,

the actual
geographical place that this idea of America would be enacted upon was

not, not even in a cultural sense.

Native Americans had dwelled on the
continent for at least ten thousand years, more than enough time to
develop profound senses of place. Native American worldviews are

intensely local, based on long associations with particular regional

landscapes. For primal cultures,

local landmarks are charged with
spiritual potency--known as manitou among the Algonquians, orenda among

the Iroquois, wakan among the Sioux--because, according to contemporary

American poet and ecophilosopher Gary Snyder,

of their perceived animal or plant habitat peculiarities, or
associations with legend and perhaps with human ancestry via

totemic systems, or because of their association with spiritual
training, or some combination of these features.

These spots are
seen as points on the landscape at which one can more easily enter
a larger-than-human, larger-than-personal realm.26

This numinous realm, much like what the Aborigines of Australia call.
"Dreamtime," is vividly depicted in Native American oral literature such
as the adventures of culture heroes like the Western region's Coyote or

the Algonquian tribes' Nanabozho (Great Hare), which occur in particular

places identifiable to the people telling the stories.27

Paul Shepard's
observation in Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of

Nature (1967) that a sacred place "associated with events important to

 

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the mythos

. consecrates and makes cosmic the territory"28 is

especially applicable to Native American senses of place. One does not

own land in Native traditions; rather, a person belongs to a place, and
is defined as a human being in relation to the home landscape.
In American written literature, a full expression of Native

American topophilia would await recent authors like Gerald Vizenor,

Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch, who combine Native

worldviews with knowledge of Euroamerican traditions in novels, poetry,

and other genres. Early American writers were slow to recognize Native

American traditions as a stimulus to a uniquely American literature;

even Walt Whitman, the great voice of diversity, was strangely silent on

this point. All the Indians do in Leaves of Grass is

"melt . . [and]

depart, charging the water and land with names."29 Cooper and
Longfellow wrote,

famously, of Indians, but romanticized them into one

dimensional Noble Savages. Only Thoreau went to the source, speaking to

the few itinerant Indians who visited the Concord area, and travelling
to Maine, in part, to learn wood-lore from native guides. His point was
not to try in some facile way to "be an Indian," but to seek clues as to

how he himself might be more native to his locality. Thoreau's

statement that "in Wildness is the preservation of the World"30 was an
argument in favor of localism; wildness (as opposed to wilderness) is

everywhere, even in a pastoral landscape like nineteenth century

Massachusetts. As Gary Snyder suggests, "nativeness" is available to

anyone who truly inhabits a place--it "doesn't matter what color your

skin is, it's a matter of how you relate to the land."31 Thoreau's

Transcendentalism required that he relate to the land as a seeker of

truth, to perceive universal meaning in local particularities.

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Frederick Turner's description of Thoreau's walden (1854) is true of
most subsequent American writings concerned with particular landscapes,
which owe a great deal to Thoreau's life and work: "in its narrative of
one man's confrontation with the discrete facts of a particular place

. . [walden] tells all who will listen that America, the New World, is
first and last a grand spiritual opportunity."32 That opportunity is to
be native, that is, at home in a beloved landscape.

Americans, however, have usually related to the land as an
abstraction, as potential real estate rather than as sacred space. The
basic fact of American history is that a politically unified population
on the Atlantic Coast gradually gained control of land, "vaguely realiz-

ing westward,"33 as Robert Frost has it in the poem "The Gift Outright,"

 

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though there is nothing vague about the Indian and Mexican Wars, broken

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treaties, and various land deals with foreign powers. The nineteenth
century American sense of place was the mindset of conquest, expressed
in the myth of "Manifest Destiny," by which America was fated to become
a continental nation, according to Henry Nash Smith, "away from the
feudal past of Europe to build a new order founded upon nature."34
Whitman was the poet of this myth, in his vision of America as
"essentially the greatest poem . . . a teeming nation of nations."35
"Land of the ocean shores!" he exclaimed: "Land of sierras and peaks

. . inextricable lands!"36 In such catalogs of the American land-
scape, Whitman expressed his hope that in expanding westward this big
land would produce not only a regionally diverse American literature,
but big-hearted, generous people to write and read that literature.

The full intellectualization of Manifest Destiny appeared in 1893,

when Frederick Jackson Turner first published "The Significance of the

 

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Frontier in American History," identified by environmental historian

William Cronon as "the single most influential essay ever written by an

American historian."37 Turner's famous "Frontier Thesis" held that

American democratic institutions continually renewed themselves on the
frontier of settlement and that the "expansion westward with its new
opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive
society, furnishled] the forces dominating American character."38 While
generally abandoned by contemporary scholars as simplistic and even

racist (what of the Native Americans?), Turner's thesis, as Cronon

reminds us, was "a story of the American landscape"39:marked by a

historical sense of place. History, after all, happens on the land;

landscape is the human record of settlement and occupation writ large in

physiography.40
The dark implication of Turner's vision was a fear that with the

frontier officially closed (in 1890, according to the 0.8. Census),

American democratic virtues would wither. Turner's was one of a number

of turn-of-the-century expressions of American uncertainty. Thorstein

Veblen and H.L. Mencken were attacking what they perceived to be the
nation's growing materialism and smug self-satisfaction. John Muir, by
then an old man, was still fighting to preserve the remaining wild

country, the source of American virtue, by Turner's thinking. In the

sense of Whitman's hope for the nation, these fears were justified.

America was rapidly becoming an urbanized, industrial nation, and the
kind of spiritually invigorating contact with nature and locality that
Emerson and Thoreau had stressed was not the life of most Americans.

According to Roderick Nash, "By the 1890's a sufficient change had

occurred in American life and thought to make possible a widespread

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reaction against the previous condemnation of wilderness."41 This back-
to-nature reaction manifested itself not only in the increasing
popularity of camping, the development of city parks, and even country
clubs--all of which had profound implications for changes in the
landscape--but in natural history literature, a newly identified genre.
Muir and John Burroughs reached a large audience that clamored for
accounts of outdoor adventures, and the previously neglected Thoreau was
widely read for the first time. Nash reminds us that this new back-to-
nature sentiment "was not, to be sure, overwhelming, nor was the
popularity of primitivism the only manifestation of discontent and
frustration at the end of the nineteenth century."42 ‘Wendell Berry,
contemporary poet and philosopher of place, notes that once "the unknown
of geography was mapped, the industrial marketplace became the new
frontier, and we continued . . . to displace ourselves."43 That sense
of displacement finds ample expression in twentieth century American
literature, which responds in a variety of ways to the issues of place,
displacement, and landscape.

In discussing modern and contemporary literature, we are again
confronted with a number of slippery terms, which like "place" and
"landscape" require clarification. We again encounter identifiable
literary movements, naturalism and modernism, which like Transcenden-
talism, not only describe periods in cultural history when the
humanistic disciplines shared certain philosophical beliefs and were
concerned with many of the same issues, but characterize tendencies that
may be found throughout intellectual history. Just as it may be useful
to speak of a certain "classicism" in the poetry and criticism of T.S.

Eliot, so in American cultural history the periods described as romantic

 

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(or Transcendentalist), realist (or naturalist), and modernist are not

completely antithetical. This is clearly the case with landscape in

American art and letters. While Emerson and Thoreau, for example, were

clearly Romantic in asserting the spiritual symbolism of nature, they

described landscape using concepts such as sublimity, developed by
Edmund Burke and other eighteenth century classical aestheticians.
Similarly, while late nineteenth century literary naturalists like
Stephen Crane and Jack London rejected Emersonian philosophical idealism

(nature as beneficent and wise) in favor of biological and environmental

determinism (nature as arbitrary and indifferent), they did find beauty

and order in the harsh natural landscapes they depicted in fiction.

Stories such as Crane's "The Open Boat" (1897), about five men adrift in

rough seas off the Florida coast, and London's "To Build a Fire" (1908),

an account of a man trying to reach shelter from an Arctic storm,
exhibit a naturalistic sublime, what Conron describes as "the arbitrary,
implacable instrument of an infinitely indifferent mechanical
universe"44 which immerses and overwhelms the human figure in the land-

scape instead of elevating him, as in Emerson's Nature.

Naturalism was also related to Transcendentalism in that it

initiated the regionally diverse literary landscape that Emerson,

Thoreau, and Whitman had championed. As Whitman had asked in "As I Sat

By Blue Ontario's Shore":

Who are you, indeed, who would talk or sing to America?
Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?

Have you learn'd the physiology, phrenology, politics,
geography, pride, freedom, friendship, of the land?
its substratums and objects?45

Literary realists and naturalists wrote fictions based on the kind of

close knowledge of local physiography and social customs that Whitman

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physical believability and symbolic power. Besides those of Crane and

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literal sense, landmarks. They have profoundly influenced perceptions
of American landscapes, wild, rural, and urban, reflecting, according to 'T7
Donald Pizer in Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature (1984), "their age's increasing sense of the limitation
imposed upon man by his biological past and his social present" while
insisting on "dramatizing man as a creature of significance and
value."46 The naturalists, as Conron observes, "apprehended the urban

environment in the same terms that the Puritans had apprehended the

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wilderness: it was wild (that is, beyond human control), inhuman, and

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dangerous."47 Similarly, when they turned to non-urban landscapes for
their settings, as with London in Alaska and Faulkner in Mississippi,
they found not Whitman's pastoralism but a harsh, Darwinian world.
Still, in depicting the American landscape, from cities to wilderness,
the naturalists continued the current of American literature which
stresses the local, the commonplace, and the diversity of human
experience across the American continent.

In considering twentieth-century trends in American literature, it
is important to think of realism and naturalism as continuing trends,
parallel and complementary to modernism, the next major cultural
movement in European and American art and thought. Like realists and
naturalists, modernists responded to changing social conditions based on

new scientific, philosOphical, and political understandings which tended

 

 

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to diminish old verities and optimisms.

But whereas realists and

naturalists addressed the perceived crisis in human existence by
creating an 'objective' art of verisimilitude and representation,
modernists sought to make sense of a overwhelmingly complex world in a

stylistically innovative art that was often more symbolic and abstract
than representational and concrete.

The three defining characteristics

of modernism (according to Lawrence B. Gamache) are particularly

relevant to the contexts of landscape and place:

1) a preoccupation with the present, usually urban and technical in
its sense of place and time,

is related to the loss of a meaningful
context derived from the past, from its forms, styles, and
traditions;

2) this sense of loss gives rise to a search for a new
context-—cosmopolitan,

not provincial in scope--and for new
techniques to evolve an acceptable perception of reality, often
paradoxically,

in the form of an attempt to rediscover roots in the
depths of the past; 3) but this search tends to an increasingly
relativistic,

inward, often disillusioned vision and a compulsive
need to develop techniques to embody it.48

These characteristics may be illustrated by examining the work of two

major American modernist poets, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams,

whose philosophical and aesthetic differences are evident in their

literary use of landscape and place.

According to Nancy Duvall Hargrove in Landscape as Symbol in the

Poetry of T.S. Eliot (1978), Eliot uses landscape I'as a means of

defining or suggesting emotional or moral states, a means of controlling
and manipulating feeling.'49

Eliot's symbolic landscapes derive from

literary sources like Dante, Tennyson, and Arthurian legend as well as

personal memories of places where he had lived--St. Louis, Missouri by

the Mississippi River, coastal New England, Boston, Paris, and London.
Hargrove identifies five major landscapes and their symbolism in Eliot's

work: “the city (boredom, triviality, sterility), the country (release,

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fertility, rebirth), the desert (chaos, terror, emptiness), the garden

(ecstasy, innocence, serenity), and the sea or river,'50 the last

possessing a number of symbolic connotations. Especially in his earlier
poems Eliot tends to be primarily urban in his sense of place, as in The
waste Land (1922), Eliot's most famous work and the prototypically
modernist poem, by Gamache's criteria. The waste Land became a standard
for what many critics valued in modern poetry: allusiveness,

irony,
erudition—-and,

in a word, difficulty. It is also characteristically

modernist as a critique of Western culture. In Imagining the Earth:
Poetry and the Vision of Nature (1985), John Elder profitably compares

Eliot's poetic vision of a corrupted civilization to that of Eliot's
contemporary,

California poet Robinson Jeffers, who from the perspective
of a wild,

coastal landscape denounced the materialism and solipsism of
modern society. While differing in most regards,

artistically and
philosophically,

Eliot and Jeffers are

joined by their sense that modern culture is corrupt precisely
because it is cut off from nature's regenerative power.

In The
waste Land, the city's sterility afflicts the whole world and its
pollutions deny the poet any vision of a landscape beyond his

spirit's unforgiving desert rocks.51
One implication of Eliot's famous poem, then, is clearly ecological;

society is psychically separated from nature, and therefore corrupts

both nature (Eliot's polluted,

sterile River Thames) and itself (the
”Unreal City').

Because place is so attenuated in The waste Land, this
implication only becomes clear when it is placed in a broader cultural

context, as in Elder's juxtaposition.

One recurring question in Eliot scholarship is Eliot's status as
an American poet.

Those claiming him for the United States describe him

as part of the American Puritan tradition and point to his return to

 

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American locales in 'Landscapes' (1934-35) and Four Quartets (1935-43).

Other critics emphasize Eliot's expatriation and eventual British

citizenship, suggesting that his political conservatism and religious

orthodoxy place him outside the mainstream of American poetry since

Whitman, which has a distinctly romantic tendency. The question is

largely moot, since Eliot's concerns were more temporal and transcendent

than local. On the subject of place in Eliot's poetry, one passage from
"Little Gidding' (1942) is frequently cited:
We will not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.52

The 'end of exploring” is metaphysical, not phenomenological; Eliot's
attitude toward place and nature is in keeping with his orthodox

Christianity, which holds that despite its beauty the earth is not

sacred, that God is distinct from creation, and that the experience of

life in place and time is primarily a transition before eternity. As
Eliot says in another, less often quoted passage from his most specifi-

cally religious work, Ash wednesday (1930):

. . . time is always time
And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place.53

And from another of the Four Quartets, “East Coker' (1940):

Home is where one starts from.

Old men should be explorers
Here and there do not matter.54

Certainly Eliot's literary influence has been universal--even

poets distinctly American in their concerns and locales, like William

Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, and Charles Olson (each of whom

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expressed disdain for Eliot's manner and philosophy) owe a great deal to

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Williams championed an American literature based on localized experience

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expressed in a poetically heightened

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colloquial speech (rather than English prosody).55 When Eliot, Ezra
Pound, and many others among Williams' contemporaries expatriated to

Europe, Williams stayed in Rutherford, New Jersey, practicing medicine

and writing poetry based on his observations of local life and readings

in American history and culture. In a 1944 letter, mostly marked by

diatribe against Eliot (who was still receiving most of the critical

accolades), Williams speaks of his ideal union of place and culture,

nature and the human:

. just as the city depends, literally, both for its men and its
materials on the country, so general ideas, if they are to be
living and valid, to some extent depend (at least for their
testing) on local cultures.

The flow must originate from the
local to the general as a river to the sea and then back to the
local from the sea in rain.

It is the poet who lives
locally, and whose senses are applied no way else than locally to_

particulars, who is the agent and the maker of all culture.56

As one of Williams' critics, Walter Scott Peterson, points out, the

I'local" in Williams 'is not, to be sure, necessarily American--except to

the American--and it can be any locality,

 

so long as it is local to the
poet.'57

Truth and beauty for Williams are to be understood not by
applying religious or intellectual precepts, but in keeping with Roman-
ticism and American individualism, through perception and experience,

communicated through a language appropriate to one's time and place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Williams' localism found its ultimate expression in his epic poem
in five books, Paterson (1946-1963), named for the industrial city in
New Jersey that is its subject. Like Thoreau's walden, similarly named
for its location, Paterson is a book of discovery and inhabitation in
which person and place become inextricably connected in both emotional
and intellectual terms. While its urban setting, innovative use of
fragments and pastiche, and imagery and symbolism conveying a sense of
cultural crisis make it a major text of the modernist canon, Paterson
also lies within the American tradition of literary landscape. Poet
Robert Lowell described Paterson as “Whitman's America, grown pathetic
and tragic, brutalized by inequality, disorganized by industrial chaos,
and faced with annihilation."58 The central theme of Williams' great
poem is divorce: divorce from place and nature, from history and
culture, and from human love:
Divorce is
the sign of knowledge in our time,
divorce! divorce!59
Williams embodies this state of divorce in Paterson's central metaphor,
I'that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and
concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may
embody."60 ”Paterson“ is a character in the poem, who like Williams is
a doctor and a poet, making his rounds and learning about the city. He
is also the city itself, the cultural male principle:
Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent water forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the water filling his dreams!61

in sexual embrace with the female principle embodied in the natural

landscape:

 

 

22

And there, against him,

The Park's her head,

stretches the low mountain.
river.

carved, above the Falls,

IIIWIIIW

by the quiet

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facing him, his
arm supporting her, by the valley of the Rocks, asleep.62
This marriage,

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like all relationships in the poem,

misunderstanding as on love:

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is based as much on

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implication."63

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Incorporating excerpts from books of local history to

illustrate a historical pattern of environmental and social degradation,

Williams envisions a city and its people-—and by extension of the local
to the universal,

an entire nation--”divorced / from the insistence of
place—- / from knowledge,

/ from learning
.64

divorced / from time

Just as Williams wished for poems such as the famous “The

p I‘ll"

Ifl'I.

Red Wheelbarrow' to be more than mimetic representations of reality,

but
as artistic artifacts to approach the objective existence of the subject
matter,

so in Paterson did he seek to make his poem more than about the

city, more even than a map of the city-~he wanted the poem to be a city.

To read fully such a poem as Paterson is to walk imaginatively through a
landscape,

reading the terrain through Williams' lines.

Among the modernists, Williams was the one writer to examine
explicitly the issues of place and landscape in life and art, to
champion a philosophy and aesthetic of the local.

But several other
modernists, particularly novelists contemporary to the doctor from

 

Rutherford, created locales that are permanent additions to the American
literary landscape.

William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County,

Mississippi, depicted in several novels including The Sound and Fury
(1929). As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932), may be the

most completely and specifically realized location in American

 

literature,

23

a place in which landscape,

history, and dramatic conflict

merge to create the kind of tragedy that places Faulkner in the company

of Euripides, Shakespeare, and Melville. As Faulkner remarked, 'I

discovered that my little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing

about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.“65 His

accomplishment illustrates Williams'

ideal of the local made universal,

as do landscapes envisioned by other major twentieth-century American

authors, including Robert Frost (New England), Willa Cather (Nebraska,

among others),

Ernest Hemingway (the northern Michigan of Nick Adams),

A.B. Guthrie (Montana), John Steinbeck (California) and many others

continuing to this day.

While the styles and attitudes of these authors can be meaning-

fully discussed as being in some sense 'modernist,‘ they collectively

constitute a modern neo-romantic (or counter-modernist) tradition, which

in its cultural, aesthetic, and even political tendencies contrasts

strongly with the values of modernism as previously discussed. The

following chart is meant to clarify these differences by juxtaposing

them as paradigms:

Sense of
Place

Attitude

Historical
Sensibility

IODERNISM
European, Old world

urban

Cosmopolitan

Intellectual.
Universal symbols.

Temporal. Linear,
mechanistic, present /
future oriented; dwelling
in time.

COUNTER-MDDERNISM
American, New world

Rural / Wild as much as or
more than urban.

Provincial / Regional

Experiential. Local

'particularities.

Spatial (Geographical).
Cyclical, organic, past /
present oriented; dwelling
in place.

 

 

   

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24

Aesthetics Elitist. Art created
for a select, refined
audience. “High culture.“
Innovative. Abstract,
ironic, analytical,
cynical, 'deconstructive.‘

Immediate European, particularly

Antecedents British literary
traditions.

Exemplary T.S. Eliot

Authors Ezra Pound

Gertrude Stein

This contrast may be better understood by again consulting a
geographer, in this case Raymond D. Gastil, who in Cultural Regions of
the United States (1975) discusses cultural variations I'in terms of
regional cultural cores, domains, and peripheries . . . a model in which
a bundle of cultural traits spreads in a coherent form from an
identifiable area, becoming less dominant with distance."66
culture, at least American literary culture,
original domain in New England, with Boston as the cultural core.
”Boston created a new core culture on the periphery of English culture,"

Gastil remarks, “but English culture was itself on the periphery of

European culture.'57

immigrants from many cultures, European, Asian, and African, populated

As the American nation expanded westward and

Populist. Democratic
inclusiveness: art about
and sometimes even for
ordinary people and places.
Popularity not a vice.

Transformative. Concrete,
literal, synthesizing,
affirmative, 'con-
structive.‘

American Transcendentalism,
realism and naturalism.

William Carlos Williams
Robert Frost
Willa Cather

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American

can be traced back to its

the continent, new cultural cores developed on the periphery of New

England's domain.

Cities including Chicago, New Orleans, and San

Francisco grew not only into economic centers for surrounding regions,

but places where ideas and artistic culture were shared. Despite the

contemporary dominance (through print, film,

and broadcast media) of New

York and Los Angeles, Gastil characterizes American culture as

 

 

 

 

 

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decentralized, with many cultural domains (ie. regions) and core cities

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with varying influences.

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literary culture, modernist or otherwise:

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Understanding of core and periphery makes possible a view of - J‘
American history in terms of growth and contraction of core-domain- '
periphery relations in our society. It suggests that we look for
further creativity through the revitalization of old core cultures
or the creation of new cultures at the periphery of the old.68

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The "revitalization" of cities implies a role for artistic and

intellectual culture as well as architectural planning and political

reform. By emphasizing urban experience and the cosmopolitan world of

ideas, modernist and post-modernist writers have maintained the cultural

function of cities. Similarly, the “peripheral" perspectives of neo-

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rural,

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and wild places as sources of artistic inspiration and cultural renewal

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As Jim Wayne Miller argues, "writers play an important role in the

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process of our becoming a land and people,

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in discovering, through
literature, the land and life of different parts of the nation."69 This

continuing literary diversification has contributed to the creation of

distinct American regions.

The concept of region is essential to geography, which is in great

part the study of regions. Geographer Robert E. Dickinson defines "the

regional concept" as the process "whereby phenomena associate on the
earth's surface in spatial groupings, physical, biotic, or human," bound

by "symbiotic or interconnected relations of one place with another."70

Regions, then, are not meaningful if thought of as isolated, hermetic

entities. They are defined by contrast and comparison with other
regions, by what they share—-topographically and culturally—-with their

neighbors, as well as by their internal diversity, natural as well as

 

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26
cultural. Since humanistic studies are based on the belief that
cultures benefit from an free exchange of ideas and materials, what
James I. McClintock calls the "universal-particular paradox"71 is
essential to the employment of the regional concept in the service of
what Miller describes as a "cosmopolitan regionalism":

a regional perspective which does not exclude a knowledge of the
wider world, but is concerned with and appreciative of the little
traditions within the great traditions of human history, and of
ways in which small and great traditions are connected-~[which] can

stimulate greater interest in and study of the role of place in
literature generally. . . .72

Contrary to the notion that "regionalism" and "localism" are synonymous
with "separatism" and "parochialism," writers who express strong senses
of place are often the most vocal proponents of cross-cultural study.
The influence of Eastern philosophy and poetry on the Transcendentalism
of Emerson and Thoreau has been well documented. William Carlos
Williams immersed himself in the art of many cultures, including the

poetry of Chaucer and the painting of Brueghel. Among American poets

since World War II, midwesterners Robert Bly and James Wright have been
instrumental in expanding the American understanding of the modern by
popularizing, through translation, the poets of Spanish modernismo
(Dario, Garcia Lorca, Vallejo, Neruda) as well as Germans (Rilke and
Trakl), incorporating lessons learned from these authors into their own

poetry. As Wright once said in an interview, "I'm not saying that the

value of poetry depends on writing about a place or not writing about a

place, only that there is . . . a poetry of place. It appeals to me

very much."73 That appeal originates in the beauty and accuracy of an
author's evocation of place, and culminates in the enrichment of

cultures, local, regional, national, and international.

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One social effect of the American literature of place has been an

increased ecological awareness of the inseparability of human well-

being, physical and spiritual, from the health of local environments.

By appreciating not only the concept of "place," but particular places

in larger cultural and geographical contexts, we learn, according to

geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, "to contrast the evils of the arrogance of power,

the threat of a world that is becoming uniform, and the destruction of

nature, with the goodness and beauty of local pride and local

customs."74 There is, however, a growing consensus, according to Edward

Relph, that "the means of experiencing, creating, and maintaining

significant places

. are disappearing and that 'placelessness'-—the

weakening of distinct and diverse experiences and identities of places--

is now a dominant force."75 Relph argues that our international

consumer culture tends to homogenize landscapes, among other means, by

developing identical roads and architecture in all regions and by

failing to preserve natural communities such as forests and streams.

Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams (1986) and other books about

particular landscapes, lists the threats to the "geographies of North

America" as "ignorance of what makes them unique . . . utilitarian

attitudes . . failure to include them in the moral universe, and

brutal disregard."76

By giving creative voice to the interconnectedness of culture and
nature, of people and place, American authors provide a continuing

critique of the attitudes contributing to placelessness and the misuse

0f landscape. Writers have played an important role in the
environmental movement, indirectly by promoting a vision of life in

harmony with nature, and directly by inspiring action to preserve

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landscapes and ecosystems. Thoreau's residence by Walden Pond is the
symbolic beginning of modern environmentalism, his book walden its first
great text. John Muir's accounts of adventures in the Californian
wilderness, including The Mountains of California (1894) and my First
Summer in the Sierra (1911), were instrumental in the establishment of
both Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Club. More recently, the
essays and fiction of Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire (1968),
have increased awareness of the American Southwest desert, even
inspiring the formation of a controversial direct action group, Earth
First!, dedicated to the defense of the desert and other fragile
landscapes. Wendell Berry of Kentucky has written several widely read
books of essays, poetry, and fiction which celebrate and defend the
integrity of rural communities, promoting a new, ecologically
responsible ("sustainable") agriculture as well as a regionalism
"defined simply as local life aware of itself" which "pertains to living
as much as to writing, and . . . pertains to living before it pertains
to writing."77 Regional thinking seems to have culminated in bioregion-
alism, a new cultural and political philosophy promoting political
decentralization, greater local control of natural resources, and a
redefining of boundaries and sovereignty to match natural criteria. Not
surprisingly, the most articulate proponent of this place-centered
philosophy is an American poet, Gary Snyder, who advocates literary and
POlitical bioregionalism in poetry and prose statements that are an
essential reference in discussing place and landscape in contemporary
literature. Snyder introduces Turtle Island (1974), a Pulitzer Prize
Winning book of poetry, by dedicating his work to the bioregional ideal:

that we may see ourselves more accurately on this continent of

 

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watersheds and life-communities--plant zones, physiographic

provinces, culture areas; following natural boundaries. The

"U.S.A." and its states and counties are arbitrary and inaccurate

impositions on what is really here.78
The bioregional project, summarized by Kirkpatrick Sale in Dwellers in
the Land: The Bioregional Vision (1985) as a process of "knowing the
land, learning the lore, developing the potential, and freeing the
self,"79 is a political extension of ideals developed in great part by
the American literature here discussed. Places like Walden Pond,
Yosemite Park, and even particular towns and neighborhoods are recog-
nized and cherished because of their literary associations. But the
protection of such valued places requires active citizenship, especially
at the local level. The "ecological benefits of bioregionalism, of
cultivating a sense of place," according to Snyder, "are that there will
then be a people to be the People in the place . . . in terms of imple-
menting and carrying through legislation as mandated."80 The writing of
a law is similar to the writing of a poem or novel as a recognition of a
place's natural and cultural value. Protection of the place is
potential, not inherent in the written word; bioregionalism therefore
emphasizes a personal attachment to place that originates in emotion but
is expressed in action.

The basis of this continuing American neo-romanticism is a deeply
spiritual vision of nature and the human place in nature. As Mircea
Eliade, one of the great scholars of religion, has written:

since to settle somewhere, to inhabit a space, is equivalent to
repeating the cosmogony and hence to imitating the work of the
gods, it follows that, for religious man, every existential
decision to situate himself in space in fact constitutes a

religious decision.81

The sacred quality of places enables individuals, according to Snyder,

   

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to make "intimate contact with wild world, wild self. Sacred refers to
that which helps take us out of our little selves into the larger self
of the whole universe."82 Though distinctly Buddhist, Snyder's
description of a communion with place is compatible with Native American
religions as well as the insights of American writers since Emerson, who
confessed to finding in "the tranquil landscape" something "more dear
and connate than in streets or villages." The most famous passage in
Nature best exemplifies the experience of place epiphany:
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a
clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of
special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am
glad to the brink of fear. . . . Standing on the bare ground,--my
head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--
all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am
nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of God.83
Spiritually motivated or otherwise, the conservation of nature
requires a respectful attitude toward place and landscape that exceeds
mere utilitarianism. As ecologist Aldo Leopold states in summary of his
famous "land ethic":
When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to
use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to
survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it
the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing
to culture.84
Leopold's "esthetic harvest" includes the literature of landscape and
place particularly strong and diverse in the United States, which by
stressing the experience of place counteracts the trend toward
placelessness and environmental ignorance of which writers have long
been warning us. By knowing the land directly, and by learning the lore

of places--including literature--specifically social and political goals

of a developed potential and a freed selfhood become realizable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Notes

 

1John Conron, The American Landscape (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973), xviii.

21 take the prioritizing for these definitions from webster's
Dictionary.

3See John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the vernacular

Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984) for an excellent
etymological discussion of "landscape."

4Frederick Turner, Spirit of Place: The Making of an American
Literary Landscape (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1989), ix.

5William Wordsworth, "Preface, Second Edition of the Lyrical

Ballads," in English Romantic writers, ed. David Perkins (San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), 328.

6James Houston, "The Concepts of 'Place' and 'Landscape' in the
Judaeo-Christian Tradition," in Humanistic Geography: Prospects and

Problems, ed. David Ley and Marwyn S. Samuels (Chicago: Maaroufa, 1978)
224.

I

7I borrow the term "topoanalysis" from Gaston Bachelard, who
defines it as "the systematic psychological study of the sites of our

intimate lives." Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston:
Beacon, 1969), 8.

8Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1984), 2.

9Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), 4.

10Clarence Mondale, "Concepts and Trends in Regional Studies,"
American Studies International 27, no. 1 (April 1989): 13-14.

11See David Canter, The Psychology of Place (New York: St.
Martin's, 1977).

12Outstanding among recent geography texts on region is Michael
Bradshaw, Regions and Regionalism in the united States (Jackson, MS,
1988). The rather new field of environmental history offers numerous
books of distinction; two volumes dealing with particular regions are
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology
of.New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) and William

Ashworth, The Late, Great Lakes (Detroit: wayne State University Press,
1987).

13Karl W. Butzer, ed., Dimensions of Human Geography: Essays on
Some Familiar and Neglected Themes (Chicago: University of Chicago
Department of Geography, 1978), 5. See Butzer's notes for citations of
exemplary writings on these topics.

32

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14William E. Mallory and Paul Simpson-Housley, eds., Geography and
Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1987), xi.

15The classic American Studies texts on American mythic visions of
nature are Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American west as Symbol
and Myth (New York: Vintage / Random House, 1950) and Leo Marx, The

.Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

16Jim wayne Miller, "Anytime the Ground is Uneven: The Outlook for
Regional Studies and What to Look Out For," in Mallory and Simpson-
Housley, eds., Geography and Literature, 4.

17James I. McClintock, "Gary Snyder's Poetry & Ecological
Science," Biology Teacher 54, no. 2 (February 1992): 82.

18Frederick Turner, (Spirit of Place, 18) so designates Emerson's
second major essay, "The American Scholar" (1837). I call it a draw.

19Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of
America, 1983), 7.

2°Ibid., 48.

21Roland Van Zandt, cited in Jay Appleton, The EXperience of
Landscape (London: Wiley, 1975), 41.

22Roderick Nash, Wilderness in the American Mind, 3rd ed.,

(New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 67.

23Thomas Cole, "Essay on American Scenery" (1835), in Conron,
American Landscape, 568.

24This lack of historical associations was both an incentive and a
detriment to artistic expression. Turner argues that earliest American
literature suffered from a lack of a "recognizable cultural context."

It was, by turns, a "literature of resistance and bewilderment" or "an
inventory of economic possibilities." Turner, Spirit of Place, 14-15.

25Nash, Wilderness, 69.

26Gary Snyder, "Good, Wild, Sacred," in Meeting the EXpectations
of the Land, ed. Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, and Bruce Colman (San
Francisco: North Point, 1984), 204-205.

27Two recent sources of these tales are Barry Lopez, Giving Birth
to Thunder, Sleeping With His Daughter: Coyote Builds Nbrth America
(Kansas City, MO: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977) and Alethea K. Helbig,
Nanabozhoo, Giver of Life (Brighton, MI: Green Oak, 1987).

28Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the
Ebthetics of Nature (New York: Knopf, 1967), 37..

29Walt Whitman, "Starting from Paumanok," Poetry and Prose (New
York: Vintage / Library of America, 1982), 186.

3°Henry David Thoreau, "Walking," in The Natural History Essays
(Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1980), 112.

31Gary Snyder, The Real Wbrk: Interviews and Talks 1964—1979 (New

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32Turner, Spirit of Place, 39.

33Robert Frost, "The Gift Outright," The Poetry of Robert Frost
(New York: Holt, 1969), 348.

34Smith, Virgin Land, 47.

35Whitman, "Preface" to Leaves of Grass (1855), Poetry and Prose,

36Whitman, "Starting from Paumanok," Poetry and Prose, 185.

37William Cronon, "Landscape and Home: Environmental Traditions in

Wisconsin," Wisconsin Magazine of History 74, no. 2 (Winter 1990-1991):
94.

38Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New
York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1962), 2—3.

39Cronon, "Landscape and Home," 95.

40The following quotation from D.H. Lawrence will effectively
clear the palate after this discussion of Manifest Destiny: "Men are
free when they are in a living home land, not when they are straying and
breaking away . . . the most unfree souls go west, and shout of
freedom." Lawrence, Studies, 186.

41Nash, Wilderness, 143.
421bid., 160.

43Wendell Berry, The unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra
Club Books, 1977), 3.

44Conron, American Landscape, 413.
4sWhitman, Poetry and Prose, 477.

46Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century
American Literature, rev. ed., (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1984), xii.

47Conron, American Landscape, 411.

48Lawrence B. Gamache, "Toward a Definition of Modernism," in The
Mbdernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, ed. Lawrence B. Gamache
and Ian S. Macniven (London: Associated University Presses, 1987), 33.

49Nancy Duvall Hargrove, Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T.S.
Eliot (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1978), 11.

5°Ibid., 15.

51John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 16.

52T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 208.

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54Ibid. , 189 .

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55Williams described The waste Land as "the great catastrophe to
(Mir letters," complaining that the work he and others like Marianne
Moore had undertaken to rediscover "a primary impetus, the elementary
principle of all art, in the local conditions . . . staggered . . .
tunder the blast of Eliot's genius which gave the poem back to the
academdcs." William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William
Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), 146.

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Stilliams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957),
225.

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57Walter Scott Peterson, An Approach to Paterson (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1967), 5.

58Robert Lowell, cited in William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New
York: New Directions, 1963), 2.

59Williams, Paterson, 28.
601bid., 7.
611bid., 14.
52Ibid., 17.
53Ibid., 20.

54Ibid., 102-103.

65William Faulkner, cited in James B. Meriwether and Michael

Milgate, eds., The Lion in the Garden: Interviews with Wiliam Faulkner
(New York: Random House, 1968), 255.

 

66Raymond D. Gastil, Cultural Regions of the United States
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 42-43.

 

67Ibid., 44.
68Ibid., 43.
69Jim Wayne Miller, "Anytime the Ground is Uneven," 12.

70Robert E. Dickinson, Regional Ecology. The Study of Man' 3
Environment (New York. Wiley, 1970), 176.

71James I. McClintock, "Gary Snyder and Re-inhabiting Place,"

Where? Place in Recent American Fiction: The Dolphin 20 (Spring 1991):
33. -

72Miller, 13.

73James Wright, Collected Prose, ed. Anne Wright (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1983), 195.

74Yi-Fu Tuan, "Cultural Pluralism and Technology," The
Geographical Review 79, no. 3 (July 1989): 278-279.

 

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75Relph, Place and Placelessness, 4

76Barry Lopez, "The American Geographies," Orion 8, no. 4 (Autumn
1989): 59.

77Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1972), 67.

78Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974),
unpaginated "Introductory Note."

79Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision
(San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985),

44-47.
80Gary Snyder, Real work, 140.

81Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of
Religion (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 65.
82Snyder, "Good, Wild, Sacred,"

205.
83Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 10

84Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine,
1970), xviii-xix.

85Snyder, "Good, Wild, Sacred,"

4‘ l‘

206.

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Chapter 2

Place and Landscape in Midwestern Literature

We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more
than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for
people. In these higher aspirations, the important
thing is not to achieve, but to strive.

Aldo Leopold
"Natural History," A Sand County Almanac (1949)

Topography is perfect, curio-size;

Deft as landscape in museum cases.

What is beautiful is friendly and underfoot,

Not flaunted like theater curtains in our faces.
No peak or jungle obscures the blue sky;

Our land rides smoothly in the softest eye.

John Frederick Nims
"Midwest," The Iron Pastoral (1947)

Like nations, regions exist as combinations of geographical fact
and historically determined, culturally bound perceptions about place.
All regions have defining myths or symbolic identities; the American
East has its Puritan heritage and status as the cradle of Anglo-American
culture, the West, its perpetual connection with wilderness, frontier
opportunities, and youthful exuberence. The identity of the American
Midwest (or Middle West) is perhaps more complex than that of other
regions; literally the "middle" of the North American continent, it is
also the perceptual core--the "Heartland"--of the United States, a
region whose people, culture, and landscape are often described as being
typically "American."1 In The Middle west: Its Meaning in American
Culture (1989), James R. Shortridge argues for a national context for
Midwestern regional identity, based on three controlling American myths:

"pastoral idealism, unfettered youthfulness, and world leadership in

37

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technology." These myths have been longitudinally generalized to three
regions: the "East as the embodiment of American technological might and
the West as the land of eternal youth,"2 leaving the Midwest, the
agricultural heartland, to exemplify through images of fruitful fields,
hardworking, conservative folk, and quiet small towns, the pastoral
vision or myth of America: a peaceful agrarian kingdom between--and away
from--the extremes of urban sophistication (and corruption) and the
moral license of unsettled frontiers. Although urbanization and
industrialization continue to claim much of the region's landscape,
particularly in the Lower Great Lakes, the Midwest is consistently
defined by what Leo Marx identifies in The Machine in the Garden:
Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) as "the cardinal
image of American aspirations . . . a rural landscape, a well-ordered
green garden magnified to continental size."3 This image is central to
the regional identity of the Midwest, particularly as expressed in its
century old literary tradition. In poems, fictions, and essays, noted
authors from the Midwest have done much to develop this pastoral myth,
while testing its validity in their artistic depictions of the region's
people and landscapes.

Though by now the Midwest, according to geographers Stephen S.
Birdsall and John W. Florin "is clearly a region of farms and factories,
of a white, Protestant, dispersed, agricultural population and black and
immigrant, clustered, urban populations,"4 the region's pastoral image
has deep historical roots. The territory that would become the present
states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota
was settled under the auspices of a series of Federal Land Acts,

beginning in 1784 and climaxing with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787,

 

 

 

 

 

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which provided for the division of the "western" territories into
states, counties, townships, sections, and parts of sections for
farming, and for the democratic governance of these new political units.
The "Northwest Territory," as it came to be known, was the first planned
settlement of a large region in history, the manner of its settlement
and development being largely determined before a single legal settler
entered the area. That this territory would be free, not slave-holding,
agricultural, not industrial, governed by reason and not by anarchy, was
the wish and design largely of one man, who may deserve the designation
of the first Midwesterner: Thomas Jefferson. According to Graham Hutton
in Midwest at Noon (1946), Jefferson "deliberately fostered Midwest
settlement to offset the dominance of commercial New England
[seeing] in the new Midwest the basis of a free peasant-farmers' society
which would never (he thought) be run by city mobs and a city proletar-
iat."S To create this American Arcadia, Jefferson sought to provide, as
he wrote to James Madison in 1785, "by every possible means that as few
as possible shall be without a little portion of land [because] small
landholders are the most precious part of a state."6

But if Jefferson's motives were democratic and idealistic, his
means were rationalist and Cartesian. The immense size of the Northwest
Territory (and the Louisiana Purchase of Jefferson's presidency, for
that matter) required a more systematic and predictable system for
establishing land tenure than the traditional "mates and bounds" of New
England, by which land holdings were legally described in terms of
natural borders between properties such as streams, lakes, ridges, even
individual trees and rocks. The American Midwest would instead be

surveyed, sold, and developed according to a system of intersecting

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lines and square subdivisions; upon what Richard Rhodes describes in The
Inland Ground: An EVocation of the American Middle WEst (1991) as a
"Dionysian land, a Dionysian continent, plains and torturous rivers and
sharp mountains and wandering shores," Jefferson overlaid "a Euclidian

grid as if Apollo truly reigned and the Furies were forever banished."7

The present day Midwestern landscape, including the Old Northwest and

the states of Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and North

Dakota, bears Jefferson's grid as its distinguishing characteristic.

Most roads, often at one mile intervals to correspond with section

lines, run north-south or east-west, and the township (a square with six

mile sides, divided into thirty-six sections of one square mile each,

each square mile of six hundred and forty acres broken into eighty or

forty acre parcels) marks the landscape like no other feature. As

Michael Martone, editor of Townships (1992), a book of essays about

Midwestern places, writes, "We know the Midwest by this arbitrary and

artificial pattern that has been imposed upon it."8

We also know the Midwest by its relatively level topography, a
feature obvious enough that geographer John Frazier Hart begins his

noted essay on the region with the tersest possible statement: "The

Middle West is flat."9 Popular conceptions inherited from the Romantic

era about what constitutes natural beauty favor the sublimity of
mountain or maritime landscapes not present in the Midwest, which as

contemporary novelist and poet Jim Harrison writes of Michigan's Upper

Peninsula, "lacks the drama and differentiation favored by the garden-

variety nature buff."10 A century and a half of dramatic alterations of

Midwestern landscapes for agriculture, forestry, industry, and human

residence are a further challenge to those who would celebrate the

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natural character of this almost completely humanized inland environ-

ment. Since the region's primeval forests and tall grass prairies were

early reduced to small remnants, Midwestern writers have tended to dwell
on picturesque qualities in the landscape--quieter, less dramatic beauty
resulting from subtle irregularities and the juxtaposition of human and
natural elements--and to observe natural enclaves within the altered

landscape with an attention that is reverent and at times even transcen-

dental. Even when they have been harshly critical of the region's

culture, Midwestern writers have written lovingly of its landscapes and

unique places.

The necessary context for reading works of classic Midwestern

literature is the agrarian culture that matured in the region during the
nineteenth century and came to national recognition through the

acceptance of "Middle West" as a regional label by 1915.11 By that

time, according to James R. Shortridge,

"development and self-confidence
had reached such a stage that the Middle West had become the standard by

which to judge the rest of the nation." Values associated with the

region's pastoral image--democracy, egalitarianism, progressivism, hard
work, and moral rectitude--contributed to what Shortridge describes as
"the tendency to see the region as the 'middle ground' both figuratively
and literally between the urbanized East and the western wilderness."12

This pastoral idealism amounted to what John Frazier Hart terms a

"family farm ideology [which] took root and flourished in the Middle

West," distinguished by the following seven Core beliefs:

1) hard work is a virtue;
2) anyone who works hard can make good;
3) anyone who fails to make good is lazy;

4) a man's true worth can be determined by his income;
5) a self-made man is better than one to the manor born;

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6) a family is responsible for its own economic security; and
7) the best government is the least government.13

This essentially middle-class world view, described by Lewis Atherton in
.Main Street on the Middle Border (1954) as "the cult of the immediately
‘useful and the practical,"14 originated with the exigencies of frontier
survival and matured in the market oriented culture of small towns.
Twentieth century advances in technology and in mass culture entertain-
ment and fashion would reinforce the pragmatic tendency of Midwestern
(and by extension, American) culture by promoting materialistic values
including short term profit, mobility, fashion, and convenience.

In respect to regional landscape and literature, this ideology
manifested itself in utilitarian attitudes toward nature and a strong
current of anti-intellectualism in Midwestern culture. Alexis de
Tocqueville, French observer of American customs who travelled from New
York to Michigan in the 1830's, noted both of these cultural traits in

Democracy in America (1840):

I readily admit that Americans have no poets; I cannot allow that
they have no poetic ideas. In Europe the people talk a great deal
of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think
about them: they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate Nature,
and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests which
surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet. Their eyes are
fixed upon another sight: the American people views its own march
across these wilds--drying swamps, turning the course of rivers,

peopling solitudes, and subduing Nature.15
As Atherton observes, Tocqueville's was "a discriminating judgement that
was still applicable . . . for years to come."16 The forests of the
eastern part of the Midwest and the original prairies to the west were
so extensive in their natural state that they were perceived to be

inexhaustible, and were therefore not missed until they were gone. At

the end of the nineteenth century, conservationists promoted the

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planting of trees as an effective safeguard against drought, deluge, and

damaging winds--in other words, in terms of "the immediately useful and

practical." Aesthetic and spiritual reasons for preserving nature were

rmach harder to promulgate in such a utilitarian society.

Atherton also posits three corollaries to the "cult of the

immediately useful and the practical": (1) the belief that "every art

and profession must justify itself financially"; (2) "that 'artistic

matters' should be left to females"; and (3) "that artistic and
intellectual activities must conform to local standards of morality."17
These social standards for the arts were evidenced by the popularity of

sentimental verse, such as was written by Will Carleton, one of the most

widely read poets in the nineteenth century Midwest. In the poem "Tom

Was Goin' For a Poet," Carleton tells of the reaction in a farming

community to one young man's interest in poetry. Tom's neighbors

"watched him from a distance, an' held his mind in doubt, / An' wondered

if Tom wasn't shaky, or knew what he was about."

Tom's father questions

his son's masculinity, hoping the young man will concentrate on more

practical activities like plowing a straight furrow:

Tom was goin' for a poet, an' said he'd a poet be:
One of these long-haired fellers a feller hates to see;

Poets are good for somethin', so long as they stand at the head;
But poetry's worth whatever it fetches in butter an' bread.18

As contemporary Illinois poet and critic Lisel Mueller writes, "[flor

these people, experience was the touchstone of knowledge. As a result,

the society was characterized by considerable anti-intellectualism and a

distrust of 'impractical,‘ abstract thinking.

. . . the folksy, home-

spun versifier may be able to feel at home, but the real poet must put

up with the status of village idiot."19

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Midwestern literature developed in the early twentieth century in
reaction to American anti-intellectualism, materialism, and puritanical
social proprieties; authors sought in the best tradition of realism to
depict life as they knew it, not according to outdated ideals. Poets
and novelists such as Edgar Lee Masters and Sinclair Lewis were at times
harshly critical of Midwestern society as it was developing out of its
agrarian period into the modern industrial order. But these early
masters of Midwestern literature were not dismissive or contemptuous of
the region and its people; rather, in depicting individual experiences
in Midwestern places, their fictions contrasted what the region had
become-~oligarchica1, impersonal, and industrial (Hamiltonian according
to some, after Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson's Federalist nemesis)--with
the Jeffersonian ideals that had settled it: egalitarianism, individual-
ism, and a life lived close to nature.20 They shared not only social
philosopher (and Wisconsin native) Thorstein Veblen's dismay over
America's growing materialism, but the hope of historian (and Veblen's
fellow Wisconsin native) Frederick Jackson Turner that "if the ideals of
the pioneers shall survive the inundation of material success, we may
expect to see in the Middle West the rise of a highly intelligent
society where culture shall be reconciled with democracy in the
large."21 Like reformers, journalists, and labor activists of the
period, these literary artists, in Lisel Mueller's words, "attacked the
gradual debasement of the pioneer heritage by industrial encroachment,
which brought with it ugliness, conformity, corruption, crime, the
concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few, and .
[the] cheapening of life values. . . ."22 They sought to break repres-

sive traditions by representing life as they knew it, and to find reason

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45

for optimism about the region's future, social as well as literary.

One early sign of an emergent Midwestern literature was the
publication of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885),

the book that Ernest Hemingway would later claim marked the beginning of

American literature. Twain's dramatization of a Missouri boy's travails

in a harsh social environment, accompanied by an accurate representation
of regional speech and poetic description of the mighty Mississippi

River made the novel a central text of American realism and naturalism

and an acknowledged classic of world literature. It speaks to universal

human desires and conflicts, while figuring prominently in the mythic

formation of national and regional identities. Subsequent authors in

the Midwestern literary tradition sought, with varying degrees of

success, the kind of universality Twain had achieved by writing

realistically about human dilemmas--social, economic, environmental, and

spiritual--as worked out in particular places. Authors like Hamlin

Garlin, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Willa
Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Ernest Hemingway
expressed their social and geographical senses of place in language that

is both spare and fluid, descriptive and evocative, and hence character-

istically Midwestern. Since the Midwestern landscape was successively

experienced as rural, small town, and urban, it is useful to consider

these authors in terms of those settings, rather than according to the

chronology of publication dates in discussing the role of place and
landscape in their writings.

There are two conflicting views of the Midwestern agrarian
frontier, both expressed in literature about the pioneer experience.23

The first is consistent with the American pastoral ideal in its purest

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and blissful labor in the earth, all centering

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supreme agrarian weapon, the sacred plow."24

No writer expressed this

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vision of the early Midwest as memorably as Willa Cather, particularly

in her three novels of pioneer Nebraska: 0 Pioneers! (1913), My Antonia

(1918), and A Lost Lady (1923), the central characters of which must

become physically and emotionally attached to the prairie landscape in

order to achieve spiritual fulfillment as well as financial success. In

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47

realism that is perhaps the strongest literary expression of populist

discontent over conditions in the agricultural Midwest. Garland

occasionally evokes the beauty of the "Middle Border" landscape in

passages that anticipate Cather's lyricism, admitting in a brief preface
to the collection that the symbolic "main-travelled road" of the title

"does sometimes cross a rich meadow where the songs of the larks and

bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled . . it may lead past a bend in

the river where the water laughs eternally over its shadows." But the

natural terrain has imposed upon it a parsimonious human landscape that
.defeats even honest work and planning: the road "is long and wearyful,
and has a dull little town at one end and a home of toil at the other

. it is traversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the

weary predominate."26 Prosperity and repose are hard to achieve not

through any deficiency in the land, but because of usurious characters
like Jim Butler in the story "Under the Lion's Paw," who deceives
renters into making improvements that they will never profit by.

Garland's stories depict life on the agricultural frontier not only as

tiring, lonely, and uncomfortable, but positively tragic when empathy

and fairness were absent in economic relations.

Classic Midwestern writers were as unrelentingly critical-~and, by

dint of their attentions, celebratory--of the small town as Garland had

been of frontier life. The realism of now canonical works by Edgar Lee

Masters, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson went beyond the precedent
set by Twain and European writers like Gustave Flaubert in frankly

treating theretofore taboo aspects of human behavior, including
sexuality.

Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915) caused a popular and

critical uproar for portraying a fictional Illinois town not as a mythic

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haven of virtue in an ever more sophisticated and corrupt urban America,

but as the home of real,

flawed people as prone to hypocrisy, greed, and

lust as anyone. These free verse poems, modeled on classical Greek

epigrams, give voices to the dead in the town cemetery; they amount to

what critic Robert Narveson calls a "sim le assertion of common nature
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and motives in city people and country people [that] was not only

shocking but liberating":

The individual portraits portray the gamut of human emotions,
desires, compulsions; and petty viciousness in one character is
balanced by grandeur of soul in another. Far from repudiating the
American pastoral myth, Masters made it central in his thought; but

he was aware that the agrarian ideal differed from the actual
condition of life in his times.27

This contrast between pastoral possibility and usurious reality is made

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clear by Schroeder the Fisherman, who characterizes himself and his

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relation to significant place, sitting "on the bank above Bernadotte"

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Sinclair Lewis' novel Main Street (1920) is another highly
critical view of Midwestern small town society in the early twentieth
century, a picture of a smugly self-satisfied society ignoring its best
traditions and valuing above all else material possessions and social
propriety. This best selling satire had a major impact on popular

perceptions of the Midwest; as Lewis Atherton says, it "penetrated the

consciousness of even the obtuse, and thus joined with Spoon River in

completing an indictment which now influenced all classes of Ameri-

cans."29 Main Street is the story of Carol Kennicott, a young college

graduate with dreams of making a difference, of bringing artistic

culture and civic pride to a small Midwestern town. As she exclaims one

day on her way to class, "That's what I'll do after college! I'll get

my hands on one of these prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an

inspiration. . . . I'll make 'em put in a village green, and darling

cottages, and a quaint Main Street!"30 But the town of Gopher Prairie,

to which Carol moves after marrying the staid Dr. Will Kennecott, is

anything but quaint and picturesque. Its architecture is ugly and

barely functional and there is no park or village green; there is, in
short, nothing to suggest "that, in the fifty years of Gopher Prairie's

existence, the citizens had realized that it was either desirable or

possible to make this, their common home, amusing or attractive."31 The

residents of this desolate place are a "savorless people, gulping taste-

less food . . . listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things
about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the

greatest race in the world."32

The story of Main Street is essentially Carol's struggle to

improve Gopher Prairie, not only to beautify the town but to enlighten

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the artless, trivial, and prejudiced townspeople, who resist and even-

tually defeat her plans. Lewis portrays the conformity, priggishness,

and materialism of Gopher Prairie in such detail that the book's satire
has become its most famous aspect. But Lewis had a broad vision of how
this fictional town, and the real Midwest, had come to be, and what it

might become.33

James R. Shortridge observes that "Lewis ultimately

pictured Gopher Prairie, and thus the Middle West, as a tragedy":
The potential for a great civilization existed in the fertile land,
and a vision of this greatness had been glimpsed by the first

generation of settlers. The second generation had lost sight of the

dream. Corrupted by an obsession with the material side of success,
they broke the pastoral tie.34

From the novel's first sentence Lewis places his critique in this
historical and geographical context: "On a hill by the Mississippi where

Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the

cornflower blue of Northern sky." Of course, the satire begins immedi-

ately; Carol isn't thinking about Indians or pioneers, but about "walnut
fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact
that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which
concealed her ears." But despite her shortcomings--the pretensions,
insecurities, and escapist tendencies that Lewis satirizes almost as
much as the dullness and hypocrisy of Gopher Prairie--Carol is the
heroine of Main Street, a "rebellious girl [who] is the spirit of that
bewildered empire called the American Middlewest."35 Had Carol lived in
an era less repressive of women's ambitions, she might have been a
landscape architect or planning commissioner: her critique of Gopher
Prairie is a study in environmental perceptions consistent with the work

of recent geographers like Edward Relph who see in modern land use and

mass attitudes an "inauthentic attitude to place" in which places "are

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seen only in terms of their functional and technical properties and
potentials."36 Carol understands that what makes the town so dull is
the standardization and loss of regional and ethnic diversity that is
occurring everywhere in America. While she never approaches the
mystical oneness with the prairie associated with Willa Cather's
heroines, Carol does perceive in the landscape and in people like the
Swedish farmers who still live closely with nature, "the dignity and
greatness which had failed her in Main Street."37 Carol recognizes in
the wholesale assimilation of diverse ethnic customs ("Scandinavian
women zealously exchanging their spiced pudding and red jackets for
fried pork chops and congealed white blouses, trading the ancient
Christmas hymns of the fjords for 'She's My Jazzland Cutie'") the loss
of "whatever pleasant new customs they might have added to the life of
the town."38 Her critique of placelessness is similarly insightful,
extending beyond architecture to encompass the "neglect of natural
advantages, so that the hills are covered with brush, the lakes shut off
by railroads, and the creeks lined with dumping—grounds."39 Through
Carol Kennecott, Sinclair Lewis expresses his outrage over this indif-
ference toward nature and place, one symptom of the materialism and lack
of cultural vision he believed limited human freedom and fulfillment not
only in the Midwest, but everywhere in modern America.

We find in the life and work of Sherwood Anderson perhaps the best
illustration of the transformation of the Midwest from a rural to an
urban oriented society, and of the psychic conflict resulting from this
massive change. A product of small town society who lived in cities
during crucial periods of his life, Anderson addressed what David D.

Anderson calls "the difference between the American ideal as he had

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learned it and its actuality as he had seen it put into practice during
the years when America became dominated by material things at the cost
of the values inherent in the ideal."40 From his boyhood in late
nineteenth century Clyde, Ohio, Anderson was intimately familiar with
the positive aspects of small town life-—neighborliness, participatory
democracy, the proximity of natural landscapes--and the negative
attributes which he would characterize as "the grotesque." His best
fictions are concerned with the tension between ideals and realities as
understood by individuals who have widely varying abilities to act on
their desires, and for whom any success is ambiguous.

The notion of success, particularly financial success, was central

to Anderson's emergence as a writer. As the son of a harness maker who

was unable to adjust to the economic changes then underway, Anderson was
bound to see in the American ideology of hard work and "the immediately
useful and practical" his own best hope for an improved station. He was
nicknamed "Jobby" for the opportunism and diligence which eventually
took him to the presidency first of a Cleveland merchandising firm, then
of his own successful paint company. By the prevailing standards
Anderson was himself a great success—-a prosperous businessman with a
wife and three children, who wrote fiction in his spare time. But he
became increasingly troubled with his life, torn between his literary
aspirations and his family and business duties. In 1912, Anderson's
nervous system forced a decision: he experienced a breakdown, and after
wandering the streets of Cleveland for some time was found, dazed and
incoherent. After being hospitalized, Anderson disposed of his business

obligations and left his family to pursue his writing career in Chicago.

As important as the actual events which led to Anderson's decision

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is Anderson's story about his crisis, which though apocryphal prOvides
insight into the writer he was then becoming.' According to Anderson, he
was dictating a letter to his secretary when of a sudden he was struck
by the pointlessness of his life in business. In a visionary moment, he
looked down at his feet and said "I have been wading in a long river and
my feet are wet. My feet are cold, wet, and heavy from long walking in
a river. Now I shall go walk on dry land."41 He then arose to walk out
the door and away from his business forever, determined to follow his
muse.

The metaphor of a river and dry land is significant for its
romantic organicism and as a mythical representation of Anderson's
situation in the imagery of landscape. In this image, Anderson arises
from powerless wading in the stream of time to walk on dry earth, on the
solid ground of the region that would be the subject matter of his
writing. Within six years Anderson would publish the two novels, Windy
MCPherson's Son (1916) and Marching Men (1917), on which he had been
working for a number of years, as well as Mid-American Chants (1918), a
book of poems that magnifies Anderson's visionary moment into a
mythology of the Midwest poised between eras, between the pastoral past
and the industrial present and future. While admittedly poor, these
poems were, according to critic Bernard Duffey, "unquestionably of
first-rate importance for their author" because they represent "a deep
conversion from fear and bewilderment at the Midwest and its ways
[characteristic of Anderson's first two novels] to a sympathetic concern
for it."42 Anderson acknowledges the book's deficiencies in his
foreword, offering the poems as encouragement for other, superior poets

who may deliver "an answering and clearer call in the hearts of other

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its birth in the memory of older things than we know." A place, in

other words, is a place only "when many generations of men have walked

 

the streets of the city or wandered at night in the hills of an old
land" to identify "the memory haunted places."45 These singers must
know the land and learn the lore in order to sing the place into being.
The one remarkable, even lovely poem among the Mid-American Chants
is "Mid-American Prayer," a meditation on place in which Anderson asks
the people of the Midwest to fulfill the promise of their region, to
balance the traditional and the modern by sacralizing the landscape:
that these

fields and places, out here west of Pittsburgh, may be-

come sacred places, that because of this terrible thing, of

which we may now become a part, there is hope of hard-

ness and leanness--that we may get to lives of which we
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Anderson recalls his boyhood in Ohio, when he perceived the sacredness
of places, "defying the New Englanders' gods, trying to find honest,
mid-western American gods" by praying "in the night by a strip of broken
rail fence--in the rain--walking alone in meadows--in the hundred secret
places that youth knows," much as had the Indians who once lived there,
"dancing and fighting and praying while they said big words--medicine

words." But all of this ritual and reflection is less retrospective

 

 

 

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55
than anticipatory: Anderson is praying for the infusion of the old
pastoral values into the modern industrial age:
It is the time of the opening of doors.
No talk now of what we can do for the old world.

Talk and dream now of what the old world can bring to us
--the true sense of real suffering out of which may come

the sweeter brotherhood.46
Like that of other Midwestern authors, Anderson's "sense of place”
was inseparable from a "sense of time," described by David D. Anderson
as the knowledge "that the Midwest out of which they came was historical
as well as geographical and psychological, and that its time had

passed."47

In deesburg, Ohio (1919), his most noteworthy contribution
to American literature, Anderson recreated the historical moment when
the Midwest was poised between eras, the agricultural and the indus-
trial, and the small town was about to lose its brief dominance over the
region's cultural landscape. The opening of "Hands," the first
narrative in Winesburg, is appropriate to the tone Anderson wished to
establish for the entire volume:

Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near

the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little

old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had

been seeded for clover but that had produced a dense crop of yellow
mustard weeds, he could see the public highway. .48

There is in this description a strong sense of the liminal, of a place
and its people perched precariously between the past and an unknown
future. The veranda, one of many similar locations in Winesburg, is
"half decayed" as are the certitudes and confidences of the town's
inhabitants, who may be said to be "near the edge of a ravine" in a
spiritual sense. Nervousness like the old man's is the predominant

emotion in Winesburg—-nervousness about the future, about how to express

feelings and establish intimacies, and about the efficacy of pastoral

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\nalues which are having a hard time surviving--a field seeded for clover
:xroducing weeds, a highway leading into an unimaginable future.49
One story which illustrates many of the themes of Winesburg, Ohio

is "The Untold Lie," in which Hal, a young farm hand, reveals to Ray,
1115 older coworker, that he has gotten his girlfriend Nell pregnant and
is torn between his desire for freedom and his sense of responsibility.
'rhough Ray faced a similar crisis when he was young, he finds himself
'unable to give Hal any advice. The momentary bond shared by these two
‘normally uncommunicative men is reinforced by Anderson's description of
the landscape:

There they stood in the big empty field with the quiet corn shocks

standing in rows behind them and the red and yellow hills in the

distance, and from being just two indifferent workmen they had

become all alive to each other. Hal sensed it and because that was

his way he laughed. "Well, old daddy," he said awkwardly, "come on,

advise me. . . ."50
But Ray fails to convey his mixed feelings about his own life and
youthful dreams. When he returns to his house that day, everything
appears bleak and hopeless--his rather ramshackle house, his aged wife
and weeping children. Anderson magnifies Ray's sense of defeat by
contrasting the farm hand's domestic situation with the beauty of the
Ohio countryside at sunset, when "the low hills were washed with color
and even the little clusters of bushes in the corners of the fences were
alive with beauty." Ray experiences another moment of profound
realization, "just as he and Hal had suddenly become alive when they
stood in the corn field staring into each other's eyes":

The beauty of the country about Winesburg was too much for Ray on

that fall evening. That is all there was to it. He could not stand

it. Of a sudden he forgot all about being a quiet old farm hand and

throwing off the torn overcoat began to run across the field. As he

ran he shouted a protest against his life, against all life, against
everything that makes life ugly.51

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57
He runs to catch Hal before the young man speaks to Nell, before Hal has
accepted as his fate the kind of life Ray himself has lived to regret.
But Hal has already made up his mind, already told his girlfriend,
truthfully, that he wants to marry her, settle down, and have a family.
The "untold lie" of the story's title is whatever advice Ray might have
given Hal. Empathy, after all, is a feeling for, not a feeling udth.
The moment shared by these two men makes them more completely human,
less lonely and "grotesque," to use Anderson's term. But each lives,
necessarily, in a kind of isolation, and must judge his own life for its
merits and failures.

"Departure," the last story in Winesburg, Ohio, ends with George
Willard, the stories' recurring character and sometime protagonist,
leaving town in a train to try his fortunes in a city to the west,
presumably Chicago. George is the archetypal young man of the period,
taking the journey from town to city as did so many young people, both
in real life and in other Midwestern fiction of the period, notably in
Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900). Chicago had not only become
the economic nexus of the Midwest, but a gathering place for artists
seeking the creative freedom and artistic company unavailable in small
towns and cities. As Bernard Duffey writes in The Chicago Renaissance
in American Letters (1954), "the group reality of twentieth-century
American literature began in Chicago because in Chicago a chief strain
which has formed our modern writing was first recognized . . . a
literary culture deliberately hostile to and liberated from the dominant
forces of a modern business America."52 Between 1890 and 1920, a number
of important writers lived in Chicago, including Henry Fuller, Hamlin

Garlin, Joseph Kirkland, and Robert Herrick in the earlier period, and

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Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Sherwood Anderson,

euui Carl Sandburg in the later. These writers knew one another and

benefitted from their associations. Literary magazines, particularly

.Poetzy'(founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912) and The Little Review
(founded by Margaret Anderson in 1914) not only published Midwestern
unriters but placed them in an international context: European and
American poets with different regional identifications who appeared in
.Poetry'included W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore,

VWallace Stevens, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, and William Carlos

Iflilliams.53 By endowing Chicago with a literary life that bore influ-

ences both native and foreign, the writers of the Chicago Renaissance

Imade of that mercantile and industrial midland metropolis a cultural

core for the Midwest; their work, in turn, made of the provincial

Midwest a region proper--a place with its own internationally recognized
indigenous art.

There also emerged at this time a literature about Chicago which,
according to Carl S. Smith in Chicago and the American Literary
Imagination 1880-1920 (1984), constituted "a major episode in the
aesthetic response to the rise of the modern industrial city in America,
of which Chicago was by wide agreement a leading example, if not the

leading example.".54 Chicago was ideally situated to become a national

center of trade, especially after railroads connected it with the

industrial East and the agricultural West. The city's location at the

southern end of Lake Michigan (and connection to the Mississippi River
via the Illinois and Michigan Canal) made the city a world port,
shipping industrial and agricultural products to distant destinations.

As newcomers arrived from farms and small towns, and foreign immigrants

 
   

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frtnn many nations, Chicago grew enormously in population and diversity,
as well as in physical terms of city blocks and size of buildings. The
rnuman cost of this growth in social stratification and alienation from
xuature have provided imagery and dramatic conflict for writers who take,
according to Smith, "the most overwhelming physical elements of the
cityscape . . . and then use them to analyze the city in its
entirety."55
One notable early effort at a Chicago cityscape in literature is

Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems (1916), a major work of the Chicago
iRenaissance. While much of his later writing is rather diffuse and
prosaic, many of Sandburg's early poems successfully express the
author's Whitmanian populism by portraying in vivid, specific language
the lives of Chicago people. One of the book's best poems is "The
Harbor," which reenacts a walk through a poor section of Chicago, a
place of "huddled and ugly walls" and "doorways where women / Looked
from their hunger-deep eyes." Contrasting with this scene of degrada-
tion is the beauty and exuberence of Lake Michigan, as the poet emerges
into a "blue burst of lake" above which "a fluttering storm of gulls"
soars, pointedly "free in the open"56 unlike the people of the city.
Sandburg directly addresses the implication of "The Harbor" in the
book's next poem, "They Will Say":

Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this:

You took little children away from the sun and the dew,

And the glimmer that played in the grass under the great sky,

And the reckless rain; you put them between walls

To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,

To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted

For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.57

Despite the bleakness of such lines, Sandburg is generally celebratory

of the city's energy and potential, as in the famous first lines of

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"Chicago":

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the big shoulders.
Sandburg goes on to acknowledge the "terrible burden of destiny" borne
by the people who live in this corrupt and brutal place, capturing in
his image of "painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys"
both the attraction and danger of urban modernity. But the dominant
tone of "Chicago" and other Sandburg poems about the city is one of
defiant pride, as in his personification of Chicago as a laborer "with
lifted head singing so proud to be / alive and coarse and strong and
cunning."58 The modern world, Sandburg believes, will strike a balance
between nature and culture; the excesses of industrialism will be
mitigated through a renewal of the traditional pastoral values symbol-
ized by the Midwestern prairie. "Prairie," the first poem in Sandburg's
second book, Cornhuskers (1918), celebrates "the milk of [the prairie's]
wheat, the red of its clover, / the eyes of its women" which gave Sand-
burg "a song and a slogan." The prairie itself is given lines (slogans
perhaps) to speak which affirm Sandburg's faith in a pastoral region
with a modern city as its cultural core:

I am here when the cities are gone.

I am here before the cities come.

I nourished the lonely men on horses.

I will keep the laughing men who ride iron.
I am the dust of men.59

There is also a long and continuing tradition of Chicago fiction,
in which the physical circumstances of the city contribute significantly
to narrative conflict. Thus we have Caroline Meeber in Dreiser's Sister

Carrie, fresh from a small Indiana town and feeling insignificant amid

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61
the massive downtown buildings and glittering department stores. In The
Pit (1903), Frank Norris depicts the trading room of the Chicago Board
of Trade as a scene of economic battle on a mythological level, with
Herculean capitalists attempting to corner the wheat market. Upton
Sinclair envisions Chicago's enormous stockyards in the muckraking novel
The Jungle (1906) as a Dantean landscape with rivers of blood and
forests of hogs on meathooks, a hellish place that brutalizes those
unfortunate enough to inhabit it. The Chicago tradition in fiction
continued with James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan (trilogy, 1932-1935),
Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), and Saul Bellow's The Adventures of
Augie March (1953), novels distinguished by the particular ethnic per-
spectives of protagonists who wish, according to Carl S. Smith, "to be
part of a world that satisfies them, that does not deny their personal
value and exclude them," but read "in the physical face of the city the
forces that crush their spirits and turn them away."60 While the sense
of place in these novels is primarily urban, the natural landscape is
always present beneath the pavement, waiting to be evoked in contrast to
the dehumanizing urban environment. In his essay on the sense of place
in Farrell's Studs Lonigan, Peter A. Carino correlates Studs' youthful
potential and that of nineteenth—century America, citing as an illus-
tration Studs' reverie in Washington Park, a moment of transcendental
connection with nature ended by the hard reality Studs must return to
when he leaves the park. Such moments, according to Carino, remind the
reader of nature's "subjugation to urban development and the subsequent
ascendence of money and competition at the expense of the humane values
and respect for nature which characterized the potential of an earlier

America."61

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The Midwest today consists of rural, small town, urban, and
scattered 'wild' landscapes, which writers continue to employ as
settings for their poems, essays, and fictions. The Midwestern pastoral
ideal is just that: an ideal, an abstraction against which writers
lneasure the contemporary reality of people and place. Midwestern
‘writers like Sherwood Anderson, and more recently, Theodore Roethke and
James Wright, are not wistful for an Arcadia that never was; rather,
they exhibit what Leo Marx calls a complex (as opposed to a sentimental)
pastoralism which not only invokes 'the image of a green landscape—-a
terrain either wild, or if cultivated, rural--as a symbolic repository
of meaning and value” but 'acknowledges the reality of history” and “the
forces which have stripped the old ideal of most, if not all, of its
meaning."62 These writers are realists as well as dreamers; if modern
society is materialistic and ignorant of (or even antagonistic toward)
regional landscapes and history, they present it as such. But in their
love of land and lore, of place and people, Midwestern writers abide by
the optimistic, if pragmatic, pastoralism of Thomas Jefferson, whose
"dialectical“ politics, according to Marx, recognize "the constant need
to redefine the 'middle landscape' ideal, pushing it ahead, so to speak,
into an unknown future to adjust it to ever-changing circumstances."63
We have in the region's literature a vision of a beautiful land full of
natural resources--rich soil for farming, trees for lumber, and minerals
and metals for industry which can make people rich-~and fields, forests,
rivers, and lakes which can make people richer yet, if society follows
the lead of its writers, artists who have loved Midwestern landscapes

and places for their intrinsic beauty and spiritual worth.

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1Topographically, the American Midwest may be described as the
Interior Plains of North America, situated west and north of the Ohio
River, south of Canada, north of the Ozark Plateau, and east of the
shortgrass prairie which begins between the ninety-eighth and one-
hundredth meridian (an ecotone, or ecological transition, dividing North
Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas into eastern and western
halves, accounting for the simultaneous Western and Midwestern regional
identities of those states). Its humid continental climate is
characterized by cold winters, warm to hot summers, and by precipitation
sufficient for the vegetation of three main biotic provinces: mixed
deciduous forest, northern pine-oak forest, and long—grass prairie. The
region's climate and rich soils have made it the agricultural
(especially corn, wheat, and dairy) heartland of North America. States
with at least a partially Midwestern image and self-identification are
Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri,
North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas.

2James R. Shortridge, The Middle wast: Its Meaning in American
Culture (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1989), 134.

3Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
Ideal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 141.

4Stephen S. Birdsall and John W. Florin, Regional Landscapes of
the United States and Canada. Second Edition. (New York: Wiley, 1981),
271.

5Graham Hutton, Midwest at Nbon (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1946), 24.

6Thomas Jefferson, cited in Hildegard Binder Johnson, Order Upon
the Land: The U.S. Rectangular Survey and the Upper Misssissippi Country
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 39.

7Richard Rhodes, The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American

Middle west. Revised ed. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas,
1991), 12.

8Michael Martone, ed., Townships (Iowa City, IO: University of
Iowa Press, 1992), 5.

9John Frazier Hart, "The Middle West," Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 62, no. 2 (June 1972): 258.

1°Jim Harrison, "Passacaglia on Getting Lost," Just Before Dark:
Collected Nonfiction (Livingston, MT: Clark City, 1991), 263.

11As Birdsall and Florin note, the term "Midwest" and its variants
imply "that 'the West' begins at the Appalachians with the closer Middle
West gradually merging into the Far West somewhere between the
Mississippi River and the Rockies" (Birdsall and Florin 270-271).

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12Shortridge, The Middle west, 27-28.

13John Frazier Hart, "The Middle West," Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 62, no. 2 (June 1972): 272.

14Lewis Atherton, Main Street on the Middle Border (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1954), 116.

15Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Two volumes. (New
York: Knopf, 1945), 74.

16Atherton, Main Street, 31.
17Ibid., 116-117.

18Will Carleton, Farm Ballads (New York: Harper, 1898), 48—49.

19Lisel Mueller, "Midwestern Poetry: Goodbye to All That," in In
the Middle: Ten Midwestern Wbmen Poets, ed. Sylvia Griffith Wheeler
(Kansas City, MO: BkMk / University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1985), 70.

20Critic Carl Van Doren's notion that classic Midwestern
literature constituted a "revolt from the village," a rejection of an
apparently "revolting" small town provinciality can be dismissed not
only because of the reverence in which the authors concerned--Masters,
Lewis, and Anderson--held Midwestern Jeffersonian and pioneer ideals,
but because these authors found models for their characters in city
dwellers as well as town people. Anderson wrote about Winesburg, and
Masters about Spoon River, while living in Chicago. My point is that
these authors were concerned with conflicts and changes in the newly
industrial society which were affecting people in every environment,
rural, small-town, and urban.

21Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New
York: Holt, 1948), 156.

22Mueller, "Midwestern Poetry," 70.

23See Meyer (1965) for the characteristics of Midwestern farm
fiction and an annotated bibliography of the genre.

24Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American west as Symbol and
Myth (New York: Vintage, 1950), 138.

251bid., 223.

26Hamlin Garlin, Main-Travelled Roads (New York: Fawcett, 1961),
12.

27Robert Narveson, "Spoon River Anthology: An Introduction,"
Midamerica 7 (1980): 58.

28Edgar Lee Masters, "Schroeder the Fisherman," Spoon River
Anthology (New York: Collier, 1962), 188. For a personification of
Jeffersonianism, see Masters' epitaph for "Jefferson Howard," the Spoon
River resident who followed his "father's beliefs from old Virginia" in
opposing the town's "dominant forces drawn from New England,
Republicans, Calvinists, merchants, bankers . . . the church with its
charnel dankness" (Masters 116).

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29Atherton, Main Street, 109.
30Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: Harcourt, 1920), 5.
311bid., 37.

32Ibid., 255.

33While based on Lewis' hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Gopher
Prnairie is one town in the mythical Midwestern state of Winnemac, the
geography of which Lewis develops in several novels, including Main
£3treet, Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and Elmer Gantry (1927). The
:regional representiveness of this fictional state bears comparison with
FEnJlkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

34Shortridge, The Middle west, 45.

35Lewis, Main Street, 1.

36Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), 121.
37Lewis, Main Street, 58.

38Lewis, Main Street, 265-266.

39Ibid., 268.

40David D. Anderson, Sherwood Anderson: An Introduction and
lvaterpretation (New York: Holt, 1967), 166.

41Ibid. , 15-16.

42Bernard Duffey, The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters
(Ekast Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1954), 204.

43Sherwood Anderson, Mid-American Chants (New York: Lane, 1918),

44Ibid., 16.
45Ibid., 7.
461bid., 69-72.

47David D. Anderson, "The Dimensions of the Midwest." Midamerica
1 (1974):13.

27 48Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Penguin, 1976),

49Anderson's novel Poor White (1920) depicts the transformation of
a C“1:10 town much like Winesburg into an industrial city. His theme is
. e human cost of the change from an agrarian, democratic society to an
1ndustrial, oligarchic one.
50Anderson, "The Untold Lie," Winesburg, Ohio, 205.

511bid., 207.

66

 

52Duffey, Chicago Renaissance, 261-262.

53Ibid., 186.

54Carl S. Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination
1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), ix.

55Ibid., 9.

56Carl Sandburg, "The Harbor," Complete Poems (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 5.

57Sandburg, "They Will Say," Complete Poems, 6.

58Sandburg, "Chicago," Complete Poems, 3.
59Sandburg, "Prairie," Complete Poems, 79.
60Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 75.

61Peter A. Carino, "Chicago in Studs Lonigan: Neighborhood and
Nation." Midamerica 15 (1988): 75.

62Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 363.

53Ibid., 139.

Chapter 3

Place and Placelessness in Willa Cather's Nebraska Novels

Improvement makes strait [sic] roads; but the crooked
roads without Improvement are roads of Genius.

William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)

The experience of landscape and place pervades the writing of

Willa Cather, from her early stories to her late novels. Although

Cather was born in Virginia and lived most of her adult life in eastern

cities, she is most often identified with the long grass prairie

landscape of southeastern Nebraska, the setting of many of her best

fictions. Cather's family moved to Nebraska in 1883, when the region
was still in its frontier period. Having previously known only the

forested, hilly terrain of Virginia, the nine-year old Cather initially
felt homesick and lonely in the "Divide," as the country between the

Republican and Blue Rivers was known, experiencing "a kind of erasure of

Personality" in the vast and seemingly barren plains. This sense of

dis location motivated Cather to befriend her immigrant neighbors,
especially the Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, and Czechs, who then greatly
outnumbered American born settlers in Nebraska. These foreign born

Pioneers, Cather recalled, "made up for what I missed in the country. I
Particularly liked the old women; they understood my homesickness and

were kind to me. . . ." Just as she learned to love the prairie

landscape, confessing that "the shaggy grass country . . . gripped me

67

68
with a passion that I have never been able to shake,"1 Cather came to
view the pioneers as heroic creators of the Midwestern cultural land-
scape; they "spread across our bronze prairies like the daubs of color
on a painter's palette . . . [bringing] with them something that this
neutral new world needed even more than the immigrants needed land."2
This synthesis of Old World traditions and acquired knowledge of an
American place inspired Cather's own creative endeavor: an American
regional literature with European roots, a literature about imaginative,
industrious people who relate profoundly to place and landscape.
In her early stories about pioneer life on the Great Plains,
(Rather is often concerned with the isolation of frontier folk, portray-
iru; the prairie as "a cultural desert," according to Bruce P. Baker, "a
setting often hostile to those of artistic bent, a place indifferent if
rust: actively hostile to man's creative spirit."3 Typical of this period
:is "A Wagner Matinee" (1904), a story about a woman who revisits Boston
after thirty years of toil on a Nebraska farm. Once a music teacher at
true IBoston Conservatory, the narrator's Aunt Georgiana is now a
"misshapen figure" with "ill-fitting false teeth," and skin "as yellow
(as. 61 Mongolian's from constant exposure to a pitiless wind and to the
aJJCéiline water. . . ."4 When the narrator takes his aunt to the opera,
Cather emphasizes the pathos of the old woman's life by contrasting ‘the
beauty of the music with the bleakness of the frontier landscape:
The first number . . . broke a silence of thirty years; the
inconceivable silence of the plains. . . . I saw again the tall,
naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress;
the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin pitted with
sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain gullied clay banks about the
naked house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the dish-cloths
were always hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there

was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that
stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to

69

sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer bought than those

of war.5

There is a heroic quality to Aunt Georgiana, who has sacrificed herself

for the betterment of others, including the story's narrator. But the

story's dominant impression is of her loss, her exile from art and

beauty. When the concert has concluded, Aunt Georgiana bursts into

tears, crying that she doesn't want to return to the farm. From his own

boyhood experience of Nebraska, the narrator understands his aunt's

despair, symbolizing the apparently inimical relation of frontier and

civilization with the story's final image of the bleak Nebraska prairie

laying "just outside the door of the concert hall. ." Cather's

juxtaposition is starker still for the near repetition of her earlier

descriptive catalog of the farm with its "black pond," "tall, unpainted

n6

house," and "naked . . . crook-backed ash seedlings. . . .

In "A Wagner Matinee" and other early stories, Cather emphasized

tragic themes of failure, loneliness, and despair on the frontier

plains; the bleak landscapes and deterministic social environments
depicted in these stories places them in the naturalistic genre of

Hamlin Garlin and Stephen Crane. The novels of her mature period

Present a more balanced view of both people and place, maintaining a

tragic sensibility while describing the prairie landscape and the human

experience there in more positive terms.7 Cather's three novels of the

Nebraska prairie, O Pioneers! (1913) , My Antonia (1918) , and A Lost Lady
(1923) , present a view of people and nature that owes more to American
Romanticism and classical pastoral than to the traditions of realism and
naturalism, prompting Cather scholar Susan J. Rosowski to describe them

as a "trilogy of place," the work of "a creative artist considering how

70

to establish a spatial context within which society might operate

"8 Whereas Cather's heroes are characters like Alexandra Bergson

in O Pioneers! and Antonia Shimerda in My Antonia who express their love
of place by working to make their surroundings productive and beautiful,
much of the dramatic conflict of the stories derives from the presence
of characters who are displaced from their original homeland, and miss

it, or are by reason of occupation or inclination physically or emotion-

ally unattached to local landscapes. Though Cather celebrates a sense

of place unique to Nebraska's early homesteaders, she posits an opposing

placelessness as a force pulling this rural society both back in time to
origins in Europe and forward into the materialistic modern age.
0 Pioneers! was Cather's breakthrough work, the novel which

established her Nebraska as a notable locality in the geography of world

literature. Borrowing a term from C.S. Lewis, critic David Stouck

characterizes the novel as "primary epic," which articulates "society's

most fundamental and cherished values, giving voice to the quest and

aSpirations of a whole people."9 The traditional source of epic

narrative in American literature is the struggle of westering pioneers

to subdue the wilderness and establish Euro—American civilization in the

Vaet continental interior. That 0 Pioneers! is one version of this

national myth is evident even from its title. In "Pioneers! O

Pioneersl, " the poem from which Cather derived her title, Whitman

I‘epeats the words as a refrain, idealizing through exclamation the

collective heroism of a "Central inland race":

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we, and piercing deep the

mines within;
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,

Pioneers! O Pioneers!10

71

Cather shares with Whitman (and Frederick Jackson Turner) a sense

of national pride in the adventure of Western settlement. But epic is

only one of her thematic concerns. Cather referred to O Pioneers! as a

"two-part pastoral,"11 the two parts being separate stories that Cather

combined, one about a Swedish pioneer woman and another about a tragic

love affair. These narratives constitute pastoral not merely because of

their rural setting, but by virtue of Cather's use of classical pastoral

conventions derived from Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics. Primary among

these conventions is a comparison of life in the city and in the
Exountry, often achieved by the contrast of characters representing urban

arui rural experience. What John H. Randall refers to as pastoral's

“Clissociated sensibility" derives from the perception that "city life

Ines: gotten out of tune with the cycles of nature: the seasons, fertility

and drought, birth and death." Comparing Cather's characters and

situations to Virgil's, Randall and other critics have described her
Nebraska novels as "good pastoral," which does not sentimentalize or
oversimplify life, but makes issues like death, time, and love "stand

(NJt. kw'clearing away all the adventitious accretions that clutter things

in more complicated and sophisticated city life."12 Nature, including

the description of landscape, is but one aspect of pastoral, which as

R"—’$<>\mrski observes is typically concerned with social conflict and the

individual's striving for a meaningful life:

The Eclogues presented [Cather] a model of bringing together
apparently disparate subjects--farmers and poets, the land and love
--as two forms of the human desire for perfection. Approximately
half the eclogues present a primary impulse toward perfect harmony
in nature, the other half a primary impulse toward perfect
happiness in love. Both follow the tragic pattern characteristic
of good pastoral, by which moments of perfection are surrounded by

disillusionment and loss.13

72

In the case of Cather's prairie pioneers, tragedy looms in the unpre-

dictability of weather and economic trends, as well as in the fortunes

of love and health. As Renaissance painters were wont to inscribe on

their pastoral scenes, "Et in Arcadia ego": Latin for "I (Death) am even

in Arcadia." The Arcadia that is Cather's Nebraska is no exception.

Appropriate to its epic theme of struggle against a hostile envi-

ronment, O Pioneers! begins in winter, when the prairie is bitterly cold

and depressingly colorless. The year is 1882, when frontier conditions

‘prevail and "the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska

tuableland, was trying not to be blown away." Like Aunt Georgiana's farm

it: "A Wagner Matinee," Hanover and surrounding farms are in need of

spmatial ordering and aesthetic improvement. The town is merely a

"cfiluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray

skay."14 Homesteads are similarly "few and far apart; here and there a

vvirmdndll gaunt againt the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow."
Cather personifies this "stern frozen country"15 as "a wild thing that

baud its ugly moods. Its Genius was unfriendly to man."16 By

“Genius, " Cather invokes Roman myth and folklore, in which places were

said to be inhabited by "genii loci," tutelary spirits that can help or

lliIICLer man, and must therefore be appeased. The local spirit of wild

NBbraska does its best "to overwhelm the little beginnings of human

SOCiety that struggled in its sombre wastes." The land wants "to be let

alcnae, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of

'bEGHAty, its uninterrupted mournfulness."17 As the adversary in this

epic:struggle, it is an "enigma" to be solved, not an opponent to be

Conquered.

Alexandra Bergson, the novel's central character, is the person to

73

solve the enigma. She possesses the intelligence and fortitude expected
of an epic heroine, but more importantly, the imagination and aesthetic
discrimination of an artist. Alexandra's strength of character is
established early in the narrative when her dying father gives her,
rather than his wife or sons, responsibility for the farm and family. A
Swedish immigrant, John Bergson subscribes to "the Old-World belief that
land, in itself, is desirable."18 He knows "every ridge and draw and
gully between him and the horizon,"19 and believes in the land's poten-
tial, but has "an idea that no one understood how to farm it properly
. ."20 In eleven years Bergson "had made but little impression upon
tflie wild.land he had come to tame,"21 either in its appearance or
productivity. His one accomplishment after years of crop failures and
natural disasters is to have completed payments on his land (a typical
fEar1n of the prairie Midwest: a full section of six hundred and forty
escares). He senses, however, that his intelligent, hard working daugh-
ter, "who read the papers and followed the markets, and who learned by
true rnistakes of their neighbors,"22 will come to understand the enig-
nmatLic: land, and succeed where he has failed. His two older sons Lou and
Oscar are hard workers but lack imagination and foresight. Mrs. Bergson
Ccnltlributes significantly to the household, but is of a rather nostalgic
"UJHCi: Mr. Bergson tells his sons not to grudge her nonessential work,
n131<>wing her garden and setting out fruit trees, even if it comes in a
busy season."23 While reasonably well adjusted to life in Nebraska,
”“33. Bergson misses Sweden; she "had never quite forgiven John Bergson

for bringing her to the end of the earth; but now that she was there,

She wanted to be let alone to reconstruct her old life in so far as that

was possible."24 By gardening and gathering Mrs. Bergson attempts to

74
Create the old world in the new, even though the "insipid ground-
cherries, " "garden tomatoes, " and "rank buffalo-pea"25 do not make the
best preserves. Among her family, only Alexandra has the courage,
patience, and intelligence to make the prairie bloom, to transform it

from undifferentiated space to significant place.

Alexandra learns not only from her neighbors' mistakes, but from

their successes. One neighbor whose wisdom she comes to rely on is

Ivar, an old Norwegian who lives alone in "the most inaccessible place

he could find,"26 a beautiful but unproductive piece of land full of

hummocks and ridges. Ivar practices "a peculiar religion of his own"-27

an ascetic, he goes barefoot most of the year, wears his white hair

long, and makes his home in a sod hut almost indistinguishable from the

hillside. He also exhibits a Franciscan love of nature: a vegetarian,

he doctors his neighbors' animals and puts out grain for the wild birds

attracted to his pond. "He best expressed his preference for his wild

homestead," Cather tells us, "by saying that his Bible seemed truer to

him there. If one stood in the doorway of his cave, and looked off at

the rough land . . . one understood what Ivar meant."28 Though her

OStensible reason for visiting Ivar, one day six months after John

Bergson's death, is to buy his handmade hammocks, Alexandra is actually

more interested in obtaining his advice about hogs, which so many of her

neighbors are losing to disease. Ivar tells Alexandra to move her hogs

from their dirty pen to her sorghum patch, feed them grain instead of

Slop, and give them shade and clean, fresh water. Oscar and Lou hear

this advice with dismay; unlike Alexandra, they worry about the

criticism of neighbors and prefer to be inconspicuous. Back home from

the trip to Ivar's farm, Alexandra's "eyes went back to the sorghum

75

patch south of the barn, where she was planning to make her new pig
corral."29 Alexandra possesses qualities critical for success in
Igicnneering: imagination and a willingness to experiment. "A pioneer
srujuld have imagination," Cather observes, "should be able to enjoy the
idea of things more than the things themselves."3° Alexandra listens to
truose who have learned from experience, seeking to duplicate their
Stuccesses and avoid their failures in changing nature to fit human ends,
and in adapting themselves to the landscape.31

Alexandra's conflict with her brothers over the farm comes to a
Cisisis after their initial prosperity gives way to "three years of
dinouth and failure, the last struggle of a wild soil against the
eru:roaching plowshare."32 Lou and Oscar fear the risk of a new mortgage
axud wish to leave the Divide, as many of their neighbors are then doing.
Alexandra must take pains to convince them that "the right thing is
IJSLually just what everybody don't do,"33 which is to note changes in
agricultural methods and economic trends so as to properly invest and
Plani for the future. Returning from what amounts to a research trip to
true river country, Alexandra tells her youngest brother Emil of her new
resolve to keep the land. Approaching their farm in their horse drawn
W«atgon, Alexandra realizes how deeply she loves and understands her
éudopted home landscape, experiencing an transcendental epiphany of

Place:

Her face was so radiant that [Emil] felt shy about asking her. For
the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of
geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and
yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious.
Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her.
Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes
across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will

before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man
or a woman.34

76
o Pioneers! thus presents the American epic of pioneering in unconven-
tional terms: the land is tamed by imagination and love rather than by
force and active will. Alexandra's epiphany on the Divide is evidence

of Cather's primary philosophical and aesthetic tendency to romanticism,

rather than to realism or epic. As biographer James Woodress writes,

"Cather belongs in the tradition of American Romanticism, "35 and it is
the place-centered idealism of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau that
anticipates such visionary realizations of being at home in a beloved

landscape as experienced by Alexandra.

Because Lou and Oscar acceed (though reluctantly) to Alexandra's

plans, they all become well-to-do farmers, among the wealthiest on the

Divide. But only Alexandra owns a "new consciousness of the country, "35
a love of place that will change the wilderness into a well ordered
pastoral space, distinguished by "the beauty and fruitfulness of the
outlying fields" and "a most unusual trimness and care for detail, "
ineluding the "big white house" and "so many sheds and outbuildings

- . . that the place looked not unlike a tiny village."37 Alexandra
Prefers to live simply, in close contact with both nature and those in
her employ. In contrast, Lou and Oscar lack Alexandra's love for the
land, concerning themselves instead with conspicuous consumption ("the
general conviction that the more useless and utterly unusable objects
Were, the greater their virtue, "38) and politics, for which Lou "ne-
glects his farm to attend conventions and to run for county offices."39

In their placelessness, Lou and Oscar represent the new materialistic

Spirit of the settled Midwest, and are suspicious and unaffectionate

toward their sister. They believe she is too generous and personal with

her hired help, including old Ivar, who has lived with Alexandra since

77
he lost his farm to mismanagement. Lou and Oscar want to send Ivar away
to an asylum because his eccentricities strike them as the signs of a
potentially violent insanity; their conflict with Alexandra over this
matter is one example of their effort to gain control over Alexandra's
portion of the divided property.40
Another conflict involving place and placelessness in O Pioneers!

is between Alexandra and Carl Linstrum, whose friendship since childhood
has always seemed to promise romance. But Carl's family takes the route
that tempted Lou and Oscar, selling their farm when conditions were poor
'and moving away. While Alexandra is making the decisions and super-
vising the work that make her family wealthy, Carl works but fails as an
engraver in Chicago, returning years later to visit Alexandra before
trying his luck in the goldfields of Alaska. At the age of thirty-five,
Carl is a displaced country person, "homely and wayward and definitely
personal,"41 who enjoyed the sophistication of city life but never
successfully adjusted to the urban scene. In a conversation about the
advantages and disadvantages of a mobile, unattached life, like his own,
and of a settled, grounded existence, such as Alexandra's, this would-be
couple reveal their envy of the other's lot. When Carl expresses his
sense of failure, Alexandra tells him "I'd rather have had your freedom
than my land." But Carl insists that attachment to a place brings
greater happiness in the long run, because "Freedom so often means that
one isn't needed anywhere":

Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you

would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of

rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know

nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know

where to bury him. . . . We have no house, no place, no people of
our own.

78

Alexandra counters Carl by noting how a country life can stultify the
spirit if one comes to feel isolated:

We grow hard and heavy here. We don't move lightly and easily as

you do, and our minds get stiff. If the world were no wider than my

cornfields, if there were not something beside this, I wouldn't feel

that it was much worth while to work.
But Alexandra's characterization of country folk as "hard and heavy"
holds truer of her brothers and those of their commercial bent than of
herself. Alexandra mentions Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of her
hired men, who became depressed and suicidal because of the slow pace
and repetitiveness of life on the Divide. A trip to visit relations in
Iowa restored her spirits by reminding her that the world is made up of
many places, the Divide being significant among them in its own way.
Alexandra, too, would benefit from the experience of travel, that like
Carrie she too can become "contented to live and work in a world that's
so big and interesting" because "it's what goes on in the world that
reconciles [her]."42 At the novel's end, when Carl has begun to succeed
in Alaska, and has again returned to Nebraska after the murder of
Alexandra's beloved younger brother Emil and his lover Marie, Alexandra
is presented with the opportunity to broaden her horizons, to travel
with Carl to Alaska. This they plan to do, and to marry, with the
understanding that they will return to the farm,~where even after
tragedy and loneliness there is "great peace . . . and freedom."
Alexandra's first devotion is to the land, and Carl must give up his
wanderlust, if not become a creature of place, to be her husband. "We
come and go," Alexandra tells Carl, "but the land is always here. And

the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for

a little while."43

 

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O Pioneers! concludes with the heroic pioneer period passed into
history, become the American Golden Age in contrast to a new, prosperous
era which forsakes pastoral values (including a strong sense of place)
and European immigrant traditions in favor of the convenience and
conformity of town and city life. Cather's nostalgia for the prairie
landscape and the people who tamed it is stronger yet in My Antonia, her
second Nebraska pioneer novel and, by a near consensus, her greatest
work. Etymologically, nostalgia means "the pain in returning," sugges-
ting wistful thoughts of an earlier time and a personally significant
place. David Stouck observes that nostalgia "is the emotion evinced by
pastoral art," fusing together "the pleasure of remembrance with the
painful awareness of mutability."44 Cather strikes this very note with
the novel's Virgilian epigraph, Optima dies . . . prima fugit: "The best
days are the first to flee." The central theme of My Antonia is the
nostalgic (and tragically futile) desire to recapture the innocence of
childhood when material and social success has not fulfilled spiritual
and emotional needs. The life of Jim Burden, the novel's narrator,
serves as a synecdochic representation of Midwestern society in its
transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: his childhood
is spent in the country, his adolescence in a small town, and his
adulthood in cities. Along the way, Jim has lost something, as has his
developing civilization.

Jim Burden, like Carl Linstrum of O Pioneers!, is a sensitive and
restless man. Our first view of Jim is in motion, travelling through
Iowa in a train "flashlingl through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by
country towns and bright—flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the

sun." In the novel's brief "Introduction," the author meets Jim on the

 

 

 

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80
train; the two old friends grew up together in the same Nebraska town,
and both now live in New York, Jim being employed as legal counsel for
the railroad. Despite his worldly success, Jim has not found happiness
in adult life. A man of a "romantic disposition" and "quiet tastes,"
Jim is unsuitably married to an sophisticated woman who strikes the
author as "unimpressionable and temperamentallly incapable of
enthusiasm." Dissatisfied with the present, Jim dwells on his Nebraska
childhood, particularly his friendship with a Bohemian girl named
Antonia, who "seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the
whole adventure of our childhood."45 Since re-establishing contact with
Antonia after many years, Jim has been writing a memoir centering on
Antonia and treating her as an emblematic figure of pioneer days. When
he gives the manuscript, told in his first-person point of view, to the
author, the novel proper begins.

Jim Burden comes to Nebraska from Virginia upon the death of his
parents. He rarely mentions his family or experiences back east, and
from the start is concerned with telling how he came to the Divide and
became a native. In his train voyage west, the child Jim experiences
the same dislocation Cather initially felt on the prairie. He remembers
nothing about crossing the great Missouri River, and "the only thing
very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long,
Nebraska."46 The prairie is for the newcomer a mere expanse of space, a
place only in name and "not a country at all, but the material out of
which countries are made." The region's outstanding characteristic is
the sky, "the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it."47 Though
Jim claims not to have been homesick, he admits to having felt "erased,

blotted out" by his initial impression of Nebraska. He surrenders him-

 

 

 

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81
self to an apparent emptiness that he will fill with experiences.
Cather devotes the second chapter to Jim's first explorations of
place on his grandfather's farm--"down to the kitchen" contrasting with
his memory of "out in the kitchen" back in Virginia--the cellar, and the
landscape outside, which varies more than he had thought. The passages
relating to Jim's visit with his grandmother to her garden are among
Cather's most lyrical, evoking a feeling of "motion in the landscape
as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath
it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping."48 In the peaceable
kingdom of this prairie Eden, the serpents are likely to be only bull-
snakes who keep the gophers down. Jim's grandmother even protects a
chicken-thieving badger, because in "a new country a body feels friendly
to the animals." The chapter builds up to another of Cather's memorable
epiphanies of place, when Grandmother leaves Jim at his request to sit
alone at the center of the garden. Once he is still and observant, the
plant and animal world around him comes fully alive, and he discovers a
"new feeling of lightness and content":49
I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect
anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt
it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I
was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and
become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or
goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be
dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one,
it comes as naturally as sleep.so

From this point, Jim feels at home in Nebraska, which he has experienced

as a place, its open space made significant by his appreciation of its

variety and differentiation.

Antonia, namelessly introduced in the first chapter as a Bohemian

girl travelling to the town of Black Hawk on the same train as Jim,

 

 

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82

makes her first substantive appearance in a scene reminscent of
Alexandra's first visit to Old Ivar in O Pioneers! Like Ivar, Antonia's
family lives on a beautiful but not very promising piece of land, a
place of "broken, grassy clay cliffs," "cottonwoods and ash trees," and
"rough red hillocks."51 Also like Ivar, they live in an earth cave
dwelling, the best they can manage, from which they emerge as if the
earth is giving them birth. Antonia and Jim quickly establish a friend-
ship, and because we know from the introduction that Jim will ultimately
leave the Divide, Cather has here established the conventional pastoral
pairing of a city person with a rural counterpart. Antonia, who is
destined to become "a rich mine of life, like the founders of early
races," embodies pastoral values--the love of place and "the goodness of
planting and tending and harvesting."52 When she is mature enough to
articulate her values she will tell Jim "I'd always be miserable in a
city. I'd die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack
and tree, and where all the ground is friendly."53 Antonia brings Old
World intuitions about nature and beauty to this very American land-
scape. Jim will teach her to speak and write English, but Antonia will
inspire in Jim an enthusiasm for the possibilities of life and the glory
of nature.

The first of the novel's five parts (or "books") takes Jim through
a year on the prairie, one full seasonal cycle beginning in autumn and
ending the following summer. In her 1923 Nation essay on "Nebraska: The
End of the First Cycle," Cather describes autumn as "the season of
beauty and sentiment" on the Great Plains, "as spring is in the Old
World."54 Cather's description of the prairie in autumn lends a.

romantic, nostalgic glow to the first chapters involving Jim's explora-

 

 

83

tions and adventures with Antonia. Among the places Jim comes to love
are the "sunflower-bordered roads," "damp spots" at the edges of "pale-
yellow cornfields" where "the smartweed soon turned a rich copper
colour," a neighbor's catalpa grove, and "a big elm tree that grew up
out of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk's nest in its branches."
Jim learns to look closely to find the poetry in what would seem a
prosaic landscape to a casual and unengaged observer. The scenery is
composed of subtle details and contrasts, such as that lone elm tree
emerging from the fissured terrain. Trees are especially appreciated by
.prairie dwellers:

Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard

fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit

them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of

detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.55
Against this scenery, we see Jim and Antonia play and talk their way
into being best friends. So long as this first autumn endures, life
seems a golden idyll, an long afternoon when "miles of copper-red grass
were drenched in sunlight," a mystical hour owning "the exultation of
victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death. . . ."56

As winter approaches, and "the autumn colour was growing pale on

the grass and cornfields,"S7 we are reminded of death's residence in
Arcadia by the onset of tragedies which Jim's nostalgic tone can mute
but not diminish. Place and displacement play an important role in the
tragic fates of the Russians Pavel and Peter and of Mr. Shimerda,
Antonia's father. Pavel and Peter are immigrant bachelors who share a
farm; Jim and Antonia visit them there and are treated with melons from

their sizable patch. Late autumn visits disaster on the two men: first

they develop an impossible debt to Wick Cutter, the villainous Black

 

84
Hawk money-lender, then Pavel strains himself at work--an injury that
will prove fatal. On his death-bed, Pavel reveals the "great trouble"
he had earlier alluded to which necessitated their emigration from
Russia. Pavel and Peter were known to have sacrificed two people to
save their own lives--they were riding in a sleigh in the forest, and in
being chased by a large pack of wolves were forced to throw a newly
wedded couple off the sleigh to lighten the load. Shunned by their
neighbors and family, Pavel and Peter wandered to "strange towns,"
always having to move on because their story followed them. The friends
came to America, where they hid their terrible secret and were plagued
by "such bad luck that people were afraid of them and liked to put them
out of mind."58 Pavel dies a painful death in this foreign land, and
Peter leaves the Divide to work in a railway construction camp-—the
railroad again symbolizing motion and displacement.

The fate of Pavel and Peter anticipates that of their friend Mr.
Shimerda, who hears Pavel's death-bed confession. Mr. Shimerda never
wanted to leave Europe, and is terribly homesick for the places and
society of his native Bohemia. Unlike his conceited, boastful, and
rather ignorant wife, Mr. Shimerda is dignified, sensitive, and
educated; Antonia later tells Jim that her father "know a great deal;
how to make the fine cloth like what you not got here. He play horn and
violin, and he read so many books that the priests in Bohemie [sic] come
to talk to him."59 In Nebraska, to which his wife wished to immigrate
for the sake of her oldest son, Mr. Shimerda is displaced from the
cultural life he so treasures. He cares for his family, showing partic-
ular solicitousness for Antonia's education, but is always melancholy

and ultimately suicidal. He shoots himself during the worst snowstorm

 

 

 

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of the winter, during the bleak frozen season when the plains landscape
is least comforting, particularly to a man so overcome by homesickness.

Cather develops two remarkable vignettes relating to the aftermath
of Mr. Shimerda's suicide and the themes of immigrant homesickness and
the Midwestern cultural landscape. The first occurs while the adults in
Jim's household are busy assisting with funeral preparations and the
official investigation, leaving Jim alone in his grandparents' house.
His thoughts soon turn to the unfortunate Mr. Shimerda: "I knew it was
homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered whether his
released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his own
country."60 This recalls Jim's feelings about his dead parents when he
first arrived in Nebraska, that he had left their spirits back in
Virginia among the places familiar to them, "looking for me at the
sheep-fold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the
mountain pastures."61 Human spirit and geographical locality were of
such a unity to Willa Cather that she often wrote of the dead persisting
in their beloved places, as in the triumphant final sentence of O
Pioneers!, which describes the Divide as a "Fortunate country, that is
one day to receive hearts like Alexandra's into its bosom. . . ."62 But
like the Spanish explorer Coronado, who may have reached Nebraska in the
sixteenth century, Mr. Shimerda "died in the wilderness, of a broken
heart,"63 and his spirit in not in its proper place. Alone at home that
winter day, Jim senses Mr. Shimerda's spirit with him in the room,
resting before its long journey back to Bohemia. Years later, when
Antonia herself wonders if "maybe my father's spirit can go back to
those old places," Jim recalls that winter day and his intuition: "I

said I felt sure then that he was on his way back to his own country,

 

86

and that even now, when I passed his grave, I always thought of him as
being among the woods and fields that were so dear to him."64

Mr. Shimerda's unusual grave occasions the second vignette
resulting from his death. In accordance with Bohemian tradition, Mrs.
Shimerda and her son Ambrosch decide that the old man should be buried
on the southwest corner of their land, at the very point where section
roads will converge once roads and fences follow the rectangular survey.
Though Jim's sternly Protestant grandfather objects, the grave is dug
and a simple ceremony performed. In the dead of winter, the grave

"looked a very little spot in that snow-covered waste," one that the

 

mourners assume that traffic will eventually ride over. Something
curious happens though: years later, when the wildness has been plowed
out of the land and "the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but
followed the surveyed section-lines," the grave remains, untouched. The
converging roads were made to curve slightly in order to avoid Mr.
Shimerda's grave, its unmown red prairie grass a remnant of wilderness
that survives the pioneer period. The grave is sacred space in several
senses--religious, personal, aesthetic, and ecological. There is
another image in the novel that most readers and critics think of as
central to My Antonia: the plow silhouetted against the flaming sunset
which Jim and Antonia see soon before Jim goes to college--a hieroglyph
of the pastoral ideal. But in a novel so concerned with wilderness and
pastoralism, place and the tragedy of displacement, the image of Mr.
Shimerda's grave--Jim's favorite place on the Divide--bears equal
consideration:

. . . at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the

dusty roads used to look like soft grey rivers flowing past it. I
never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country

 

87
it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the
propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I
loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence--the error
from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along
which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset.65
The spirit that could not carry out the sentence is the spirit of place
Cather hoped would emerge in the Midwest: circularity to temper
linearity, wildness to survive development, and Old World aesthetic and
spiritual sensibilities to complement American utilitarianism and

"common sense." By such small gestures pastoral values might endure in

the new materialistic age.

 

After the tragic winter, the seasonal cycle of Jim's first year is
completed by spring, "the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital
essense of it everywhere,"66 and summer, which brings "that breathless,
brilliant heat which makes the plains of Kansas and Nebraska the best
corn country in the world."67 Jim lives on his Grandfather's farm for
three years but narrates only the events of the first, which for Jim
constitutes the "best days" of his life--and of American society, in
Cather's view. Antonia, who faces a difficult future breaking the land,
expresses the conventional pastoral desire to stop time so that "no
winter ever come again."68 But neither life or history can stop, and
Jim's move to town coincides with the beginning of his adolescence and
the period of small town dominance on the Midwestern cultural landscape.

The town of Black Hawk, like the Hanover of O Pioneers! and
prairie villages in other Cather stories, is a fictionalized representa—
tion of Cather's actual hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska. Like her
contemporaries Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis, Cather cast a
critical eye on Midwestern small town life just before and after the

turn of the century. Jim first describes Black Hawk, glowingly, as "a

 

88
clean, well-planted little prairie town, with white fences and good
green yards about the dwelling, wide, dusty streets, and shapely little
trees growing along the wooden sidewalks."69 As an adolescent with
burgeoning social (and sexual) desires, Jim benefits from living where
he can attend school, dances, and musical recitals. But the mainstream

society of Black Hawk is marked by conformity, boredom, snobbishness,

 

and materialism--a town full of Babbitts like Alexandra Bergson's
brothers Lou and Oscar. In yet another winter scene--the bleak season
again reinforcing the theme of environmental and spiritual malaise--Jim
explores the back streets of Black Hawk, where he deduces much about his =‘
townspeople from their architectural use of space:

On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold

streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side,

with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy

shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle

porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-late. Yet for all

their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of

them managed to contain!70

In striving to maintain the impression of propriety, the people of

Black Hawk exercise extreme caution in speech and action. As in
Sinclair Lewis's Main-Street, colorful immigrant traditions that might
enliven the place are ignored and even reviled. The dominant attitude
is that "foreigners were ignorant people who couldn't speak English,"
even though there is no one in town with "the intelligence or
cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Antonia's father."71
Jim's best experiences of the town are those that recall pastoral values
and transplanted European culture: the home of the neighboring Harling
family, which is like a little farm, frequent visits from farmers come

to town, and most importantly, the presence of Antonia and other

immigrant girls like Lena Lingard who have hired into local families as

 

 

 

 

 

 

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domestic help. In preferring the company of the hired girls to that of
the "refined" but dull town girls, Jim breaks unwritten social propri-
eties based on distinctions of ethnicity and class. Unlike most Black
Hawk boys who "looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and living
in a brand-new little house with best chairs that must not be sat upon,
and hand-painted china that must not be used," Jim is loath to conceal
his affection and admiration for Antonia, Lena, and the other girls "who
helped to break up the wild sod, [and] learned so much from life, from
poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers. . . ." Their beauty,
‘vigor, and knowledge derive from European traditions and their direct
[experience of an American landscape; they "had been early awakened and
made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a
new."72

One might expect Jim to court one of the country girls, but he
defers to the very prejudice he abjures in his townspeople. Despite his
attraction to Antonia, their relationship stays on the level of a
childhood friendship; even his dreams about Antonia innocently recall
the places and play of their country childhood, "sliding down straw-
stacks as we used to do; climbing the yellow mountains over and over,
and slipping down the smooth sides into soft piles of chaff." His
recurring dream about the Swedish beauty Lena Lingard is, however,
strongly sexual--in a harvested field Lena "came across the stubble
barefoot, in a short skirt, with a curved reaping-hook in her hand . .
flushed like the dawn, with a kind of luminous rosiness all about her."
Lena sits by Jim, sighs and says "Now they are all gone, and I can kiss
you as much as I like."73 Jim does in fact have something of an affair

with Lena once he is in Lincoln attending the University, but the

 

 

90

dalliance distracts him from his studies and he is soon off to Harvard,
eventually settling in New York to a conventional and unhappy marriage.

Cather's treatment of sexuality has interested many of her
critics, many of whom note in her characters an aversion to sex and a
corresponding idealization of childhood. James Woodress goes so far as
to say that Cather's "greatest failing as an artist is her inability to
depict heterosexual adult relationships affirmatively."74 Blanche H.
Gelfant sees Jim Burden as a "disingenuous and self-deluded narrator"
who "celebrates the myth of creation but fails to participate."75 James
E. Miller similarly argues that My Antonia depicts not the fulfillment
of the American dream, but its loss, finding in the name "Jim Burden" an
allegory "not only [of] his acute sense of personal loss but also a deep
sense of national unease, a burden of guilt for having missed a chance,
for having passed up an opportunity. . . ."76 Just as America traded
nature for industry, and democracy for republic, so Jim passes up his
chances with Antonia, earth goddess and mother of races, settling
instead for a passionless marriage and exile in the city. He tells her
"I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or
my sister--anything that a woman can be to a man,"77 but then leaves the
Divide for twenty years. He embraces the aesthetic and not the physical
aspects of Antonia and the place, nostalgically preserving both in his
memory as "a succession of . . . pictures, fixed there like the old
woodcuts of one's first primer. . . ."73 In dread of change, Jim
sublimates life into art, because "Some memories are realities, and are
better than anything that can ever happen to one again."79

One such sublimation of life into art is occasioned by Jim's

reading of Virgil's pastorals. One evening in Lincoln, while reviewing

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Georgics Book 3, Jim mulls over the melancholy thought that "the best
days are the first to flee." He then turns to an earlier passage where
Virgil proclaims "Primus ego in patriam mecum . . . deducam.Musas": "I
shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country."
Before he can get far with his study, Lena Lingard knocks at the door,
there to pay Jim a visit for the first time. Though Lena is as
beautiful and sensuous as ever-—more so for her fine new clothing and
deportment, she doesn't so much arouse Jim's sexual interest as his
nostalgia for the people and places of his childhood. As soon as the
actual flesh and blood Lena, sexy Swedish farm girl turned successful
fashion designer, has left him to his books, Jim reverts to his fantasy
image of her, now transformed by his experience of literary art: "my old
dream about Lena coming across the harvest—field in her short skirt
. floated before me on the page like a picture, [emphasis added] and

underneath it stood the mournful line: 'thima dies . . . prima fugit.'"
The lesson he has drawn from this conjoining of life and art is "the
relation between girls like those (Lena, Antonia, and other transplanted
Europeans] and the poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them
in the world, there would be no poetry."80 Cather's citation of Virgil
certainly reinforces the nostalgia of her narrative, but it also
universalizes the Nebraska locality. Gaston Cleric, Jim's mentor at
Lincoln, had explained to his students that what Virgil meant by
"patria" was "not a nation or even a province, but the little rural
neighbourhood on the Mincio where the poet was born." Virgil prayed to
bring poetry not to Rome, but "to his own little 'country'; to his
father's fields, 'sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees

with broken tops.”81 Jim's relation of Virgil and the "hired girls" of

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Black Hawk is an imaginative leap substantiated by his memoir, which
brings the muse to the Divide, his (and Cather's) "patria."

But Jim is only half an artist, and like Carl Linstrum in O
Pioneers!, whose talent is confined to the engraving of others' work, he
must content himself with secondhand pastoral--an aesthetic appreciation
of the very real art that Antonia (like Alexandra Bergson) has created
with the Nebraska landscape as her medium. Jim's belated return to the
Divide reenacts his boyhood arrival, with Antonia to greet him instead
of his grandmother, and another beautiful garden landscape to explore.
Cather again lyrically describes a place in which trees and children are
at home. In the orchards and grape arbors where Antonia's many sons and
daughters play, Jim experiences the same deep peace he felt sitting
alone in his Grandmother's garden as a child, a feeling that recurs when
his discovery of a remnant of the old pioneer road brings him "the sense
of coming home to himself. . . ." This contentment is, however, only a
respite from a disappointing life. Antonia, on the other hand, has
always been at home with herself and her place, and for this reason the
lofty sentiment with which Jim concludes the novel is a half-truth:
"Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the
incommunicable past."82 Antonia also possesses the present; for her the
pastoral ideal is a reality, as alive for her as her children and the
plants and animals on her farm. Susan Rosowski aptly concludes of My
Antonia that the "early male myths of adventure have led to pointless
wandering and lonely exile, and the women, originally assigned roles of
passivity, have become the vital sources of meaning."83 Jim's solitary
fate speaks to the passage of an era, but Antonia's success as a

agriculturalist, mother, and wife confirms that the pastoral ideal has

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endured.
My Antonia marked the end of Cather's first period as a novelist,

a period characterized by a celebration of America's past and optimism
for its future. In her book of collected essays, th Under Forty
(1936), Cather made the oft quoted statement that for her, the "world
broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts. . . ."84 There were a number of
reasons for her new pessimism. Though she was at the height of her
career as a popular and critically acclaimed novelist, Cather felt let
down by success, according to biographer James Woodress. Her personal
and professional life was in transition; for example, her best friend
Isabelle Hambourg had permanently expatriated to Europe, and her novel
of World War I, One of Ours (1922), won her the Pulitzer Prize but was
described as a failure by previously vociferous supporters like H.L.
Mencken and Sinclair Lewis. Cather's disillusionment, however, was
deeper than personal or professional; like many other authors and
artists of the period, Cather's attitude toward American life and
culture was affected by major events of the time. Woodress reiterates a
familiar historical litany: "World War I, Prohibition, Communist witch
hunts, the gaudy extravagances of the Jazz Age--all these extrinisic
factors that sent other American writers to self-imposed exile in Europe
contributed to Cather's sense of alienation."85 The four novels of her
middle period, One of Ours (1922), A Lost Lady (1923), The Professor's
HOuse (1925), and My Mortal Enemy (1926), all reject the present time--
the 1920's--which Cather described in her Nation essay on Nebraska as
"stamped with the ugly crest of materialism. . . ."86 In A Lost Lady,
her third and final novel of the pioneer era in Nebraska, Cather

directly attacked that materialism as the force destroying the dominant

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pastoral ideal in the Midwest, particularly the love of nature and sense
of place she attributed to the first generation of Nebraskans. As John
H. Randall notes, Cather's “image of the garden is replaced by that of
the wasteland. . . . It is not that the land is suffering from any
physical blight, for the Middle West is as blooming as ever; the land is
fruitful but the people are parched."87

From the moment of its publication A Lost Lady was recognized as a
model of stylistic grace and even perfection. Cather wrote the novel
according to principles she expounded upon in “The Novel Démeublé,“ an
article published by the New Republic in 1922. A 'novel démeublé,‘ or
"unfurnished novel,” dispenses with the descriptive cataloging of
physical sensations that Cather felt cluttered many works of realistic
fiction. By reducing exposition, description, and dialogue to an
essential minimum, such a novel creates ”the inexplicable presence of
the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by
it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the
deed. . . .“88 In its formal innovation and sense of cultural crisis, A
Lost Lady is strongly modernist, leading Harold Bloom to place it in the
'aesthetic context“ of major works of the period including Eliot's “The
Waste Land," Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Hemingway's The Sun Also
Rises. 'Subtler and gentler" than such writings, according to Bloom, A
Lost Lady 'elegizes just as profoundly a lost radiance or harmony, a
defeat of a peculiarly American dream of innocence, grace, hope."89 In
the American Midwest, where the novel is set, that dream is course the
pastoral ideal of humanity in harmony with the natural environment.

A Lost Lady is concerned with the childhood and young adulthood of

Niel Herbert, the son of a small town Nebraska judge, who is befriended

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95
by the attractive and gracious Marian Forrester and her older husband,
Captain Daniel Forrester. Captain Forrester is not a pioneer
homesteader like Alexandra Bergson or Antonia Shimerda, but a wealthy
railroad contractor who owns a summer home at the edge of Sweet Water,
another version of Red Cloud, Nebraska. The Forresters lead a luxurious

life, dividing their time between their idyllic country retreat and

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soirées with their society friends in Denver. While their house is
architecturally unremarkable and even ugly, its location atop a hill
above two creeks and a wetland is lovely. Captain Forrester “had
.selected this place long ago because it looked beautiful to him, and he
happened to like the way the creek wound through his pasture, with mint
and joint-grass and twinkling willows along its banks."90 In this
pastoral setting the Forresters entertain their wealthy and refined
guests, each of whom is charmed by their lively and well spoken hostess,

Marian Forrester.

Since Niel lives in town, his experience of nature and significant

If

place occurs on the Forrester property, where the story proper begins in
chapter two as Niel and his friends spend a day playing and picnicking
by the marsh. The Forrester marsh is a central image in the story; I'its
delicate ecology,‘I Susan Rosowski observes, “suggests a fragile beauty
that is all the more precious because it is so easily destroyed by
change.'91 That change is embodied in the person of Ivy Peters, a boy
about six years older than Niel, nearly an adult at the time the story
begins. Ivy interrupts the boys at their picnic, taunts them for
enjoying nature ('I thought girls went on picnics“), and expresses his
disregard for the Forresters' stewardship of the marsh. In a shocking

dramatization of his callous placelessness, Ivy uses a slingshot to stun

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96

a woodpecker, which he claims is damaging the trees. After slitting its

eyes with a knife, Ivy releases the bird, which flies in blind panic
before managing to find its way to its hole. Niel climbs the tree in
order to catch the bird and euthanize it, but he falls and breaks his
leg. His friends take him to the Forrester home to be cared for; thus
begins Niel's friendship with that refined couple, and thus Ivy Peters
emerges as the story's villain--indeed, as the snake in the garden of
Eden, with physical ugliness to match his spiritual wretchedness:
I'narrow beady eyes,‘I red skin 'flecked with tiny freckles, like rust
spots,‘I very small eyes “and an absence of eyelashes [that] gave his

pupils the fixed, unblinking hardness of a snake's or a lizard's."92

Though Niel is attracted to Mrs. Forrester's glamour, fine taste,

and uncanny ability to make people comfortable with themselves and other
company, "it was as Captain Forrester's wife that she most interested

Niel, and it was in her relation to her husband that he most admired

her."93 Captain Forrester, after all, created the place to showcase her

charms. As a young man, he saw Nebraska when wilderness conditions
prevailed: I'good hunting, plenty of antelope and buffalo, boundless
sunny sky, boundless plains of waving grass, long fresh-water lagoons
yellow with lagoon flowers, where the bison in their periodic migrations
stopped to drink and bathe and wallow.“ One particular place, the site

of an Indian encampment by the Sweet Water creek, intrigued the young

Captain Forrester. There he envisioned a garden, a house for his
friends to visit, and 'a wife like Mrs. Forrester to make it attractive
to them.‘ All this came to be, as the Captain tells a dinner party,
less out of design than through his imagination.

The statement with

which he concludes the story of his country home conveys Cather's own '

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conception of the pioneer era:

. . . my philosophy is that what you think of and plan for day by
day, in spite of yourself, so to speak--you will get. You will get
it more or less . . . because a thing that is dreamed of in the way
I mean, is already an accomplished fact. All our great West has
been developed from such dreams; the homesteader's and the
prospector's and the contractor's. We dreamed the railroads across
the mountains, just as I dreamed my place on the Sweet Water. All

these things will be everyday facts to the coming generation, but to
.94 '
us--

For the pioneer generation of Captain Forrester, Alexandra Bergson, and
Antonia Shimerda, human labor in contact with the native landscape
provided spiritual rewards: again, the pastoral dream. But the new
generation concerns itself with facts instead of dreams, with economic
rather than spiritual enrichment, and Nebraska will be poorer for it.
When the Captain sickens and then dies, his fears prove to have
been well-founded. Mrs. Forrester loses control of the property not
only because of the late Captain's financial reverses, but through her
own loss of balance, of proper relation to her home. Without her
husband, Mrs. Forrester is “like a ship without ballast, driven hither
and thither by every wind," having "lost her faculty of discrimination;
her power of easily and graciously keeping everyone in his proper
place."95 The person whom Niel is most disturbed to see leave his
proper place is Ivy Peters, who becomes a shyster lawyer with more than
a passing interest in the late Captain Forrester's land and beautiful
widow. Peters succeeds in both cases, much to Niel's disgust. He
drains the marsh, rents and then purchases the Forrester home, thereby
obliterating 'a few acres of something he hated, though he could not
name it," and asserting “power over the people who had loved those
unproductive meadows for their idleness and silvery beauty." Ivy is the

prototype of the new capitalist speculator who will commodify the

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Notes

1Willa Cather, The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles
and Critical Statements, 1893-1896, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 448.

2Willa Cather, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,“ The Nation
117 (September 5, 1923): 237.

3Bruce P. Baker, “Nebraska's Cultural Desert: Willa Cather's Early
Short Stories,“ Midamerica 14 (1987): 12.

4Willa Cather, ”A Wagner Matinee,“ Early Novels and Stories (New
York: Library of America, 1987), 103-104.

51bid., 106-107

61bid., 110.

7The duality of Cather's response to the frontier is consistent
with women's frontier narratives as discussed by Annette Kolodny in The
Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-
1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). Kolodny
writes of the need of pioneer women to create home and community in
contrast to typically male narratives of action, conquest, and
domination of nature. In the literature she examines, Kolodny finds
that pioneer women 'avoided male anguish at lost Edens and male guilt in
the face of the raping of the continent by confining themselves,
instead, to the 'innocent . . . amusement' of a garden's narrow space”
(Kolodny, The Land Before Her, 7). Many women, in letters, poems, and
fictions, found the open prairie a particularly apt landscape upon which
to project the garden ideal. On the other hand, the lot of many women,
particularly during the early days of settlement, was confinement to a
bleak homestead, far from family and friends. For these unfortunates,
the “dream of a domestic Eden had become a nightmare of domestic
captivity“ (Kolodny, The Land Before Her, 9). Drawing from her first
hand experience of frontier conditions, and from her friendships with

immigrant women, Cather depicts both visions of the wilderness--as
wasteland and as Eden--in her fictions.

8Susan J. Rosowski, “Willa Cather and the Fatality of Place: 0
Pioneers!, My.Antonia, and A Lost Lady,I in Geography and Literature: A
Meeting of the Disciplines, ed. William E. Mallory and Paul Simpson-
Housley (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 81, 83.

9David Stouck, Willa Cather's Imagination (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1975), 23.

1°Walt Whitman, “Pioneers! 0 Pioneers!“ Poetry and Prose.

(New
York: Vintage / Library of America, 1982), 372.

11Quoted by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1953), 11.

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12John H. Randall, “Willa Cather and the Pastoral Tradition,‘I in
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Merrimack College, 1974), 78.

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13Susan J. Rosowski, The voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's
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19Ibid., 20.

201bid., 22.

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31Among a number of parallels between 0 Pioneers! and Virgil's
Eclogues that Rosowski draws is between Old Ivar in his sod home
retreat, visited by Alexandra and the boys, and the nature god Silenus,
who sings of nature and love to visiting youths. Rosowski, The voyage
Perilous, 47.

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35James Woodress, Willa Cather: A Literary Life (Lincoln:
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38Ibid., 97.

39Ibid.,,98.

4OCather characterizes ethnicity with great accuracy: Swedish
ethnologists note a strong tendency to conformity in their population.
The notion of lagom, meaning appropriateness, inconspicuousness, and
moderation in all things, is a decisive factor in Swedish culture.
National Geographic Assistant Editor Don Belt writes that the idea of
lagom I'colors all sides of Swedish life-~the home, the workplace, the
schools. And while it makes for an orderly society, some Swedes fear
that the lagom ethic . . . discourages the best and the brightest
. . . .' See Don Belt, “Sweden: In Search of a New Model,“ National
Geographic 184, no. 2 (August 1993): 22. Lagom is certainly an element

of Cather's characterization of Lou and Oscar, though she does not use
the term.

Another Swedish tradition depicted but not named in O Pioneers! is
allemansratten, or everyman's right, by which anyone “can wander freely
--even over private property--and glory in the solitude and perfect
stillness.“ Thus the pleasure Alexandra finds in nature is something
she brings to Nebraska from Sweden, just as her friend Marie confesses
to a love for trees similar to that of her Bohemian ancestors who
worshipped trees before the advent of Christianity. Belt's observation
of the Swedish holds true of other ethnic groups, and of the relation
between groups like the Swedes and the Bohemians who met in the

Americas: l'Rather than history, it is geography that unifies the Swedes,
and silence that keeps them apart'I (Belt, 13).

41Cather, O Pioneers!, 115.

42Ibid., 122-124.

43Ibid., 307-308.

44Stouck, Willa Cather's Imagination, 46.

45Willa Cather, My Antonia (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918),
unpaginated 'Introduction.’

46Ibid., 5.

471bid., 8.

481bid., 16.
49Ibid., 17.
5°Ibid., 18.
511bid., 21.
521bid., 353.

53Ibid., 320.

54Cather, "Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,“ 236.

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55Ibid., 40.

57Ibid., 50.

59Ibid., 51.

59Ibid., 124.

6°Ibid., 101.

61Ibid., 8.

62Cather, O Pioneers!, 309.
63Cather, My Antonia, 244.
64Ibid., 236.

55Ibid., 117-119.

65Ibid., 120.

67Ibid., 137.

681bid., 140.
59Ibid., 145.
7°Ibid., 219.
7lIbid., 200-201.

721bid., 198.

73Ibid., 225-226.

74Woodress, Willa Cather, 299. Many feminist readings of Cather
emphasize her apparent lesbianism. According to Deborah Lambert,
'Cather was a lesbian who could not, or did not, acknowledge her
homosexuality and who, in her fiction, transformed her emotional life
and experiences into acceptable, heterosexual forms and guises'I (Deborah
Lambert, 'The Defeat of a Hero: Autonomy and Sexuality in my Antonia,“
in Willa Cather's fiMy.Antonia' (Modern Critical Interpretations), ed.
Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 119-120. In Lambert's
reading, the relationships of Emil and Marie in 0 Pioneers!, Jim and
Antonia in my Antonia, and Niel and Marion in A Lost Lady are actually
lesbian relationships in disguise. On Cather's sexual orientation,
Woodress offers an appropriate caution. 'If one defines a lesbian as a
woman who has sexual relations with another woman,‘ Woodress argues,
'Cather cannot be called a lesbian on the basis of available records.
On the other hand, if a lesbian is a woman whose primary emotional
attachments are to other women, regardless of sexual relations, then
Cather was most certainly a lesbian“ (Woodress, 141).

75Blanche H. Gelfant, 'The Forgotten Reaping-hook: Sex in.My
Antonia,‘ in Willa cather's ”my Antonia,“ ed. Harold Bloom, 79, 89.

76James E. Miller, Jr., 'My Antonia and the American Dream,‘ in

    
     
     

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Willa Cather's rmy Antonia,“ ed. Harold Bloom, 102.
77Cather, My Antonia, 321.

78Ibid., 353.

79Ibid., 328.
8°Ibid., 270-271.

81Ibid., 264.

821bid., 371-372.
83Rosowski, The voyage Perilous, 91.

84Willa Cather, th Uhder Forty (New York: Knopf, 1936), v.

85Woodress, kdlla Cather, 336.

86Cather, ”Nebraska: End of the First Cycle," 238. Consistent with
her rejection of the present, the major works of Cather's third and
final period, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Shadows on the Rock
(1931), and Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), are historical romances
set in eras long past and places far from Nebraska. Cather did return
to Nebraska locales in Obscure Destinies (1932) and in Lucy Gayhart
(1935); the stories in the former volume are equal in quality and
importance to her best novels.

87John H. Randall, The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa
Cather's Search for value (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 155.

88Willa Cather, 'The Novel Démeublé,‘I in Willa Cather on writing
(New York: Knopf, 1949), 41-42.

89Harold Bloom, 'Introduction,‘ Willa Cather's “my Antonia," 1-2.
90Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (New York: Knopf, 1923), 11.

91Rosowski, I'Willa Cather and the Fatality of Place,” Geography and
Literature, 90.

92Cather, A Lost Lady, 20-22.

93Ibid., 78. Cather's ambiguity toward sexuality plays as
important a role in A Lost Lady as in my Antonia. Just as Jim Burden
tells us of 'his' Antonia, so does Niel Herbert's perspective alter and
distort our view of the woman he idealizes, Marian Forrester. Like Jim,
Niel is uncomfortable with sex--he remains a bachelor and reacts with
disgust to Mrs. Forrester's dalliances. Just as Jim's view of life is
colored by the books he has read, from The Life of Jesse James to
Virgil's pastorals. so is Niel's interpretation of people and events
mediated by his reading of such authors as Byron, Fielding, Montaigne,
and Ovid. The chapter that deals with Niel's reading ends with his
discovery of her adultery, which shocks and angers him not from 'a moral
scruple she had outraged, but an aesthetic ideal' (Cather, A Lost Lady,
87). Out of their dissatisfaction with life, both Jim and Niel
sublimate experience through art.

94Ibid., 52-55.

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9SIbid., 152-153.

95Ibid., 105-107.

97Cather, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle,“ 238.
99Ibid., 237.

99Rosowski,

“Willa Cather and the Fatality of Place,“ Geography and
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Chapter 4

Aldo Leopold: Ecologist and uidwostorner

Ecologist Aldo Leopold, who was born in Iowa in 1877 and lived in
Wisconsin from 1924 until his death in 1948, is best remembered as the
author of A Sand County Almanac (1949), a volume described by Leopold
scholar J. Baird Callicott as “a best seller, the environmentalist's
' bible, and a twentieth-century landmark in a genre of American letters
pioneered by Thoreau. . . .“1 This classic of nature writing is
primarily noted for the thesis of its capstone essay, “The Land Ethic,“
that society needs to expand its ethical boundaries to include “man's
relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it."2
Leopold's “land ethic“ is the philosophical “upshot“ of a book largely
devoted to the illustration of ecological, ethical, and aesthetic
imperatives regarding nature through narratives relating the author's
experience of landscape, particularly in Wisconsin. While of interest
for its considerable influence on contemporary environmentalism
(including such new fields as environmental history, environmental
ethics, restoration ecology, and bioregionalism), A Sand County Almanac
is also remarkable as literature. Among the book's strong literary
qualities are its regionalism and sense of place. Aldo Leopold was by
birth, outlook, and ultimate residence a Midwesterner: in style and
substance, A sand County Almanac addresses the pastoral identity of his
home region--the Midwest as America's agrarian heartland--with the aim

of reforming the human-nature relationship there and elsewhere.

105

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The man who would become a major figure in twentieth-century
conservation was born and raised in Burlington, Iowa, on the Mississippi
River.3 Like Mark Twain before him, many of Leopold's first significant
experiences of nature occurred near the greatest American river, the
heartland stream memorialized by T.S. Eliot as “a strong brown god.“4
Leopold's father, a prominent Burlington businessman, instructed Aldo
and his brothers in outdoorsmanship on hunting trips to the Illinois
side of the river. In admonishing Aldo to shoot partridges in flight
and never from trees, for example, Carl Leopold inculcated a basic
conservationism in his son; Leopold would one day write that “to forego
a sure shot in the tree in favor of a hopeless one at the fleeing bird
was my first exercise in ethical codes.“ In his essay “Red Legs
Kicking,“ Leopold remembers the shooting of his first partridge not as
an exploit to boast about, but as a moment when he intensely appreciated
the integrity and beauty of a wild place. “I could draw a map today,“
Leopold writes, “of each clump of red bunchberry and each blue aster
that adorned the mossy spot where he lay, my first partridge on the
wing. I suspect my present affection for bunchberries and asters dates
from that moment.“5
But as Leopold famously observed, “One of the penalties of an

ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.“6
While he was at college, “progress“ consumed that little remnant of
wildness in the agrarian Midwest, prompting Leopold to entertain his
“first doubt about man in the role of conqueror“:

I came home one Christmas to find that land promoters, with the

help of the Corps of Engineers, had dyked and drained my boyhood

hunting grounds on the Mississippi River bottoms. The job was so

complete that I could not even trace the outlines of my beloved
lakes and sloughs under their new blanket of cornstalks.

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107
The conversion of this marsh to cropland was for Leopold a formative
experience; his shock and “sense of loss“ were such that he did not
write about his former hunting grounds until late in his life: “my old
lake had been under corn for forty years before I wrote “Red Legs
Kicking."7 Speaking of children's first experiences of nature and
significant place, Paul Shepard argues that “territory and the sacred
places within it orient the individual to topography, position him in

the land and in the cosmos, an environmental gestalt of figure and

ground.“8 By extension, the desecration of a child's sacred ground is a

source of spiritual trauma, as we will see in the case of Ohio poet
James Wright. Aldo Leopold turned his sorrow to commitment, continuing
his ecological education so as to help heal this “world of wounds“ as a
“doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself
well and does not want to be told otherwise.“9

As was the experience of the young Ernest Hemingway of Oak Park,
Illinois, Leopold's well-to-do family travelled by boat and rail each
summer to a resort community in northern Michigan; Leopold's first
experience of near-wilderness occurred at Marquette Island in the Les
Cheneaux group in northern Lake Huron. Like Hemingway at Walloon Lake,
Leopold was more interested in fishing, boating, and hunting than in
social diversions available among the “summer people.“ He explored
Marquette Island intensely, drawing detailed maps of the well-forested
terrain and continuing his special interest in ornithology. According
to Leopold's biographer Curt Meine, Leopold's father maintained strict
conservation rules while on vacation, seeing to it that “Aldo never kept
a bass under a pound-and-a-half, nor a pike under three pounds.“

Northern Michigan was, as Meine describes it, “a land rich in the raw

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conservation principles beyond the Forest Service mandate for timber
management. In his fifteen years as a forest supervisor in Arizona and
New Mexico, Leopold focused on issues relating to game protection,

including the need for hunting laws and habitat preservation. His

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109

Director of the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin removed
Leopold from field work for four years. But he had returned to the
Midwest, his home and the regional focus of his work during the last
twenty-four years of his life.

Leopold's first major project after leaving the Forest Service was
a game survey of eight midwestern states, sponsored by the Sporting Arms
and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute. Between 1928 and 1931, he
travelled extensively to gather data relating to hunting laws and prac-
tices, habitat, and animal populations in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa,
Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan; this information went
into his Report on a Game Survey of the Nbrth Central States (1931).
“Affection born of nativity,“ Leopold writes in the Report, ‘is probably
in part responsible for my conviction that no region in the world was
originally more richly endowed with game than this one [the American
Midwest]. . . .“12 But decades of intensive commercial farming had
decimated game populations by destroying their habitat, necessitating a
new understanding between government, land owners, and the public.
Laws, certainly, were needed to.regulate hunting and other uses of land,
but the success of game management rested with private landowners,
particularly farmers. Leopold wrote his second book with that insight
in mind; Game Management (1933) provided landowners, professionals, and
bureaucrats alike with sound techniques for correcting the adverse
conditions he had observed during the Midwestern survey. These two
publications became essential to conservation research and public policy
at mid-century, earning Leopold the title of “father of game manage-
ment.“

Leopold's appointment in 1933 as Professor in a new Department of

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influence, he bought eighty acres of land on the Wisconsin River in the
sand country of central Wisconsin, a place where he and his family-—wife
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and put game management theory to work in the field. Through each of

these endeavors Leopold sought to reconcile democratic individualism

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environmental thought spent significant portions of their lives in the
area: frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner and preservationist
John Muir spent their boyhoods not far from the abandoned farm Leopold
bought in 1935. In an essay on environmental traditions in Wisconsin,
environmental historian William Cronon writes that all three men "found
their environmental compass, their most intimate sense of place, in a
small area within fifteen miles of [the town of] Portage, in the sandy,

low-lying country near where the headwaters of the Fox River converge

with the Wisconsin River.'15 Turner, who was briefly Leopold's neighbor

‘and acquaintance in Madison, grew up in Portage and studied at the
University of Wisconsin; his famous “frontier thesis“ originated with
research into land—tenure patterns around his home town. Muir, who is
most famous for his writings about the Sierra Nevada of California and
his fight for wilderness protection in the West, came to the Wisconsin
sand country with his family from Scotland in 1849. Muir experienced
the Midwestern wilderness first hand, helping to turn a rugged forest
into productive farm land. Whereas Turner celebrated the pioneer period
for its supposed democratizing effect, Muir loved the Wisconsin land-
scape for its own sake, writing his memoir The Story of My Boyhood and
Ybuth (1912) as a transcendentalist celebration of the wild nature he
believed to be literally sacred, revelatory of God's splendor. The sand
country, as Muir's account implies, was never cut out for intensive
farming. Overproduction of wheat, excessive grazing, clear cut lumber—
ing, and marsh drainage caused erosion, peat fires, and the creation of

inland sand dunes. As environmental historian Susan Flader relates, the

land Aldo Leopold bought in 1935 was hardly a mid-American Arcadia:

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. less than half the land in any of the sand counties was in
farms, and of that very little was actively cultivated. The rest
was considered wasteland--weeds, brush, runty jack pine, scrub oak,
and raw peat sprouting dense thickets of seemingly worthless aspen.

Much of the land had reverted to the counties for nonpayment of real

estate and drainage taxes. There it reposed, for few would think
of buying it.16

Leopold, in fact, selected his farm I'for its lack of goodness and its
lack of highway; indeed my whole neighborhood lies in a backwash of the
River Progress."l7 Seeing the place as a living laboratory for applied
ecology, Leopold set to healing the wounds inflicted on the land by a
long history of abuse. In the terminology of contemporary bioregional-
ism, he "reinhabited' the country of Turner and Muir, finding that
country "may be rich despite a conspicuous poverty of physical endow-
ment, and its quality may not be apparent at first glance, nor at all
times."18

For the rest of his life Leopold spent every weekend and moment he
could spare at the farm, staying in the converted chicken coop
affectionately known as the 'Shack.‘ He and his family planted native
trees and other vegetation, provided cover for wildlife, and kept a
detailed record of their work and observations. By this time, Leopold
was a convert from utilitarian, Pinchot-style conservation; he now
embraced a holistic, ecological view of land management that considered
the welfare not only of game animals, but of all creatures, including
predators, within the context of the entire “land community.“ He was
still an avid hunter, but the chase had become just one of many possible
outdoor activities. His motivation in owning and improving the land
went beyond diversion, research, or environmental restoration-~the
larger purpose was educational. Leopold meant to present his Sand

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wrote narrative pieces about life at the shack for publications such as
Wisconsin Agriculturalist and Farmer and Aububon. By 1941, Leopold was
envisioning a book of collected essays balancing narrative description
of what is in nature and current land use with ecological exhortation-—a
prescription of what ought to be the norm in human-nature relations. Up
until his death in 1948 (caused by a heart attack suffered while
fighting a brush fire at the Shack), Leopold worked on the manuscript
that his family and friends would edit and posthumously publish as A
Sand County Almanac.

A Sand County Almanac is arranged into three parts (the most
popular recent edition adds a fourth section of essays). Part I, the
“Almanac" itself, reflects the influence of Thoreau's walden in
representing the passage of a full year's cycle, January to December, at
Leopold's "week-end refuge from too much modernity: 'the shack."19
Part II is concerned with 'The Quality of Landscape“ not only in the
Midwest, but across North America, as Leopold recounts episodes in his
life that taught him vital lessons in conservation. The Part III of
recent paperback editions collects essays from Round River (1953), the
second posthumous Leopold volume, on educational issues of nature and
outdoor recreation. Part IV (originally Part III) is titled 'The
Upshot' for its directly philosophical arguments concerning a 'Conser-
vation Esthetic,‘ 'Wilderness,‘ and most importantly, “The Land Ethic.“
This arrangement works to acquaint us with a man through his life and
works before explicitly seeking to convert us to his way of thinking.

By moving from the local to the universal, from natural history through
memoir to ecological theory, the structure of Leopold's book creates, as

John Tallmadge comments, 'a climate of belief that will make us recep-

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culture has gradually expanded its definition of "community" by extend-
ing its range of ethical consideration. Having evolved from tribal
obligations to a general humanitarianism, society now needs to include
nature itself in its ethical constructs. “The land ethic,“ Leopold
writes, ”simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include

soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land." It

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“simple rhetorical figures” and "turns of phrase” to achieve what John
Tallmadge calls the "memorable succinctness'24 of his prose. Figurative
language is especially important in A Sand County Almanac, including the
recurring metaphor of landscape as language and literature, as a book
from which nature-literate people can read lessons in ecology, ethics,
and aesthetics.25 “Every farm woodland,‘I Leopold declares, “in addition
to yielding lumber, fuel, and posts, should provide its owner a liberal
education."26 Thus, “every farm is a textbook on animal ecology,"27 and
I'he who owns a veteran bur oak owns more than a tree. He owns a histor-
ical library. . . .‘28 This is the premise of “Good Oak,“ the essay for
February in which Leopold tells of sawing down an old oak tree that had
been killed by lightning. Leopold introduces an environmental history
of Wisconsin by imagining his saw "biting its way, stroke by stroke,
decade by decade, into the chronology of a lifetime, written in
concentric annual rings of good oak.” After 'a dozen pulls of the saw
to transect the few years of our ownership, during which we have learned
to love and cherish this farm,“ Leopold cuts into 'the reign of the
bootlegger"29 who wasted the soil and burned the farmhouse; he then
continues to saw progressively back into history. Some of the stories he
reads in the wood grain are encouraging, such as John Muir's attempt to
establish a wildflower sanctuary just thirty miles from Leopold's farm:
~ '1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birthyear of mercy for
things natural, wild, and free.'30 Most of the history, however, is a
continuum of environmental neglect and abuse, a chronology of years such
as 1899, when 'the last passenger pigeon collided with a charge of shot
near Babcock, two counties to the north. . . .'31 Leopold concludes the

essay by comparing the saw with the wedge and the axe as tools for

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splitting wood and as “an allegory for historians."32 These homely
metaphors are also likely to appeal to people, such as farmers, who may
be better convinced of an ecological argument if it is phrased in collo-
quial, commonsensical language. By speaking the vernacular of rural
Wisconsin, Leopold creates for himself a persona, described by James I.
McClintock as 'a twentieth century variant of the mythic American yeoman
farmer, the traditional repository of Jeffersonian virtue and homespun
wisdom."33 Leopold's rhetoric is in this regard distinctly Midwestern.

Comments made by Donald Worster, dean of environmental historians,
about Leopold's metaphorical language should be considered in light of
Leopold's regionalism. Worster describes Leopold's interchanging use of
the terms “mechanism“ and 'organism' to represent land ecology as a
”vacillation between root metaphors . . . consistently identified with
fundamentally antithetical world views.'34 Worster's point is well
taken, particularly since the terms occur even within single paragraphs,
as in a section of the essay 'Round River“ concluding with a mechanical
metaphor: “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of
intelligent tinkering.'35 Though Leopold made relatively few such
comparisons of land to mechanical structures (there are none at all in
the ”Almanac” section, where the ”community“ paradigm dominates),
Worster concludes that Leopold's land ethic was 'in many ways . . .
merely a more enlightened, long-range prudence: a surer means to an
infinite expansion of material wealth. . . .' This overstates the case,
as does WOrster's claim that by Leopold's use of ‘agronomic terms . . .
the entire earth became a crop to be harvested, though not one wholly

planted or cultivated by man."36 Leopold applied the word "harvest'l to

the cultural, rather than economic, rewards of prudent land management;

     
   
   
   

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he strenuously objected to those in his own field, forestry, who are
“quite content to grow trees like cabbages, with cellulose as the basic
forest commodity.“ Such specialists feel “no inhibition against
violence; [their] ideology is agronomic."37 Leopold's 'ideology,‘ as it
were, was pastoral, not agronomic, as Worster has it. A major cause of
environmental distress in the Midwest was and is the kind of agriculture

Leopold called “clean farming," which “means a food chain aimed solely

 

at economic profit and purged of all non-conforming links," including
native flora and fauna. Leopold abjured this 'Pax Germanica of the

_agricultural world,“ a bleak monoculture that he would replace with a

 

simultaneously ecological and democratic diversity: “a food chain aimed
to harmonize the wild and the tame in the joint interest of stability,
productivity, and beauty."38 .Animals, plants, and humans would all be
able to “make a living“ in an economy of nature so constituted. But to
initiate such a profound social change Leopold first needed to fit his
style to his intended audience, the people whom he wished to convert
from a utilitarian to an ecological perspective on land. Herein lies
the subversive nature of Leopold's ethic and rhetoric: he communicated a
deeply radical proposition--that nature has rights--by coopting the
archetypes and idiomatic language of his native region. Leopold's
personas as yeoman farmer, "intelligent tinkerer,’ doctor to the land
organism, or landlord to plant and animal tenants derive from typically
Midwestern speech and cultural norms. That A Sand County Almanac is
revered by state game officers, farmers, and high school biology
teachers as well as conservation professionals in government and
academia is testimony to Leopold's success in articulating values that

must operate locally if wider social objectives are to be achieved.

118
Leopold accepted the fact that Midwestern landscapes would be
cultivated and intensely managed; he desired, however, a stewardship
that would work with rather than against ecology, that would allow for
enclaves of wild nature. He observed that many such places had survived

to remind observers of ecosystems that were once intact and could be

 

again. Driving through Illinois, for example, he saw that in "the
narrow thread of sod between the shaved banks and the toppling fences
grow the relics of what was once Illinois: the prairie."39 As have many
other Midwestern writers (including Willa Cather and James Wright),
Leopold also noticed that cemeteries in the Midwest often harbor native n~
species of plants that have been extirpated elsewhere. "Every July,"
Leopold writes in "Prairie Birthday," "I watch eagerly a certain country
graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm":
It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and
in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pinpoint
remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established
in the 1840's. Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower, the yard-
square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-
high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with
saucer—sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sole
remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole
remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of
Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo
is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even
asked.40
The flowers, described as "man-high" to emphasize their citizenship in
the land community, are beautiful to Leopold for their own sake and
because they constitute an important page in the history book of nature,
a page that tells of the great herds of bison that once roamed freely
across the plains. Because Silphium is a long-lived plant, the specimen

in the cemetery may have been a hundred years old; it may have "watched

the fugitive Black Hawk retreat from the Madison lakes to the Wisconsin

 

 

 

119
River. . . . Certainly it saw the successive funerals of the local
pioneers as they retired, one by one, to their repose beneath the blue-
stem."41 But the cultural significance of this plant is lost on most
people. When Leopold returned in August, he was angered and hurt to
find that a road crew had removed the fence and cut the Silphium. This

desecration of a sacred place was more offensive for being part of an

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ethically and aesthetically bankrupt system of land management. Leopold
emphasizes the spiritual as well as ecological dimensions of the loss by

considering the nominal steward of the graveyard's doubly consecrated

 

ground: "If I were to tell a preacher of the adjoining church that the
road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the
guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncomprehending. How
could a weed be a book?'42
Such commodification and abuse of landscape results in part from

an inadequate sense of the beautiful in nature. J. Baird Callicott
describes in his essay on "The Land Aesthetic" how the "prevailing
natural aesthetic . . . is not autonomous but derivative from art,‘I
particularly from eighteenth century notions of the "picturesque," those
perspectives of nature that suggest pictures or paintings. The way most
people look at nature is

conventionalized, not well informed by the ecological and evolution—

ary revolutions in natural history; and it is sensational and self-

referential, not genuinely oriented to nature on nature's own terms.

In a word, it is trivial.
We appreciate picturesque countryside and sublime mountain landscapes
because our culture conditions us to value such views; our national park

system, for example, originated as a means to preserve places that had

been recognized as classically picturesque or romantically sublime--

 

120

Yosemite, Yellowstone, and so forth. Few have loved the grand American

wilderness as much as Aldo Leopold, or worked so hard for its preser-

vation. But Leopold saw that ignorance of history and ecology had led

to the aesthetic undervaluation and subsequent abuse of less obviously
"beautiful" places as the sand country of Wisconsin. To counteract this
harmful tendency in American culture, Leopold proposed an evolutionary

land aesthetic, parallel and complementary to his land ethic. Leopold's

aesthetic, as Callicott notes, strives to extend human perception of
nature beyond the visual to include the other four senses and, most
importantly, "the mind, the faculty of cognition."43 To this effect

Leopold suggests that the "ability to perceive quality in nature begins,

as in art with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the

beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language."44 Valuing nature

for its ecological and evolutionary integrity enables one to "see

America as history, to conceive of destiny as a becoming, to smell a

hickory tree through the still lapse of ages. . . ."45

Such an ability to see into nature is especially important in a
region like the American Midwest, where landscapes are often apparently
prosaic. In his essay on "Country," as in "Prairie Birthday," Leopold
invokes the memory of the American bison in respect to prevailing

perceptions of Midwestern landscapes:

The taste for country displays the same diversity in aesthetic
competence among individuals as the taste for opera, or oils. There
are those who are willing to be herded in droves through "scenic"
places; who find mountains grand if they be proper mountains with
waterfalls, cliffs, and lakes. To such the Kansas plains are
tedious. They see the endless corn, but not the heave and the grunt
of ox teams breaking the prairie. History, for them, grows on
campuses. They look at the low horizon, but they cannot see it, as
de Vaca did, under the bellies of the buffalo.

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buffalo," through long study and observation of his sand country farm,
where he learned that in "country, as in people, a plain exterior often
conceals hidden riches, to perceive which requires much living in and
with."46 Among the most lyrical passages of the "Almanac" are descrip-
tions of particular places that Leopold came to know intimately, such as
a "streambank where hillside briars adjoin dank beds of frozen ferns and
jewelweeds on the boggy bottom,"47 and the fork of a river, "narrow;
deep, and fed by cold springs that gurgled out under its close-hemmed
walls of alder."48 These typically Midwestern places offer hidden
riches of subtle beauty to the sensitive and discerning observer. A

deeper-than-visual curiosity is required to apprehend their signifi-

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There are woods that are plain to look at, but not to look into.
Nothing is plainer than a cornbelt woodlot; yet if it be August, a

crushed pennyroyal, or an over-ripe mayapple, tells you here is a
place.49

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122
right, join some organizations, and practice what conservation is
profitable on your own land"51; it must build "an ethical underpinning
for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land
mechanism."52 Leopold admitted an important role for government in
conservation, but he felt that too many people wrongly delegate their
responsibility for nature to bureaus and agencies. In the Midwest,
where relatively little land is in the public domain, commitment on the
part of private landowners and amateur naturalists is essential to a
successful "revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude
toward land."53 Among Leopold's heroes in this revolt were farmers he
knew who reintroduced native tamarack trees on their land, "an
industrial chemist who spends his spare time reconstructing the history
of the passenger pigeon,"54 and an Ohio housewife whose study of the
common sparrow was recognized by professional ornithologists as a major
contribution to their field. Such commitment to nature, in Leopold's
view, needs to be included in biology curriculum, which typically
emphasizes laboratory work like dissection at the expense of field work
that will teach students to see their "native countryside with apprecia-
tion and intelligence. . . ." Like Leopold's students at the University
of Wisconsin, a college student in a class so designed could expect an
examination such as the following, presumably tailored to fit his or her

own state of residence:

We are driving down a country road in northern Missouri. Here is a
farmstead. Look at the trees in the yard and the soil in the field
and tell us whether the original settler carved his farm out of
prairie or woods. Did he eat prairie chicken or wild turkey for his
Thanksgiving? What plants grew here originally which do not grow
here now? Why did they disappear? What did the prairie plants have
to do with creating the corn-yielding capacity of this soil? Why
does this soil erode now but not then?55

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Leopold asks, in effect, that we "read the land" for lessons in human
history and the intrinsic order and beauty, or "poetry," of nature.
This kind of learning will in Leopold's view help us overcome "the most
serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic . . . the fact
that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather
than toward, an intense consciousness of land."56
Leopold harbored no illusions about the enormity of this task,

which in the Midwest required no less than a reform of middle class,
middle brow values--such as novelist Sinclair Lewis of Minnesota embod-
'ied in a man named Babbitt, in the eponymous satire to which Leopold
frequently alludes. In valuing wealth and social prestige above all
else, Babbitt represents one polarity in the Midwestern mind; the other
is the yeoman farmer, personified by Leopold as an ecologist, hunter, or
weekend bird-watcher. Since Babbitt prioritizes wealth, Leopold would
transform our conception of wealth to include the intrinsic value of
nature. To this end he occasionally resorts to humorously economic
language:

If you are thriftily inclined, you will find pines congenial

company, for unlike the hand-to-mouth hardwoods, they never pay

current bills out of current earnings; they live solely on their

savings of the year before.57
Since Babbitt values his good reputation almost as much as wealth, we
must also redefine civic virtue to include responsibility to the entire
land community; there must be "social stigma in the possession of a
gullied farm, a wrecked forest, or a polluted stream. . . ."58 As
Leopold wrote in the concluding paragraph of Game Management:

. . . twenty centuries of "progress" have brought the average

citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a

high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high
density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a

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conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true
test of whether he is civilized.59

The universally applicable message about land stewardship
expressed in A Sand County Almanac has a special resonance in the
American Midwest because of Aldo Leopold's long and profound association
with the region. His special genius was in finding common ground for
apparently irreconcilable perspectives--materialism and idealism,
science and spirituality, domestication and wildness. Between these
dualities lies the mythic pastoral middlescape, "a state of harmony
between men and land"60 for which Midwestern writers have long yearned.
"In these higher aspirations," Leopold insisted, "the important thing is
not to achieve, but to strive."61 This typically Midwestern pragmatism
inspired Leopold in his lifelong work as a conservationist, an occupa-
tion he defined as "one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is
writing his signature on the face of the land."62 With axe and shovel,
Leopold wrote a bright new chapter in the often sad history of a remote
Wisconsin county; with his expressive pen he wrote a book that makes
that place a microcosm for a world in need of love and respect. His
example is instructive for people in all places who seek to be better

citizens of the earth's diversely beautiful land communities.

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Notes

 

1J. Baird Callicott, "Introduction," ed. J. Baird Callicott,
Companion to A Sand County Almanac: Interpretive & Critical Essays

(hereafter Companion). (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,
1987), 3-4.

2Aldo Leopold, "The Land Ethic," A Sand County Almanac With Essays
0n Conservation From Round River (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970),

238. I cite this standard paperback edition of the book because it is
the most universally available.

3Leopold's biography is Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and
work (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). Callicott's
Companion makes a useful supplement, as does Susan Flader, Thinking like
a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the EVolution of an Ecological Attitude

Toward Deer, wolves and Forests (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri
Press, 1974).

4T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages" from "Four Quartets," The

Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1963), 191.

SLeopold, "Red Legs Kicking," A Sand County Almanac, 129.
6Leopold, "The Round River," A Sand County Almanac, 197.

7Leopold, "Foreword" to 1947 manuscript entitled Great
Possessions, Companion, 282-283.

8Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the
Esthetics of Nature (New York: Knopf, 1967), 37.

9Leopold, "The Round River," A Sand County Almanac, 197.

loMeine, Aldo Leopold, 23-24.

11Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (New York:
Doubleday, Page, 1910) cited in Donald Worster, American Environment-
alism: The Formative Period, 1860-1915 (New York: Wiley, 1973), 85.

12Aldo Leopold, Report on a Game Survey of the North Central
States (Madison, WI: Democrat Printing Company, for the Sporting Arms
and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute, 1931), 15.

13Leopold had mixed feelings about federal conservation efforts,
including New Deal era programs under "Alphabet" agencies like the
C.C.C. (Civilian Conservation Corps), for which Leopold briefly worked
as a supervisor. While well-intentioned and often productive, these
governmental efforts to plant forests and alleviate soil erosion did not
address the cultural causes of land abuse, which lay with private
organizations and individuals. "It is easy," Leopold wrote, "to

125

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side—step the issue of getting lumbermen to practice forestry, or the
farmer to crop game or conserve soil, and to pass these functions to
government. But it won't work. I assert this, not as a political
opinion, but as a geographical fact. The basic problem is to induce the
private landowner to conserve on his own land, and no conceivable
millions or billions for public land purchase can alter that fact"
(Leopold, cited by Meine, Aldo Leopold, 320-321). Leopold supported
public conservation initiatives, but chose to work with regional, state,
and local institutions to promote the deeper changes he hoped would
occur in how society views and uses the land.

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14Meine, Aldo Leopold, 352.

15William Cronon, "Landscape and Home: Environmental Traditions in
Wisconsin," Wisconsin Magazine of History 74, no. 2 (Winter 1990-1991):
93.

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l6Susan Flader, "Aldo Leopold's Sand Country," Companion, 49.
17Leopold, "Prairie Birthday," A Sand County Almanac, 50.
18Leopold, "Country," A Sand County Almanac, 177.

19Leopold, "Foreword to Sand County Almanac," A Sand County
Almanac, xviii.

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23Leopold, "The Land Ethic," A Sand County Almanac, 262.
24Tallmadge, "Anatomy," Companion, 116.

25Tallmadge discusses this metaphor at length, drawing a parallel
between the "book of nature" and the "cultural harvest" of Leopold's
land aesthetic. Certain figures of speech, such as Leopold's reference
to "the olfactory poems" written by animals ("Great Possessions" 46),
thus evoke the "literary" quality of landscape. More explicitly
illustrative of the land aesthetic are related metaphors of nature as
art or artist: "I know a painting . . . it is a river who wields the
brush" ("The Green Pasture," 54); as music or musician: "The wind that
makes music in November corn is in a hurry" ("If I Were the Wind," 70);
and as dance or choreographer: "The drama of the [woodcock] sky dance is
enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for
entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in
theatres" ("Sky Dance," 36). Since "literature" has arguments to make
about ecology, history, and ethics, Leopold's "book of nature" metaphor
also illustrates his land ethic.

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26Leopold, "A Mighty Fortress," A Sand County Almanac, 77-78.
27Leopold, "Home Range," A Sand County Almanac, 86.
28Leopold, "Bur Oak," A Sand County Almanac, 32.

29Leopold, "Good Oak," A Sand County Almanac, 10.

 

127

'ifil

 

3°Ibid., 17.
3lIbid., 13.
32Ibid., 17.

33James I. McClintock, Nature's Kindred Spirits: Aldo Leopold,
Joseph Naod Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary snyder
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming).

34Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: The Roots of Ecology (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 290.

35Leopold, "The Round River," A Sand County Almanac, 190.
36Worster, Nature's Economy, 289.
37Leopold, "The Land Ethic," A Sand County Almanac, 259.

38Leopold, "The Round River," A Sand County Almanac, 199. My case
for the regional nature of Leopold's metaphorical language is further
supported by the first and central image of "The Round River," derived
from the Midwestern folklore of giant lumberman Paul Bunyan. The Round
River, according to Leopold, was one "of the marvels of early Wisconsin
. . . a river that flowed into itself, and thus sped around and around
in a never-ending circuit" (Leopold, "The Round River," A Sand County
Almanac, 188). Leopold uses this image to illustrate the cyclicality of
all ecosystems. Since Paul Bunyan represents the aggressive, conquering
attitude toward nature which led to the deforestation of Wisconsin and
other Upper Midwestern states with pine forests, Leopold's archetypal
cooptation of this familiar folk hero is a particularly deft expository
strategy.

39Leopold, "Illinois Bus Ride," A Sand County Almanac, 125.

4OLeopold, "Prairie Birthday," A Sand County Almanac, 48-49.
41Ibid., 53.

42Ibid., 50.

43J. Baird Callicott, "The Land Aesthetic," Companion, 160.

44Leopold, "Marshland Elegy," A Sand County Almanac, 102.

4SLeopold, "On a Monument to the Pigeon," A Sand County Almanac,
119.

45Leopold, "Country," A Sand County Almanac," 178-180.
47Leopold, "Red Lanterns," A Sand C0unty Almanac, 67.

48Leopold, "The Alder Fork--A Fishing Idyl," A Sand County
Almanac, 40.

49Leopold, "Country," A Sand County Almanac, 178.

50Leopold, "Foreword to Sand County Almanac," A Sand County
Almanac, xix.

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423.

51Leopold, "The Land Ethic," A Sand County Almanac, 143-144.

52Leopold, "The Round River," A Sand County Almanac, 202.
S3Leopold, "Natural History," A Sand County Almanac, 202.
54Ibid., 204.

55Ibid., 208.

56Leopold, "The Land Ethic," A Sand County Almanac, 261.
57Leopold, "Pines Above the Snow," A Sand County Almanac, 88.
58Leopold, "The Round River," A Sand County Almanac, 202.

59Aldo Leopold, Game Management (New York: Scribner's, 1933), 422—

6oLeopold, "The Land Ethic," A Sand County Almanac, 243.
61Leopold, "Natural History," A Sand County Almanac, 210.

62Leopold, "Axe-in-Hand," A Sand County Almanac, 73.

 

 

Chapter 5
The Jaded Pastoralism.of Janus wright
. . one day the demons of America must be placated,
the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of Place
atoned for. Then the true passionate love for
American soil will appear. As yet, there is too much

menace in the landscape.

D.H. Lawrence
Studies in Classic American Literature

Pity so old and alone, it is not alone, yours, or
mine,
The pity of rivers and children, the pity of brothers,
the pity
Of our country, which is our lives.
James Wright
"Many of Our Waters:
Variations on a Poem by a Black Child"
Among Midwestern poets most attuned to the region's landscape was
James Wright (1927-1980), whom critic Bonnie Costello describes as an
"elegiac poet of place."1 Born and raised in the industrial city of
Martins Ferry, Ohio, across the Ohio River from West Virginia, Wright
was a self—described "jaded pastoralist"2 who saw the earth from the
perspective of his native Ohio Valley as "rifted paradise"3--a beautiful
place significantly degraded by human inhabitation and industry.
Central to Wright's poetry is a struggle between contrary views of the
humanized landscape, the human body, and the efficacy of poetry in
making sense of an apparently fallen world. Some of Wright's poems are

set in a pastoral paradise, like the "field of sunlight" in the poem

"Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,"

129

 

130
where even the "droppings of last year's horses / Blaze up into golden
stones."4 At such moments Wright is apt to feel as he does in conclud—
ing the poem "Northern Pike": "There must be something very beautiful in
my body, / I am so happy."5 More typically however, Wright speaks of a
"loneliness of body,"6 of "the rotting slit of my body,"7 analogous to
the corruption of Ohio and its dying river. He despairs then of him-
self, of nature, and of the significance of his work as a poet. A set
of lines from the poem "Many of Our Waters: Variations on a Poem by a
Black Child" encapsulates Wright's connection of landscape, body, and
poetry. They are spoken to the polluted Ohio River, one of Wright's

major images and settings:

 

Oh my back-broken beloved Ohio.

I, too, was beautiful, once,

Just like you.

We were both still a little

Young, then.

Now, all I am is a poet,

Just like you.8
Wright is of a divided mind about Ohio, the Midwest, and America as a
whole; his native country is by turns a garden and a graveyard. Torn
between celebration and bereavement, Wright alternately wishes to
embrace and escape place, person, and poetry, the sources of his joy and
grief.

Wright was fond of D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American
Literature, particularly the chapter on "The Spirit of Place," which he
considered to be "a very beautiful essay":

There is such a genius of place, a presence, and because there is,
people's feelings accumulate about it. You can share in that
feeling when you become aware of particular historical events and

the significance of monuments and so on.9

Monuments do in fact figure significantly in Wright's poetry, especially

131

graves of notable (or notorious) people. A signature piece in Wright's
collected poems is "At the Executed Murderer's Grave," which deals with
George Doty, whom the State of Ohio executed for the rape and murder of
a girl. Critics, including Jane Robinett, generally regard the poem "as
a turning point in the development of this poet's career, the point at
which he breaks away from his apprenticeship and begins his real
work."10 Forsaking the abstraction and complicated syntax of his early
poems, Wright specifically identifies himself in relation to place:

My name is James A. Wright, and I was born

Twenty-five miles from this infected grave

In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave

To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father.

He tried to teach me kindness. I return

Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried,

To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,

Had I not run away before my time.

Ohio caught George Doty. Clean as lime,

His skull rots empty here.
The setting of this poem in a graveyard in familiar territory recalls
not only Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, but Theodore
Roethke's breakthrough poem "The Lost Son," which enacts a spiritual
crisis in a Michigan cemetery.11 While Roethke's sustained emotion was
grief, Wright is concerned with guilt—-the obvious criminal guilt of
Doty, an "idiot" who "demanded love from girls, / And murdered one," as
well as the guilt Wright purports to share with Doty by virtue of their
common humanity in a fallen and corrupt world. Admitting to his own
"sneaking crimes," Wright insists on the universality of evil; in his
view, Doty's actions constituted an extreme manifestation of the malice
and destructiveness latent in all people:

Staring politely, they will not mark my face

From any murderer's, buried in this place.
Why should they? We are nothing but a man.

 

132
Wright's sense of guilt in this poem is mythic rather than
historical; Doty's grave is to be found in the "rifted paradise" of Eden
after the fall. Wright's comments about Edenic imagery in his first
book, The Green wall, also apply to "At the Executed Murderer's Grave":
I tried to begin with the fall of man, and acknowledge that the
fall of man was a good thing, the felix culpa, the happy guilt.
And then I tried to weave my way in and out through nature poems
and people suffering in nature because they were conscious.
Wright's biographer Peter Stitt has noted the contradiction in this
statement, wondering "just how 'happy' was the fall of man in Wright's
view if he also was convinced that it caused such a wealth of conscious
'suffering.'"12 Since the poet feels himself tainted by sin and guilt,
there is little hope for redemption; Wright characterizes poetry as
mercenary and therefore psychically and socially ineffectual:
I croon my tears at fifty cents per line.
Alive and dead, those giggling muckers who
Saddled my nightmares thirty years ago
Can do without my widely printed sighing
Over their pains with paid sincerity.
Wright vows in this poem to change his approaches to life and to poetry.
If his writing was once a "loud display, / Leaning for language on a
dead man's voice" (presumably E.A. Robinson, whom Wright had considered
his model) he is now "sick of lies" and ready "to face the past" with
honesty and clear language. His materials--the broken people and abused
landscape of Ohio--require direct, not oblique, treatment. Traditional
literary pastoralism will not suffice:
It does no good to woo the grass, to veil
The quicklime hole of a man's defeat and shame.
Nature-lovers are dead. To hell with them.

I kick the clods away, and speak my name.

It is of course by speaking his name, and the name of his place, that

 

133
Wright began the poem. Nature here offers no refuge from guilt or fear,
but by confronting these emotions the poet has made other responses to
his environment possible. "At the Executed Murderer's Grave" serves as
a bridge between Wright's early and later work: it rhymes and is metri-
cal, but irregularly so; it occasionally lapses into archly literary
language ("Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!), but hews closely
to specifics of place and person.

Had he dwelled entirely on the country of his origin, Wright's
collected work would be extremely bleak. Ohio is to Wright a place of
death, with the Ohio River serving as the River Styx. For him to see
beauty in that place, he needed to experience (and write about) other
landscapes. The first and most memorable of these locations was the
plains country of western Minnesota, which Wright explored at the
invitation of poet Robert Bly (b. 1926). The two poets met in 1958,
when Wright was teaching at the University of Minnesota. During this
crucial stage of his career, Wright was rejecting his previous poetic
models (including Robert Frost and E.A. Robinson) and struggling toward
a new style to match his thematic concern with character and landscape.
Wright's new style was showcased in The Branch Will Not Break (1963), a
book deeply influenced by Bly, who had published his own first book,
Silence in the Snowy Fields, the previous year. The two books are often
discussed in tandem, and rightly so, for Wright's stylistic and thematic
growth as a poet owed much to Bly's poetry, as well as to his criticism
and friendship. The subsequent course of Wright's poetry can be better
understood by examining Bly's ideas about poetry and the treatment of
landscape in his first book.

Robert Bly, who was born and still lives in western Minnesota, has

 

134
profoundly influenced contemporary poetry, both as poet and critic.
Like Ezra Pound in an earlier literary generation, he has been an
arbiter of taste, a champion of the new and experimental, and through
his translations of European and South American poets like Rilke, Trakl,
Neruda, and Vallejo, an advocate of internationalism in literature. For
many years Bly edited a magazine called The Fifties (later, The Sixties
and The Seventies) that promoted what he considered the best in contem-
porary poetry and poetic principles. In his influential essay "A Wrong
Turning in American Poetry" (1963), Bly illustrates his principles by
contrasting twentieth century American poets with their Spanish and
German counterparts. Beginning with T.S. Eliot's notion of an "object-
ive correlative" in poetry (defined by Eliot as "a chain of events which
shall be the formula of that particular emotion"),l3 Bly argues that
Eliot and the other modernists "have more trust in the objective, outer
world than in the inner world. As poets they want to concern themselves
with objects."14 Bly inveighs against any such formulaic or objectivist
notion of poetry, including William Carlos Williams' dictum of "No ideas
but in things" and Ezra Pound's belief that "the proper and perfect sym-
bol is the natural object."15 These prescriptions for poetry, according
to Bly, derive from the American "puritan fear of the unconscious and
the business drive toward dealing with outward things" which "meet in
our poetry to push out the unconscious."16 By following modernist and
"New Critical" precepts, American poetry of the 1940's and '50's became
in Bly's view "a poetry without spiritual life . . . in which the poem
is considered to be a construction independent of the poet,"17 a dryly
formalist verse either cluttered by objects or lost in flights of

abstraction. Bly prefers the inwardness of Garcia Lorca, Neruda, and

 

135
Rilke, for whom a "poem is something that penetrates for instant into
the unconscious."18 By means of vivid and associative imagery, these
poets aim (as in transcendentalism and Zen Buddhism) "to make men more
and more inward until they stop admiring objects, at which point they
will be able to see them clearly, if they wish to."19 Rilke and the
others, in Bly's opinion, should replace Eliot, Pound, and Williams as

primary models for American poets.

 

Bly's innovation was not confined to his absorption of interna—
tional influences. The colloquial diction and simple declarative

_sentences of Bly's Silence poems came as something of a shock in 1962,

"7

when formalist verse was just beginning to lose its dominance in Ameri-
can poetry. Typical readings of these poems focus on their use of both
mundane and "deep," surreal images to explore the unconscious mind and
its relationship to the physical world. Thus in "Laziness and Silence,"
Bly relates a "dream of moles with golden wings" which he experiences
one fall day ("a Saturday afternoon in the football season") while
sleeping near a lake. True to the dominant motion of the book, which is
downward, into darknesses of mind and earth, the poet awakens to
perceive the symbolic significance of the lake:

I know that far out in the Minnesota lake

Fish are nosing the mouths of cold springs,

Whose water causes ripples in the sleeping sand,

Like a spirit moving in a body.20
Whatever its private significance, the dream of moles has reminded the
speaker of nature's hidden life and consciousness. The epigraph for
Bly's book is a quote from German philosopher Jacob Boehme: "We are all

asleep in the outward man." It is by dreaming that the speaker of

"Laziness and Silence" has awakened to his inner man, and to the natural

 

136
landscape around him.

G.A.M. Janssens describes the cumulative effect of Bly's Silence
poems as emerging from "a sense of space, of wide, bleak landscapes
dotted with small midwestern towns, of the seasons, and of the time of
the day."21 The speaker of these poems is a version of the Romantic
archetype of a solitary figure in nature, a seeker of transcendental
truth. Though Bly occasionally expresses a sense of bleak foreboding
("A strange unrest hovers over the nation: / This is the last dance, the
wild tossing of Morgan's seas"22), his characteristic emotion is a
delight in nature reminiscent of Wordsworth, accompanied by an ease with
his body recalling Whitman's celebration of the "body electric." The
following lines are representative of the book's dominant tone:

Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever!

I am wrapped in my joyful flesh,

As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.

("Poem in Three Parts")

All morning I have felt the sense of death;

I am full of love, and love this torpid land.

("Driving Through Ohio")

How beautiful to walk out at midnight in the moonlight

Dreaming of animals.

("September Night With an Old Horse")23
The directness and sincerity of such sentiments bothered some critics
when Silence in the Snowy Fields first appeared. William Heyden, who
later changed his mind about the book, initially felt that Bly's "risks

. were all bad ones":

Where was his "heightened speech"? How, if to suggest something is

to destroy it, could he write lines such as "I have awakened at

Missoula, Montana, utterly happy" ("In a Train") and "There is a

privacy I love in this snowy night" ("Driving to Town Late to Mail

a Letter")? Didn't he know such bare statements were against the

rules?24

James Wright endured similar criticisms of his own more tranquil poems,

 

 

137
many of which he wrote while visiting Bly's farm in Minnesota. Bly
attributed such reactions to the insularity of many in the literary and
academic communities, "where the very process of studying poetry often
increases one's store of irony, ambiguity, wariness, and anger. . . ."
Like Whitman before them, Bly and Wright engaged in a Romantic rebellion
against poetic formalism, which in the early 1960's meant fighting

against "a kind of low level conspiracy to keep out of view the poems of

 

tenderness and quiet."25

For many poets of the period, including Bly and Wright, as well as

 

Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, and William Stafford, a revaluation of the
contemplative in poetry necessitated a strong sense of place, a return
to nature in order to explore human nature. As Bly once told an inter-
viewer, "unless American poetry can grow naturally out of American
ground, we may as well give up now and quit."26 Noting this statement
by Bly, Howard Nelson writes that Bly's early work "belongs among the
best regional writing this country has produced":

. . not regionalism of the superficial or strictly external
variety. His scenes of farms, woods, and lakes are deepened; they
have spiritual resonance. The inward world is entered in Snowy
Fields through the outward world: the soul is known through the
body and the places it moves through.27

From Bly's influence and example, Wright's poetry acquired this kind of
regionalism, moving away from postmodern abstraction and irony and
toward geographical specificity and directness of manner. According to
Wright, Bly "made it clear to me that the tradition of poetry which I
had tried to master, and in which I'd come to a dead end, was not the
only one."28 Wright undertook his own translations of modern European

and South American poets, and began experimenting with imagery and free

verse styles in his own poetry. The poems that resulted would firmly

 

138
place Wright in the American neo-Romantic tradition of place poetry.
Wright's new aesthetic made its debut in The Branch Will th
Break, in which his happiest poems appear. According to Wright, his
experiences walking around Bly's Minnesota farm, observing animals and
the landscape, provided him with the "center of that book": "my
rediscovery of the abounding delight of the body that I had forgotten

about."29 But that rediscovery comes as a struggle in the book, as

 

Wright emphasizes through his arrangement of poems. Bleak Ohio poems
predominate at first, followed by increasingly peaceful visions of
nature, mainly in Minnesota. The first poem, "As I Step over a Puddle :~-
at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor," sets the

tone, as Wright asks "Where is the sea, that once solved the whole

loneliness / Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing /

But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter."30 In keeping

with those lines, most of the poems in the beginning of The Branch Will

Nat Break present the natural world as frightening, and people as

alienated from their own places and bodies. Ohio is still a place of

pollution, despair, and death, and Wright's frequent use of geographical

place names, like Martins Ferry, Tiltonsville, Benwood, and Marion,

lends a poignant specificity to these poems. The frequently antholo-

gized "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," for example, pictures a

football stadium full of lonely people projecting their shattered dreams

onto youthful athletes who "grow suicidally beautiful / At the beginning

of October, / And gallop terribly against each other's bodies."31 In "A

Message Hidden in an Empty Wine Bottle That I Threw into a Gully of

Maple Trees One Night at an Indecent Hour," Wright observes the ghosts

of women "dancing around a fire / By a pond of creosote and waste water

 

139
from.the river / In the dank fog of Ohio."32 Corruption of body,
spirit, and place is pervasive in Wright's imagery: the violence of
bodies colliding in a football game, the acrid smell of creosote, and
the dampness and chill in the Ohio air.
Given the almost charnel tone of these poems, the frequent appear-

ance of grave and cemetery imagery is not surprising:

Somewhere in a vein of Bridgeport, Ohio;

Deep in a coal hill behind Hanna's name;

Below the tipples, and dark as a drowsy woodchuck;

A man, alone,

Stumbles upon the outside locks of a grave, whispering

Oh let me in.
("Miners")33

 

A hundred slag piles north of us,

At the mercy of the moon and rain,

He lies in his ridiculous

Tomb, our fellow citizen.

("Two Poems about President Harding")
Wright's perspective on place has become less mythic and more histor-
ical, as in the poems about Warren G. Harding of Marion, Ohio, whose
scandalous administration ended when he "died of crab meat on the way
back from Alaska."34 Ohio, which has produced more presidents than any
other state, is emblematic of the entire nation's failure to come to
terms with the native ground. Despite its pastoral ideal, the Midwest
has produced a graveyard as much as a garden; Wright is looking for a
way out of the first into the second, offering his pastoral poems (as
the titles of two poems have it) as "A Prayer to Escape from the Market
Place" and a contribution to "The Undermining of the Defense Economy."
He rejects the prevailing economic and political worldview of America, a
rationalistic mindset that abhors weakness and seeks to control nature,

human or otherwise. Thus Wright begins his poem on "Eisenhower's Visit

to Franco, 1959" by lamenting how the "American hero must triumph over /

 

 

 

 

 

 

140

The forces of darkness."35 Given the social crises about to unfold in
the United States in the 1960's, including the Vietnam War and the
beginning of the contemporary environmental movement, Wright's vision of
American society was both timely and prescient. As he elegizes in
"Stages on a Journey Westward,":

I lie down between tombstones.

At the bottom of the cliff

America is over and done with.

America,

Plunged into the dark furrows
Of the sea again.36

 

After a group of political poems, Wright shifts from the wasteland
of industrial Ohio to the pastoral plains of western Minnesota. The
turning point of The Branch Will Not Break occurs in the poem "Two
Hangovers," where the book's title appears as a line. Wright first
describes a morning in Ohio, having woken from a dream "Of green butter-
flies searching for diamonds / In coal seams; / And children chasing
each other for a game / Through hills of fresh graves." The dream
represents his search for redemption in a place where "All groves are
bare" and "a sparrow outside / Sings of the Hanna Coal Co. and the dead
moon." He briefly achieves the longed for state of grace during hang—
over "Number Two: / I Try to Waken and Greet the World Once Again." The
complete change of tone in this section, as well as the detail of a pine
tree, suggests a Minnesota setting. "A brilliant blue jay . . . spring-
ing up and down, up and down, / On a branch" brings the poet an
intimation of immortality recalling Whitman's observation of the placid-
ity and self-containment of animals, who "do not sweat and whine about
their condition."37 Wright's tone finally relaxes: "I laugh, as I see

him abandon himself / To utter delight, for he knows as well as I do /

 

141

That the branch will not break."38

Wright's discovery of a sustaining joy in nature comes as a

respite not only from ego but from the mediation of experience by

literature. The title of the book's second poem wishes "Goodbye to the

Poetry of Calcium"; the poem following the transition of "Two Hangovers"

expresses both escape and arrival in its long title: "Depressed by a

Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the

Insects to Join Me."

Wright has taken Transcendentalism to heart, fol-

lowing Emerson's pronouncement in "The American Scholar" that books "are

for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour

is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their read-

ings."39 In a moment resonating with the graveyard imagery of so many

of his poems, Wright drops the book of bad poetry "behind a stone, " that

he may unencumbered "climb a slight rise of grass" to observe ants and

listen to grasshoppers and crickets. For once, Wright senses the possi—

bility of being at home in nature, in his own body, and in the words of

his poetry. His sense of wholeness wavers between the tentative and the

consummate: the "old grasshoppers" have not yet begun to sing, though

the poet is certain that "they have clear sounds to make." Nature

strikes but one note, and that at the poem's conclusion: "lovely, far

off, a dark cricket begins / In the maple trees." The sound is distant,

but the poet has at least located its source. His motion toward the

animal world is slow but persistent, like "the ants / Who are walking

single file up the fence post, " or the grasshoppers who are "tired" and

"leap heavily" because "their thighs are burdened.”o Wright still

feels the "depressing" burden of the bad poetry book, but has begun to

move with grace and attentiveness in the natural world.

 

 

 

142

Most ci'the remaining poems in The Branch Will th Break share

tliis nmflxif of a potential oneness with nature as experienced in parti-

cullar locations, often in the company of animals. Several poems express

yearning for transcendence even in their titles, as in "Trying to Pray,"

flArriving'in.the Country Again," and "Beginning," in which "The wheat

leans back toward its own darkness, / And I lean toward mine.”1 In "A

Prayer to Escape from the Market Place," Wright again rejects the

lyrimacy of the written word: "I renounce the blindness of the magazines.

/ I want to lie down under a tree. / This is the only duty that is not

death." But this realization is only a fleeting glimpse of "everlasting

happiness," as "A pheasant flutters, and I turn / Only to see him

'vanishing at the damp edge / Of the road."42 Even Wright's most famous

poem, "A Blessing," in which Wright and a friend (Bly in real life)

visit two Indian ponies in a pasture "Just off the highway to Rochester,

Minnesota," is an incipient, rather than realized, epiphany. Wright's

contact with one of the horses, caressing "her long ear / That is deli-

cate as the skin over a girl's wrist," awakens him to his own potential

for freedom and belonging: "Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out

of my body I would break / Into blossom."43 The enjambment of the last

two lines stresses both the pain of growth ("breaking") and the beauty

that results from a widening of consciousness ("blossoming"). The poet

has not yet "stepped out of his body"; he has only realized that it is

possible to do so. His state of mind resembles that at the end of

"Two
Horses Playing in the Orchard," which appears earlier in the book: "I
feel / Like half a horse myself, although / Too soon, too soon, already.

Now."44

Three poems at the end of The Branch Will.Not Break, however, are

 

 

 

143

consummate epiphanies of place: "Today I Was Happy, So I Made This Poem"

("The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness, / And I see that it is

impossible to die.')45, "To the Evening Star: Central Minnesota"

("Beautiful daylight of the body, your hands carry seashells.")46, and

"Milkweed." Vividly evocative of place, the last requires quotation in

full:

While I stood here, in the open, lost in myself,
I must have looked a long time

Down the corn rows, beyond grass,

The small house,

White walls, animals lumbering toward the barn.
I look down now. It is all changed.

Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.

It is here. At a touch of my hand,

The air fills with delicate creatures

From the other world.47

 

 

In seeking spiritual significance in his surroundings, the poet has not

until now truly perceived what is before him. Constrained by his ego,

he has impatiently looked down the corn rows and beyond the grass. By
releasing the downy milkweed seeds to float in the wind, Wright also

frees his own original nature from the confinement of rational thought

and obsessive guilt and grief. It is not the world that has changed,

Ibut the poet's perception of it. The pastoral quest of The Branch Will

.Not Break has brought Wright, as Peter Stitt describes, "from solipsis-
tic self-absorption to identification with the animals, from an end-

stopped despair at death to an inherent faith in natural immortality,

from man to nature and beyond.”8 He sees miraculousness in the ordin—

ary, the beauty within himself as well as in nature. "I can be happy

sometimes, " Wright told Stitt in an interview. "And I'd forgotten that.

.And Mdlfll those animals I remembered then. And that is what that book is

 

144

about, the rediscovery. I didn't hate my body at all. I like myself

very much. "49

But as Wright also told Stitt, "I am not a happy man by talent.

Sometimes I have been very happy, but characteristically I'm a miserable

son of a bitch."50 The contentment of The Branch Will Not Break proved

to be short-lived, as Wright continued his struggle with private and

public griefs. In his next two books, Shall We Gather at the River

(1968) and Two Citizens (1973), Wright "speak[s] of flat defeat / In a

flat voice,"51 once again "lonely / And sick for home."52 Three themes

dominate this period of Wright's career: loneliness and dislocation,

American history as benighted and guilt-ridden, and the blighted lives

and landscapes of Ohio. This renewed ambivalence about place, poetry,

and his body leads Wright to examine pastoralism both as a literary

genre and a social ideal.

The pastoral imagery of Wright's Branch poems--animals, trees, and

grass--carries over into this period, but is treated quite differently.

As did Willa Cather in her Nebraska novels, Wright symbolizes spiritual

malaise in the bleakness of the prairie during the cold months. In

"Late November in a Field," for example, Wright finds himself "walking
alone in a bare place" observing a pair of squirrels whose "Frail paws
rifle the troughs between cornstalks when the moon / Is looking away."
In alluding to his poem "The Blessing," Wright seems to have given up

all hope of transcendence in nature or in language:

The earth is hard now,

The soles of my shoes need repairs.
I have nothing to ask a blessing for,
Except these words.

I wish they were

Grass.53

 

 

145

Wright:fisback in the graveyard, "Listening to the Mourners," as he

titles.mxmher poem that finds him crouched "down by a roadside wind-

break /1u.the edge of the prairie. ."54 But unlike the vague and

mythical guilt of "At the Executed Murderer's Grave," Wright's grief is

specific and historical. He mourns not only for himself, but for the

dislocation of his nation from its place and its history:

So: it is not me, it is not my love

Alone lost.
The grief that I hear is my life somewhere.

This field is the beginning of my native land,
This place of skull where I hear myself weeping.55

Wright is not alone in his perception of national guilt. In his

book of essays Earth HOuse Hold (1969), Gary Snyder recapitulates D.H.

Lawrence's comment about the "menace" in the American landscape in a

manner useful to our understanding of James Wright:

The American Indian is the vengeful ghost lurking in the back of
the troubled American mind. Which is why we lash out with such
ferocity and passion, so muddied a heart, at the black-haired young
peasants and soldiers who are the "Viet Cong." That ghost will
claim the next generation as its own. When this has happened,
citizens of the USA will at last begin to be Americans, truly at

home on the continent, in love with their land.56

Robert Bly, in fact, attacked the cultural roots of the Vietnam War in

ternus identical to Snyder's. At a poetry reading in 1969, Bly expressed

the opinion that "what we're doing [in Vietnam] is repeating the crime

with Indians. The Vietnamese are our Indians. We don't want to end

this war! We didn't want to quit killing the Indians but we ran out of

Indians, and they were all on reservations."57 In his National Book

Award winning The Light Around the Body (1968), Bly illustrates the

frontier / Vietnam connection with statements such as "underneath all

the cement of the Pentagon / There is a drop of Indian blood preserved

 

 

146

in snow. "58

According to James F. Mersmann, Bly's Vietnam poems

attempt an "expiation of the burden of guilt accumulated from the rape

of the frontier and the ecology, from puritanical morality and

discipline, from killing Indians,

from a history of violence and socio-

economic inequities. . . "59

Mersmann's commentary also applies to

Cknnes Wright. Whereas Bly borrowed from surrealism and Jungian psychol-

cxny to explore the national psyche, Wright chose to continue writing
<axtensively about his personal relationship to American places. It is
'natural that American Indians,

the original inhabitants of the place,

VMNJld arise as a theme in Wright's poetry, as in Roethke's and Snyder's

 

To discover a true love for America, Wright needed to follow Lawrence's

directive in appeasing the nation's ghosts in atonement for the American

Spirit of Place, the national "soul history" described by Michigan

author Jim Harrison as stained "with the blood of over two hundred

Native American civilizations we destroyed. ."60

Wright's first expression of national guilt over the Indians comes

early in The Branch Wdll th Break, in "Stages on a Journey Westward."

The four parts of this poem retrace the westward movement of conquest,

creating place images for Ohio during the Great Depression, western

Minnesota, Nevada, and Washington state.

Landscapes in each location

bear the marks of callous economic exploitation. Wright's memory of

Ohio is of his father prowling in bread lines, returning home "grimy

with machinery" to sing his young son a lullaby, while "Outside the

house, the slag heaps waited." In Minnesota, the winter wind howling

"out of the abandoned prairies / . . . sounds like the voices of bums

and gamblers, / Rattling through the bare nineteenth-century whorehouses

/ In Nevada." Standing in a graveyard with "the half-educated sheriff

 

147

of Mukilteo, Washington," Wright imagines the miners who "paused on the

way up to Alaska / [spading] their broken women's bodies / Into

ditches of crab grass." Americans, here represented by bums, gamblers,

whores, and prospectors, have always been on the way to somewhere else,

abandoning one place for another and leaving slag heaps and graves in

their wake. These people and places haunt the American national

conscience, which speaks to Wright one night in a dream:

In western Minnesota, just now,
I slept again.
In my dream, I crouched over a fire.

The only human beings between me and the Pacific Ocean
Were old Indians, who wanted to kill me.

They squat and stare for hours into small fires

Far off in the mountains.

The blades of their hatchets are dirty with the grease
Of huge, silent buffaloes.61

Western Minnesota, as Wright told Dave Smith, is where you "start to get

a hint of what the western United States is like."62 The prairie begins

there; before the arrival of settlers, the whole state was contested
ground, home to woodland Ojibwa and their ancient adversaries, the

Sioux. The American war of conquest against the plains Indians began in

Minnesota in reaction to the Sioux revolt of 1862, when Indian resent-
ment over being swindled out of their land led to the killing of

hundreds of white settlers and the subsequent exile of the Minnesota

Sioux. Wright's meditation on that historical event resulted in a poem

essential to his oeuvre, "A Centenary Ode: Inscribed to Little Crow,

Leader of the Sioux Rebellion in Minnesota, 1862."63

In that poem, Wright addresses Little Crow, identifying him as the

"true father / Of my dark America." He first assumes a defensive tone:

"I had nothing to do with it [Little Crow's death]. I was not here. / I

was not born." Wright's Ohio ancestors,

"a lot of singing drunks and

 

 

 

148

good carpenters," also had an alibi: they were busy fighting on both

sides of the Civil War. But they, and Wright, share a measure of guilt:

"it was not my fathers / Who murdered you. / Not much." Wright here

implies that atonement for the genocide of America's native people must

begin with a recognition of guilt, followed by appropriate mourning.

But the exact location of Little Crow's grave is unknown, a fact that

symbolizes the difficulty of national (and individual) redemption. "I

don't know," Wright tells the chief, "Where the fathers of Minneapolis

finalized / Your flayed carcass. / If only I knew where to mourn

you, / I would surely mourn. / But I don't know." Lacking a specific

location or monument upon which to meditate, Wright's thoughts shift
from the conquered Sioux to his own people; his confession to Little
Crow that "When I close my eyes I lose you among / Old lonelinesses"
suggests the psychic cost that all whites have paid for America's crime

against the Indians. Despite the preservation of the Union and the

conquest of the West, white Americans are in another sense a defeated

people, who have never been more than superficially at home on the land.

Wright feels himself fated to homelessness, like "Old Paddy Beck, [his]

‘great-uncle . . dead / At the old soldiers' home near Tiffen, Ohio."

The concluding stanza projects this dislocation even beyond death:

Oh all around us,
The hobo jungles of America grow wild again.

'rhe pick handles bloom like your skinned spine.
I don't even know where
My own grave is.6‘1

131.Reading the Fire (1983), a study of Native American oral
literature, Jarold Ramsey contrasts the Indian approach to geography and
nature with "the vaguely guilty and nostalgic sense of place and feeling

for landscape that we inherit from Romanticism; it is altogether

149

sterner, more pragmatic as to ecological necessities, and more caught up

in the narrative.“5 Ramsey's observation holds true of a number of

Native American poets and novelists who emerged during the 1960's and

'70's, including Leslie Marmon Silko. Wright's correspondence with

Silko, author of Ceremony (1977) and Almanac of the Dead (1991), repre-

sents a remarkable cultural convergence: the meeting, on equal terms, of

Euro-American Romanticism with a Native American worldview. Their

letters, published in The Strength and Delicacy of Lace (1986), do not
dwell on the tragic aspects of American history or on literary aesthe-

tics. Instead, Wright and Silko wrote of their admiration for each

other's work, of their travels, of their daily struggles as individuals

and artists. Each recognized in the other a kindred spirit, another

author giving voice to previously voiceless people. Silko's narrative

in Ceremony of Pueblo Indians facing the loss of their traditional way

of life is not far removed from Wright's elegies to Ohio people worn

down by the industrial age. Both write from a tremendous sympathy for

human suffering, particularly as caused by abrupt social change and

geographical dislocation.66 In struggling to reconcile the ideal sense

of place with the bleak reality of his native landscape, Wright derived

lessons in language from many sources. Native American sensibilities

about poetry and place proved to be as crucial in Wright's development
as his European and South American influences:

My rotted Ohio,

It was only a little while ago

That I learned the meaning of your name.
The Winnebago gave you your name, Ohio,

And Ohio means beautiful river.
("Many of Our Waters: Variations on a Poem By a Black Child")57

Wright did indeed find that "pragmatism as to ecological necessi-

 

 

 

150

ties" required that he become "caught up in the narrative" of his place
and people. While retaining the vivid imagery and terse colloquialism
of his middle period, Wright increasingly employed storytelling to
convey what he felt as "an abrupt pang that rises not only from the
shape of my parents' lives but also from the very disruption of the
earth in southeastern Ohio."68 Because Wright refused to idealize his
place of origin or the people he knew there, the landscapes and por-
traits in his later books are colored by both admiration and revulsion.
The poem "On a Phrase from Southern Ohio," for example, centers on
Wright's memory of a patch of native wildflowers atop a strip mined hill
across the Ohio River in West Virginia, "the only / Beauty we found,
outraged in that naked hell." The trip he shared with a group of ”lazy
and thieving" friends reenacts the conquest of America: white people
cross a body of water, discover a sacred garden, and commit an act of
racial violence:

Well, we found two black boys up there

In the wild cliff garden.

Well, we beat the hell out of one

And chased out the other.69
By finding an analogue for American history in his own experience,
Wright sharpened the irony of his pastoralism: this narrative achieves
the authenticity Wright wished for in "At the Executed Murderer's Grave"
but could not achieve, because as Robert Bly points out, "a convicted
rapist—murderer is a different piece of goods from James Wright."70 The
sense of guilt in the earlier poem seems contrived in comparison to the
confession of "On a Phrase from Southern Ohio," which occurs in a fully

realized context of environmental and social debasement. This is honest

sorrow, rather than literary posturing. If nostalgia is the generic

151

emotion of pastoral art, then Wright has revised the pastoral convention
of yearning for an primal innocence and verdure. The Ohio River valley
was always degraded in Wright's lifetime, and the discovery of a lovely
remnant of wildness, "a garden of bloodroot, tangled there, a vicious
secret / Of trilliums," only emphasizes the horrors of industrialism:

It is summer chilblain, it is blowtorch, it is not

Maiden and morning on the way up that cliff.

Not where I come from.

It is a slab of concrete that for all I know
Is beginning to crumble.71

At times Wright is so strident in his condemnation of American
society as to resemble Robinson Jeffers, whose poems denounce human
solipsism and corruption as much as they celebrate the northern Califor—
nia coast that Jeffers made his home. Wright's poem "Ohioan Pastoral"
is a catalog of ugliness quite similar to that in Jeffers' famous poem
"November Surf," right down to the imagery of discarded condoms. Wright
asks us to see "the other side / Of Salt Creek," a place polluted by
"orange rinds, / Oil cans, cold balloons of lovers," where a barn "Sags,
sags and oozes / Down one side of the copperous gully." The poem's
final image is bleaker yet: the sound of a "buried gas main" hissing
"among the green rings / On fingers in coffins."72 Again, corruption of
body and nature persists even after death, because places that should
have been treated with reverence have been ruthlessly defiled. The most
concise expression of Wright's divided vision of the Midwest, "Ohioan
Pastoral" implies an ironic optimism: salvation may lie in entropy-~in
the crumbling of the slab, in the erosion by natural forces of exces-
sive human interference. Such was Jeffers' hope in imagining a storm

that would cleanse North America beyond the sea-lines, in a future with

1

I
IL
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152

the "cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks more numerous, /
The rivers mouth to source pure. . . .' Even "inhumanist" Jeffers had
to admit that "the two-footed / mammal" is "someways one of the nobler
animals,"73 and Wright at his bleakest is reminded by nature of a
persistent beauty in himself and other people that will not allow the
bond between person and place to be severed--that will keep the branch
from breaking. Since that branch appeared as the title of one book, the
decision of Anne Wright, the poet's widow and executor, to derive the
title for his complete poems from the last stanza of "On a Phrase from
Southern Ohio" is consistent with the essential humanism of his work:

And still in my dreams I sway like one fainting strand

Of Spiderweb, glittering and vanishing and frail

Above the river.74

Unlike Jeffers, Wright was guided by a profound sympathy for human

suffering. Despite his anger at modern placelessness, Wright admires
certain resilient individuals who confronted the harshness of life in
industrial Ohio. The poem "A Flower Passage," for example, memorializes
Joe Shank (elsewhere, John Shunk), a man who made a living recovering
the bodies of drowned children from the Ohio River. In Wright's ironic
pastoralism, Shank was a "Shepherd of the dead" who "dragged . . . hooks
/ All over the rubble sludge and lifted / The twelve year old bones."
As an adult Wright lived elsewhere, and could not bring flowers to
Shank's funeral service. Instead he offers the memory of the same
native plants discovered in "On a Phrase from Southern Ohio":

The true sumac, and the foul trillium

Whose varicose bloom swells the soil with its bruise;

And a little later, I bring

The still totally unbelievable spring beauty

That for some hidden reason nobody raped
To death in Ohio.75

 

153
In his "Childhood Sketch," Wright remembers feeling that Shank had "a
kind of solitary holiness about him . . . he carried the visible terror
of good and frightened people in his arms, and he was brave as even the
river never knew how to be brave." Shank and the wildflowers represent
an indestructible spirit, a genius of place as beautiful as the river
"in its rawness and wildness," even though, as Wright recalled, "some-
thing was forever drifting past to remind us of the factories that lined
the banks to the north."76 In "The Old WPA Swimming Pool in Martins
Ferry, Ohio," Wright attributes that spirit to his father and uncles,
'"good men who lived along that shore" who dug a hole ("No grave for
once") so children would have a safe place to swim. Though redemption
eludes them, these people have made the best of their situation: when
"the river, / That is supposed to be some holiness / Starts dying, /

They swim in the earth."77

In his poems and prose Wright testifies to a
"goodness" and "holiness" that persists in places and people, however
abused. As he wrote to Leslie Marmon Silko, "When you love a place,
really and almost hopelessly love it, I think you love it even for its
signs of disaster, just as you come to realize how you love the
particular irregularities and even the scars on some person's face."78
Wright's love for his place of origin was deepened and clarified
by his travels in Europe, where he experienced landscapes and cultures
that had survived centuries of change, peaceful and violent. His last
two books of poetry, Tb a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977) and the posthumous
This Journey (1982), are dominated by poems set in France, Austria,
Yugoslavia, and especially Italy, where he fell in love with the cities

of Mantua (birthplace of Virgil, greatest of all pastoral poets) and

Verona, where Romeo and Juliet loved and died. Wright's visits to Italy

154

with his wife Anne provided the happiest, most peaceful moments of his
last years. Wright maintained his cynicism about poetry and landscape
while in Europe; in "Notes of a Pastoralist," for example, he observes
that the sheep in a field outside of Pisa "did not flock together / As
they do in Spenser and Theocritus."79 Yet these late poems pay homage
to the ancient pastoral poets, whom Wright loved for writing about their
homelands in language appropriate to their time and place. Horace and
Virgil communicate across distances of geography and historical time by
means of a visionary localism; as Emerson writes in "Self-Reliance," the
ancients made their places "venerable in the imagination . . . by
sticking fast where they were, like an axis in the earth." Since he
travelled not to escape, but to gain perspective on his experience (and
use of language), Wright fairly fits Emerson's description of a wise
traveller:

when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his

house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still . . . he goes the

missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a

sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.80

Wright struggled throughout his career to balance his love of

poetic traditions ancient and modern with the necessity of writing in a
natural and regional idiom. As a young poet, he mastered the formal
style of the period, but soon resisted it as an unnecessary constraint
on his imagination. "All this time," he confesses in "Many of Our
Waters," "I've been slicking into my own words / The beautiful language
of my friends. / I have to use my own, now. / That's why this scattering
poem sounds the way it does."81 By abandoning the iconoclasm and self-

doubt of Saint Judas and The Branch Will Not Break, Wright came to

accept not only his Ohio experience, but what he called "The one tongue

155

I can write in / . my Ohioan."82 When in Two Citizens he addresses

the Roman poet Horace, he is able to do so in a spirit of geographical

and idiomatic mutual ity:

Easy, easy, I ask you, easy, easy
Early, evening, by Tiber, by Ohio,
Give the gift to each lovely other.

I would be happy.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, my good father,
You were just the beginning, you quick and lonely
Metrical crystals of February.

It is just snow.83

This conciliatory tone resounds throughout Wright's last two

books, even though some of his darkest visions of American culture and

landscape, such as "Flower Passage" and "Ohioan Pastoral," appear in

this period. The gift that Wright speaks of sharing with Horace is love

of patria--of native language and landscape. Wright's last poems brim

with confidence in the power of poetry to ease psychic pain, particu-

larly homesickness and nostalgia. Wright longed for an Ohio he could

not have, an Ohio of pastures and forests rather than strip mines and

graveyards, its river pure from mouth to source. By contemplating the

and rivers beloved of the classical poets, and by

pastures , towns ,

trusting the redemptive power of his own writing, Wright came home to

his ideal Ohio. The city of Mantua, for example, inspired him to

meditate--as did Willa Cather in My Antonia--upon the famous lament of

Virgil "s Georgics: Optima dies prima fugit: "The best days are the first
/ To flee, sang the lovely / Musician born in this town / So like my

in the poem "One Last Look at the Adige: Verona in

own . "' 84 Likewise,

the Rain, " he observes that the Ohio River "must have looked / Something

like this / To the people who loved it / Long before I was born."

Wright has taken a broader view of history; though "Steubenville [Ohio]

 

 

156
is a black crust," and America a "shallow hell where evil / Is an easy

joke, forgotten / In a week," rivers yet flow to remind him of the earth

(or paradise) just beneath the crust:

Now, Adige, flow on.

Adige, river on earth,

Only you can hear

A half-witted angel drawling Ohioan
In the warm Italian rain.

In the middle of my own life
I woke up and found myself
Dying, fair enough, still
Alive in the friendly city
Of my body, my secret Verona,
Milky and green,

My moving jewel, the last
Pure vein left to me.85

Wright did not arrive at an easy resolution of his ambivalence

toward poetry, place, and body. America, represented by the city of

Martins Ferry, is still in ruins, its pastoral dream alive but as

tenuous as a branch, a spider web, a garden of trilliums atop a strip

mined hill. Wright's search for home did not bring him literally back
to Ohio, but to a way of being, a gracefulness of word and deed. "The
secret / Of this journey," Wright discovered, "is to let the wind / Blow

its dust all over your body, / To let it go on blowing, to step lightly,

lightly / All the way through your ruins, and not to lose / Any sleep

over the dead. .um wright finally placed his faith in poetry as

his own best means to bridge the rift in paradise, to reestablish the
'vital link between person and place. He was a "jaded pastoralist," yet
a pastoralist nonetheless, who affirmed the basic message of American
Romantic literature since Emerson, what Robert Bly calls "the truth of

the soul ' 5 interior abundance":

. . that nature is not below the divine, but is itself divine,
"perpetual youth." Most important of all . . . that despite the

 

 

 

157
Industrial Revolution certain things are as they have always been,
and that in human growth the road of development goes through
nature, not around it.87
The best of James Wright's poetry-~much of it about the reality and

promise of the American Midwest--will endure as testimony to that essen-

tial insight into the nature of our human residence on earth.

 

 

 

 

Notes

1Bonnie Costello, "James Wright: Returning to the Heartland, " in
The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright, ed. Dave
Smith (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 221.

2James Wright, "Notes of a Pastoralist," Above the River: The
Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux / University Press
of New England, 1990), 328.

3Wright, "The Quest," Above the River, 3.

4Wright, "A Blessing," Above the River, 143.
5Wright, "Northern Pike," Above the River, 217.

6Wright, "The Offense," Above the River, 205.

7Wright, "To a Friendly Dun," Above the River, 206. Wright
suffered from manic depression and alcoholism, and was often in poor
health. He died of throat cancer at the age of fifty-two.

8Wright, "Many of Our Waters," Above the River, 212.

9James Wright, "The Pure Clear Word: An Interview with Dave

Smith," in Collected Prose, ed. Anne Wright (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1983), 194.

10Jane Robinett, "Two Poems and Two Poets, " in James Wright: The
Heart of the Light, ed. Peter Stitt and Frank Graziano (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1990), 49.

11Theodore Roethke taught Wright at the University of Washington.
His influence is evident in Wright's dedication to poetic craftsman-
ship, use of childhood memories of people and places, and his nature

based spirituality achieved through psychic struggle with painful
emotions.

12Peter Stitt, "The Quest for Home, " in The World's Hieroglyphic

Beauty: Five American Poets (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press,
1985). 165.

13T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent, " cited in
Robert Bly, "A Wrong Turning in American Poetry, " in American Poetry:
Wildness and Domesticity (New York: Harper 8: Row: 1990) , 8.

1“Bly, "A Wrong Turning," American Poetry, 8.

15William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, cited in Bly,

"A Wrong
Turning," American Poetry, 10-11.

16Bly, "A Wrong Turning, " American Poetry, 21.
158

 

 

 

 

159

 

17Ibid., 15-16. Bly mentions Theodore Roethke as an exception to
post-war poetic outwardness and objectivism. The influence of Roethke
on Bly, Wright, and other poets of their generation is documented by
Harry Williams in "The Edge is What I Have": Theodore Roethke and After
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1977). Williams charac-
terizes a "Roethkean mode" in Bly and Wright by their sense of place,
recognition of spirit in nature, and rejection of dominant American
institutions. In his section on Bly, Williams argues that Bly, like
Roethke, "sees a link between the spirit of a nation, its national
psyche, and the psyche of the poet, that is, the poet who goes beyond
the personal, the ego, into the archetypal and impersonal depths of the
unconscious. . ." (Williams, "The Edge is What I Have," 164).

18Ibid., 33.
19Ibid., 14.

20Robert Bly, "Laziness and Silence," Silence in the Snowy Fields
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England / Wesleyan University
Press, 1962), 53.

21G.A.M. Janssens, "The Present State of American Poetry: Robert
Bly and James Wright" in James wright: The Heart of the Light, ed. Stitt
and Graziano, 204.

22Bly, "Unrest," Silence, 25.

23Bly, "Poem in Three Parts," Silence, 21; "Driving Through Ohio,"
Silence, 33; "September Night With an Old Horse," Silence, 54.

24William Heyen, "Inward to the World: The Poetry of Robert Bly"
in Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake, ed. Joyce Peseroff (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1984), 13.

25Robert Bly, "James Wright and the Mysterious Woman," in American
Poetry, 73.

26Robert Bly, Talking All Morning (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1980), 56.

27Howard Nelson, Robert Bly: An Introduction to the Poetry (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 7. A poem in Silence in the
Snowy Fields that typifies the book's place epiphanies is "Hunting
Pheasants in a Cornfield," the actual subject of which is a willow tree
visited by the poet. At first he feels separate from the tree, and from
nature around him:

What is so strange about a tree alone in an open field?
It is a willow tree. I walk around and around it.

The body is strangely torn, and cannot leave it.

At last I sit down beneath it.

Like a Druid by a sacred oak, or Buddha under the bo tree, the poet
finds enlightenment under this native willow, suddenly sensing his
oneness with the tree and all nature:

The mind has shed leaves alone for years.

It stands apart with small creatures near its roots.
I am happy in this ancient place,

A spot easily caught sight of above the corn,

If I were a young animal ready to turn home at dusk.

 

160

Bly, "Hunting Pheasants in a Cornfield," Silence, 14.

The tree is important both as a symbol (it is an "axis mundi, " or
vertical pole around which the world is perceived to revolve) and as an
Lines from Wendell

actual organism, a fellow being in the locality.
Berry's poem "The Sycamore" provide a useful gloss on Bly's willow:

It is a fact, sublime, mystical, and unassailable.

In all the country there is no other like it.

I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling

the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place, and feeds upon it,

and is fed upon, and is native, and maker.
Wendell Berry, "The Sycamore," Collected Poems

(San Francisco: North Point, 1985), 65.

 

28Peter Stitt, "An Interview with James Wright, " The World's
Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets (Athens, GA: University of

Georgia Press, 1985), 203.

 

29Ibid.
I Think

"As I Step over a Puddle at the End of Winter,

3°Wright ,
1 19 .

of an Ancient Chinese Governor, " Above the River,
31Wright, "Autumn Begins in Martin's Ferry, Ohio," Above the
River, 121.
32Wright, "A Message Hidden in an Empty Wine Bottle That I Threw
into a Gully of Maple Trees One Night at an Indecent Hour, " Above the

River, 123.
33Wright, "Miners," Above the River, 126.

34"'IWo Poems about President Harding," Above the River, 127—

128. .
1959, " Above the River,

3F’Wright, "Eisenhower's Visit to Franco,

129.
36Wright, "Stages on a Journey Westward," Above the River, 125.
"Song of Myself, " Poetry and Prose (New York:

37Walt Whitman,
1982), 218.

Library of America,
38Wright, "Two Hangovers," Above the River, 132-133.

39Ra1ph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar, " in Essays &
Lectures (New York, Library of America, 1983), 58. Whitman echoes
Emerson's sentiment in Part 2 of "Song of Myself": "You shall no longer
take things at second or third hand, nor / look through the eyes of the
dead, nor feed on the / spectres in books, / You shall not look through
my eyes either; nor take things / from me, / You shall listen to all
and filter them from your self." Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself,"

sides ,
189-90 .

Poe try and Prose,

4°Wright, "Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk toward an
Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me, " Above the River, 133.

 

161

“Wright, "Beginning," Above the River, 135.

“Wright, "A Prayer to Escape from the Market Place, " Above the
River, 140.
43Wright, "A Blessing," Above the River, 143.

“Wright, "Two Horses Playing in the Orchard," Above the River,

134.

45Wright, "Today I was Happy, So I Made This Poem, " Above the
River, 141.

“Wright, "To the Evening Star: Central Minnesota, " Above the
River, 142.

“Wright, "Milkweed," Above the River, 143—144. The image of
seeds being released harkens back to another Branch poem, "In Memory of
a Spanish Poet," about Miguel Hernandez. Wright dreams of the poet's
"slow voice, flying, / Planting the dark waters of the spirit / With

Wright envisions such foreign poets as Hernandez as

lutes and seeds."
literary pastoralists in an extended sense of the term. Their poems

were planted as new stock in the fallow soil of American poetry in the
1950's and '60's, bringing new music ("lutes") and new life ("seeds") to
a literature in need of cross-fertilization. Thus we read: "Here, in
the American Midwest, / Those seeds fly out of the field and across the

strange heaven of my skull. / They scatter out of their wings a quiet
(Wright, "In Memory of a Spanish

farewell, / A greeting to my country"
Wright's similar release of seeds at the

Poet, Above the River, 130).
end of "Milkweed" represents his new-found poetic confidence: each of

the poems in the book is a seed, scattered to grow in the heart of

America.
48$titt, "Introduction," James wright: A Profile, 15.
49Stitt, "An Interview with James Wright," The world's Hiero-

glyphic Beauty, 204 .

5°Ibid., 202.
"Speak," Above the River, 158.

51Wright,
52Wright, "Outside Fargo, North Dakota," Above the River, 158.
53Wright, "Late November in a Field, " Above the River, 160.
54Wright, "Listening to the Mourners," Above the River, 161.
160.

55Wright, "Late November in a Field, " Above the River,

5GGary Snyder, Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions, 1969) ,

112.

57Robert Bly, comments at a poetry reading at Lawrence, Kansas,
cited by James F. Mersmann, "Robert Bly: Watering the

April 10, 1969,
in Joyce Peseroff, ed. Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake (Ann

Rocks, '"
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 6S.

5BRObert Bly, "Hatred of Men With Black Hair, " The Light Around

 

 

 

162

 

the Body (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 36.

59Mersmann, "Robert Bly: Watering the Rocks," 72.

60Jim Harrison, "Poetry as Survival," in Just Before Dark:
Collected anfiction (Livingston, MT: Clark City, 1990), 300.

61Wright, "Stages on a Journey Westward," Above the River, 124-
125.

62Wright, "The Pure Clear Word: An Interview with Dave Smith,"
Collected Prose, 195.

63For a concise and well-narrated account of the Minnesota Sioux
uprising, see Chapter 2 of Ralph K. Andrist, The Long Death: The Last
Days of the Plains Indians (New York: MacMillan, 1964). The rebellion
stemmed from the murder of a group of settlers by four impetuous young
braves returning from an unsuccessful summer hunting trip to the Big
Woods of central Minnesota. At a council of tribal leaders, the party
advocating war held sway, having argued, according to Andrist, "with any
amount of historical precedent to back them up--that it would do no good
to turn the four murderers over to the whites for punishment because all
Indians would be punished indiscriminately anyway" (Andrist, 34).
Little Crow, who had been working to adapt his people to agriculture,
argued eloquently against attack, which would surely prove futile. But
as Andrist relates, when the peaceful chief "found the Sioux meant to
fight regardless of his warnings, he had decided that it was better to
fight a lost cause than become a nobody" (Andrist, 36). The days that
followed saw the brutal killing of hundreds of settlers, followed by an
all out engagement with the Minnesota 6th Infantry and state militia.
The Sioux lost this first installment of the Plains War; even those who
had remained neutral or had assisted whites during the uprising were
exiled to reservations in Dakota Territory. Thirty-eight Sioux men were
hung on a single scaffold in the town of Mankato to satisfy the whites'
desire for revenge (306 had been sentenced to death, but President
Lincoln signed an order of executive clemency). Little Crow, who had
not wanted to fight, who had tried to convert his people to a agrarian
existence, was shot to death one year later by a farmer near the town of
Hutchinson. He had been picking berries with his son, who escaped.' The
chief's body, unidentified at the time, ended up in the offal pit of a
slaughterhouse.

64"A Centenary Ode: Inscribed to Little Crow, Leader of the Sioux
Rebellion in Minnesota, 1862," Above the River, 186-187.

65Jarold Ramsey, Reading the Fire: ESsays in the Traditional
Indian Literatures of the Far West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1983), 188.

66Silko particularly appreciated Wright's mastery of regional,
spoken English, which she contrasted with "that hideous, empty, arti-
ficial language television speaks . . . the result of the past 50 years
of working to eradicate regional usages, regional pronunciations, ie.,
regional and community expression from American English, always with the
melting pot theory in mind. . . . That is what I love most in your
writing, Jim, the gully and railroad track, the sumac and coal smoke--

 

cl

163

 

a1].<:ould only be from the place you give us or that gives you to us,
tram: Ohio country." Leslie Marmon Silko, in Anne Wright, ed., The
Ikelicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and
dkunes wright (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1986), 82.

67Wright, "Many of Our Waters: Variations on a Poem by a Black
Child," Above the River, 211.

68Wright, "A Childhood Sketch," in Collected Prose, 330-334.
69Wright, "On a Phrase from Southern Ohio," Above the River, 300.

70Robert Bly, "The Work of James Wright," in Stitt and Graziano,
eds., James Wright: The Heart of the Light, 100.

71Wright, "On a Phrase from Southern Ohio," Above the River, 300.
72Wright, "Ohioan Pastoral," Above the River, 348.

73Robinson Jeffers, "November Surf," The Collected Poems of
.Robinson Jeffers, vol. 2 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1988). 159.

74Wright, "On a Phrase from Southern Ohio," Above the River, 301.
75Wright, "A Flower Passage," Above the River, 355.
76Wright, "Childhood Sketch," in Collected Prose, 332-333.

77Wright, "The Old WPA Swimming Hole in Martins Ferry, Ohio,"
Above the River, 236.

78James Wright, in Anne Wright, ed., The Delicacy and Strength of
Lace, 32.

79Wright, "Notes of a Pastoralist," Above the River, 328.

80Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," in Essays and Lectures,
277.

81Wright, "Many of Our Waters: Variations on a Poem by a Black
Child," Above the River, 216.

82Wright, "To the Creature of the Creation," Above the River, 261.
83Wright, "Prayer to the Good Poet," Above the River, 228.

84Wright, "The First Days," Above the River, 312.

85Wright, "One Last Look at the Adige: Verona in the Rain," Above
the River, 284-285.

86Wright, "The Journey," Above the River, 338.

87Robert Bly, ed., The Winged Life: The Poetic voice of Henry
David Thoreau (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 5.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 6

A‘Water With Some Land Running Through It:
Michigan Poetry of Place

The edge is what I have.

Theodore Roethke
"In a Dark Time"

Just as we speak of a nation's literature, or of a region's, there

are distinctive literary traditions in areas within regions like the

 

American Midwest. The Midwest is a plurality as well as a unity,
consisting of several states whose unique landscapes and cultures have
encouraged the development of state and local literatures. There is for
example, as the present chapter will illustrate, a poetry of Michigan, a
poetry centrally concerned with the uniqueness of Michigan's natural and
human history, a poetry by Michigan authors about Michigan experience.
Without being directly tied to the political implications of bioregion-
alism, poets Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), Jim Harrison (b. 1937),
Judith Minty (b. 1937), and Dan Gerber (b. 1940), have written of
Michigan's land and lore in a manner which may deepen our appreciation
of the state's bioregional character.1 Their poems are of course
interesting for other formal and thematic reasons, but a sense of place
is central to each poet's vision of life. They are "poets of place"
because they recognize, as William Carlos Williams was fond of saying,
that "the local is the only universal"2; their knowledge and love of
place helps them create art with insight into general truths.

Michigan as a political entity has a greater bioregional validity

164

165

than most states because of the natural continuity of most of its
border, defined by its two peninsulas' coasts on four of the five Great
Lakes. Limnologically, the Lakes are actually seas, causing massive
climatological effects such as the milder weather (cooler summers and
less frigid winters) experienced in the state as compared to areas west
of Lakes Michigan and Superior, and the state's characteristic cloud
cover and precipitation. Like no other location in the world,
Michigan's elemental character derives from an abundance of fresh water,
leading poet Dan Gerber to declare that "This isn't a land at all, / but
‘a water with some land running through it."3 Michigan is a collection
of distinct watersheds, each with a particular glacial terrain, from the
flat glacial till plains of Saginaw and the "Thumb" to the high moraines
overlooking Lake Michigan and the Precambrian bedrock exposures of the
western Upper Peninsula. Southern Michigan is forested mainly with
deciduous species; farther north, the soils become thinner and more
sandy, the climate harsher, and the forest coniferous. This distinction
between north and south determined the distribution of Indian tribes
according to their means of subsistence, and the settlement of Euroamer-
icans according to economic activity-~farming and industry as opposed to
lumbering and mining.4 For historian Bruce Catton, who grew up in
Benzonia, Michigan, the state offered an excellent vantage from which to
view the changes wrought on an ancient landscape by a society based on a
utilitarian view of nature: "The contrast between the old and the new,"
Catton observes in his memoir waiting for the Morning Train (1972):

was too great. There was nothing for the mind to get hold of:[the

ice age] was hardly more real than what possibly might yet be. We

lived less than three hundred miles from Detroit, which seemed to

be a door looking into the future, showing unimaginable things; and
three hundred miles in the other direction, off into the desolate

 

166

north country, lay the bleak spine of the upper peninsula of

Michigan, a reef of the oldest rocks on earth . . . rocks dead

since the hour of creation.5
Michigan poets of nature and place exemplify in their work this tension
between the past and the future, the wild and the tame, the primitive
and the sophisticated, in the context of the landscape and how our
civilization has thought of and treated the land. They find in nature's
order an alternative to the hurried, detached way of life in modern
Michigan.

Theodore Roethke is the precursor of later Michigan poets for whom
nature and place are central concerns; his experience of nature tamed in
his father's greenhouses provided him with a detailed knowledge of
natural growth and decay that he applied both to descriptions of wild
landscapes and to his own psychological and spiritual development.6
Roethke was a poet of place and a poet of Michigan despite and because
of the fact that he was more interested in expressing his personal
relationship to nature than in dealing with historical themes. As his
biographer Allan Seager points out,

[Roethke] ignores all the vivid tales of the lumber boom, tales
that expressed courage, will, and cunning that might have engaged
another man . . . he ignores in his poetry the events of this
region's history . . . which expresses in modes of physical action
an energy like his own. It is as if he had inherited the best part
and did not need to acknowledge it.7
Roethke was certainly aware of how drastically the area he knew as home
had been altered in the half-century preceding his birth. "The Saginaw
‘Valley," he said in a 1953 BBC broadcast, "where I was born, had been
great lumbering country in the 1880's. It is very fertile flat country

in Michigan, and the principal towns, Saginaw and Flint, lie at the

northern edge of what is now the central industrial area of the United

167
States. "8 In an admittedly inferior poem, "Suburbia: Michigan, "
published in his letters, Roethke bemoaned the common lack of appreci-
aticni for regional history, correlating such ignorance with tolerance of
environmental degradation: "The immediate past as remote as Carthage; /

Bullxkozers levelled the curving hillside / . Tourists stare at an

.absolute marvel: / A monarch pine, saved by quixotic fancy." The poet

jpictures Michigan residents as living in "a land of lubritoriums [and]

super'ndlkrshakes" within "the geography of despair," where spiritual,

nonmaterialistic people who value nature and will not "live by objects"
are "driven from the land" to

seek the comfort of water,
Crawl back to the eternal womb, the beneficent mother.
Like dazed turtles in spring, they creep to the river
To dangle bent pins at the mouth of a roaring sewer.
"Who said, 'Yes, but,‘ was never a hero,"9 Roethke opines, counting

himself among those who in questioning material progress object to the

placelessness of modern culture in Michigan.

A major theme of Roethke's poetry is a struggle to overcome fear
of death and disintegration by identifying with the regenerative power
of nature as experienced in special locations within the poet's familiar
territory: the greenhouses and their environs, the Tittabawassee River,
adjoining woodlands, and the "far field," the spaciousness of which
comes to represent eternity and hope. "It was a wonderful place for a
child to grow up in and around," Roethke told his British audience over

the BBC:

There were not only twenty-five acres in the town, mostly under
glass and intensely cultivated, but farther out in the country the
last stand of virgin timber in the Saginaw Valley, and elsewhere, a
wild area of cut-over second-growth timber, which my father and
uncle made into a small game preserve. As a child . . . I had
several worlds to live in, which I felt were mine.10

 

 

168

Roethke acknowledges that such a sensitivity to location is uncommon in
modern society, that "there are those to whom place is unimportant."11
But he differs with T.S. Eliot's assertion in "Four Quartets" that "Old
men should be explorers / Here and there does not matter"12: "Old men
should be explorers? / I'll be an Indian."13 In the poem "The Far
Field," Roethke states his spiritual philosophy in a phrase worthy of
Emerson: "All finite things reveal infinitude." The poet's mind moves
"in more than one place, / In a country half-land, half-water," remem-
bering an early encounter with death:

At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower

Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting place of the field-mouse,

Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,

Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery,--

One learned of the eternal;

And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-
beetles

(I found it lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)

And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,

Blasted to death by the night watchman.14
These lines typify Roethke's constant juxtaposition of the human and
natural worlds--the mower's swath and the "corner missed by the mower."
Repeatedly in Roethke's verse we find ourselves "at the field's end," as
in "Idyll," "at the edge of a meadow,"15 or "the field's edge" of "High-
way: Michigan" where "we survey / The progress of the jaded."16 That
edge is liminal ground, a transition zone between nature and humanity
where one can be immersed in the nature of the place, while perceiving
"the progress of the jaded," environmental degradation resulting from
human insensitivity to bioregional integrity.

In the poem "Moss-Gathering," Roethke remembers a task by which

the economy of the greenhouses impinged upon "the natural order of

things": the task was "to loosen with all ten fingers held wide and

.U

 

 

169
limber / And lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery
Ibaskets." The moss is taken to make an item that will be purchased by
xnourners, people who have experience a personal loss for which a form of
natural beauty can provide solace. But taking the moss from its right-
ful place, where it is most beautiful, seemed wrong to Roethke, even as
a boy:
something always went out of me when I dug loss those
carpets
of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of

the marshes:

And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging
road,

As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;

Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,

By pulling off flesh from the living planet;

As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a

desecration.17
The fact that the boy walks home on a logging road ties his experience
to the larger context of Michigan environmental history. The land has
been used often without regard for "the whole scheme of life" in the
place-—a destructive process that continues to this day. Roethke's
point of social observation was from the field or the wood looking out
at the results of people living a life concerned first and foremost to
obtaining wealth and moving about oblivious to natural beauty and eco—
logical harmony. In "Highway: Michigan" he notes the dominance of the
automobile and its products over the landscape: "Here from the field's
edge we survey / The progress of the jaded. Mile / On mile of traffic
from the town / Rides by, for at the end of day / The time of workers is
their own."18
Many of Roethke's poems express joy in being and faith in the

natural order of living things; increasingly in his poetry, fear of

death gives way to a confidence that "Great Nature has another thing to

 

 

 

 

a»

 

 

 

 

170

"19 But especially in the poems of his earlier period,

do to you and me,
Roethke insists on the difficulty of subsuming the human ego, with all
its fears and doubts, to a greater wisdom in nature and to a communion
with the place one knows as the ground of one's being. Roethke's break-
through sequence "The Lost Son" depicts an emotional and spiritual
crisis played out in the Tittabawassee River valley, beginning at "Wood-
land," a version of "the far field" and a renaming of Oakwood Cemetery
in Saginaw, where Roethke's father was buried when the poet was only
twelve years old, and where the poet's own ashes would later be
interred.20 The speaker of "The Lost Son" searches the river bank for
some evidence that life is cyclical, that death is not an absolute end.
The loss of his father, the man who brought life into flowering,
resplendent being, underlies the pain that the lost son is trying to
assuage. As in the earlier poem "On the Road to Woodland," which he
begins by saying "I miss the polished brass, the powerful black horses,
/ The driver creaking the seats of the baroque hearses,"21 Roethke
employs irony in depicting his grief as highly disturbed: "I was lulled
by the slamming of iron, / A slow drip over stones." He asks the powers
of nature to comfort him: "Snail, snail, glister me forward, / Bird,
soft-sigh me home, / Worm, be with me. / This is my hard time." The
speaker then moves through a pastoral scene, "Running lightly over
spongy grounds, / Past the pasture of flat stones / . . . Over a rickety
bridge / Toward the quick-water, wrinkling and rippling."22 In a
shorter poem, "The Premonition," Roethke contrasts the permanence of the
river's flow with the transience of human life, in particular Roethke's
father, who "dipped his hand in the shallow" so that "Water ran over and

under / Hair on a narrow wrist bone."23 In "The Lost Son" he searches

171

the very place that his father taught him to love for some sign by which
he can rise from despair:

Hunting along the river,

Down among the rubbish, the bug-riddled foliage,

By the muddy pond—edge, by the bog-holes,

By the shrunken lake, hunting, in the heat of summer.
The poem continues with nature offering no comfort from loss, as the
poet explores emotional analogues to summer's process of growth and
decay. It is only in remembering winter at the greenhouses that hope
arises: "the roses kept breathing in the dark" because Papa Roethke had
the boiler running. A human labor, literally of love, was sustaining
life and beauty in what might otherwise be a dead time. Looking out a
the surrounding fields, "the landscape still partly brown," winter's
stillness provides a solace that summer's exuberance could not: "Light
traveled over the wide field; / Stayed. / The weeds stopped swinging. /
The mind moved, not alone, / Through the clear air, in the silence."
The sequence ends with the promise of spring to succeed winter, of new
life to follow death: "A lively understandable spirit / Once entertained
you. / It will come again. / Be still. / Wait."24

Roethke's later poems are dominated by that "lively, understand-

able spirit," again symbolized by the flow of water, which gives life
not only to snails, birds, and worms, but to the speaker himself: as
Roethke proclaims in "Meditation at Oyster River," "Water's my will, and
my way." Many poems, including "Meditation," find the poet on the banks
of a river; here a river in Washington State makes him remember the
river he knew first, and probably best:

. . . the Tittabawassee, in the time between winter and spring,

When the ice melts along the edge in early afternoon.

And the midchannel begins cracking and heaving from the pressure
beneath,

“'1

172

The ice piling high against the iron-bound spiles,

Gleaming, freezing again, creaking at midnight.

And I long for the blast of dynamite,

The sudden sucking roar as the culvert loosens its debris of

branches and sticks,
Welter of tin cans, pails, old bird nests, a child's shoe riding a
log,

As the piled ice breaks away from the battered spiles,

And the whole river begins to move forward, its bridges shaking.
In "Meditation" the river has the dual power to cleanse itself of
pollution and to renew the human spirit. Invoking the other mortal
creatures who depend on the river for life—~the deer, the young snake,
the hummingbird-~Roethke confesses that "With these I would be. / And
with water: the waves coming forward, without cessation. "25
Another of the "North American Sequence" poems, "Journey to the
Interior," recalls driving into northern Michigan to "the sand dunes and
fish flies, hanging thicker than moths," to experience "The stand at the
stretch in the face of death, / Delighting in surface change, the
glitter of light on waves. . . ."26 Such images typify Roethke's ideal
of spiritual union with the elemental character of place, especially the
element of water which held symbolic value for him, wherever he found
it, in the Tittabawasee River of Michigan or on the Pacific Coast where
he spent his last years as a professor at the University of Washington.
Though Roethke lived away from Michigan for much of his adult life, the
preponderance of his natural imagery comes from his early life in
Saginaw, Michigan, in the Tittabawassee River watershed of the Saginaw
valley. With rich and detailed local imagery he contributed not only to
Michigan culture and land-lore, but to the fund of world literature.

According to Lisel Mueller, Jim Harrison, who was born in 1937 in

Grayling, Michigan, "shares with that other Michigan poet, Theodore

Roethke, not only the longing to be part of the instinctual world, but

 

173
also the remarkable knowledge of plant and animal life that comes only

7 Harrison's discovery of

with long familiarity and close observation."3
Roethke's poetry when he was a college sophomore encouraged his own
early poetic efforts, and since Harrison's father was a trained agricul-
turalist, Harrison perceived "the direct sense that our backgrounds were
similar enough that there was some hope for me as a poet, so I absorbed
him rather than read him."28 Like Roethke's, Harrison's Michigan is a
landscape bruised by years of environmentally unsound economic activity,
the natural beauty of which nonetheless offers relief from the complex-
ities of our modern industrial society.29 His early poem "Northern
Michigan" belongs with Roethke's "Highway: Michigan" in any anthology of

Michigan verse:

On this back road the land
has the juice taken out of it:

stump fences surround nothing
worth their tearing down

by a deserted filling station
a Veedol sign, the rusted hulk

of a Frazer, "live bait"
on battered tin.30

Like Roethke, Harrison describes "the progress of the jaded": the "back
road" lacks even the sheen of economic activity--the only cars in view
are junked, and the gas station is closed. Similar to Roethke "at the
field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,"31 Harrison juxtaposes a
scene of human failure (his catalog of static human artifacts) with
nature's exuberance, expressed by the active verbs of the poem's second
half, which shows nature surviving even in a land with "the juice taken
out of it":

In the far corner of the pasture,

 

174
in the shadow of the wood lot
a herd of twenty deer:
three bucks

are showing off--

they jump in turn across the fence,

flanks arch and twist to get higher

in the twilight

as the last light filters through the woods.32
Harrison provides historical context for "Northern Michigan" in his
first novel, Wblf (1971), in which his semi—autobiographical narrator
describes the same land as

lumbered off for a hundred years with few traces of the grand white

pine which once covered it, an occasional charred almost petrified

stump four feet in diameter, evidence of trees which rose nearly

two hundred feet and covered the northern half of the state and the

Upper Peninsula, razed with truly insolent completeness by the

lumber barons after the Civil War with all the money going to the

cities of the south--Saginaw, Lansing, Detroit--and east to Boston

and New York.33
All of Harrison's writing involving Michigan scenes is informed by this
knowledge of how the land was stripped of its ancient grandeur by what
Harrison describes in his essay "Passacaglia on Getting Lost" as the
"greed that discovered the country, greed that propelled the Westward
movement, greed that shipped the blacks, greed that murdered the
Indians, greed that daily shits on the heads of those who love
nature."34 Harrison's use of Michigan history results in what Gary
Snyder calls "instantly-apprehended because so-well-digested larger
loopings of lore."35 This kind of "lore-digestion" operates in
Harrison's novel Sundog (1984), the main character of which is named
Corvus Strang--Corvus is the genus appellation of crows and ravens,
birds common to northern Michigan-~and Strang after James Strang, the
nineteenth century Mormon leader who declared himself king of Beaver

Island in Lake Michigan. Harrison's Strang parallels his namesake in

the religious fundamentalism of his youth and in his love for nature;

17S
his life as a foreman to large construction projects in isolated places
around the world is something of a modern day version of King Strang's
attempt to found a new Eden in the then wilderness of northern Michigan.
With regional history in mind, Harrison explores in his poetry

special places in his familiar terrain, which like Roethke's
Tittabawassee locales relieve confusion and psychic distress. Citing
The Poetics of Space (1969) by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard,
Harrison lists such natural features of Northern Michigan as "gullies,
hummocks in swamps, swales in the middle of large fields, the small
alluvial fan created by feeder creeks, undercut river banks, miniature
springs, dense thickets of the tops of hills: like Bachelard's attics,
seashells, drawers, cellars, these places are a balm to me."36 The poem
"Walking," aptly designated as the first poem in the aptly titled
collection Locations (1968), explores many such places:

Walking back on a chill morning past Kilmer's Lake

into the first broad gully down its trough

and over a ridge of poplar, scrub oak, and into

a large gully, walking into the slow fresh warmth

of midmorning to Spider Lake where I drank

at a small spring remembered from ten years back;

walking northwest two miles where another gully

opened, seeing a stump on a knoll where my father

stood one deer season, and tiring of sleet and cold

burned a pine stump, the snow gathering fire-orange

on a dull day; walking past charred stumps blackened

by the '81 fire to a great hollow stump near a basswood

swale. . . .37
These line are characteristic of Harrison in their wealth of
prepositions--into, down, and over, for example, which trace the
speaker's movement-~and the many location-identifying nouns such as
lake, gully, ridge, spring, knoll, and swale. These words are

particular to the subtle gradations of Harrison's Michigan landscape,

gradations that require a fine eye to observe and a specific vocabulary

 

 

176

Harrison states in "Passacaglia" the pleasure he takes in finding (and
writing about) the kind of natural beauty many people overlook:

I prefer places valued by no one else. The Upper Peninsula has

many of these places that lack the drama and differentiation

favored by the garden variety nature buff. I have a personal stump

back in a forest clearing. Someone, probably a deer hunter, has

left a beer bottle beside the stump. I leave the beer bottle there

to conceal the value of the stump.38

In "Walking," Harrison mentions the 1881 fire as one important

reason for the condition of the present landscape. But the more
immediate context is of the speaker's personal association with certain
locations. As if noting significant sites on a pilgrimage, Harrison
drinks at a spring he had visited ten years before and recognizes the
knoll where his father once burned a stump to keep warm. He remembers a
"great hollow stump near a basswood / swale" for the time it offered him

hunting cover in his youth, when he "sat within it on a November morning

/ watching deer browse beyond my young range of shotgun." That memory

 

of close observation of nature (even incorporation into it--note the
preposition "within") is only a brief glance into the speaker's mind.
In the poem's many subsequent line, Harrison resumes his walk through
cedar swamps, more lakes, finally to "the larger water" where a rather
Roethkean submersion takes place:
. . . there walking along the troughs

of waves folding in upon themselves; walking to an island

small, narrow, sandy, sparsely wooded, in the middle

of the island in a clump of cedars a small spring

which I enter, sliding far down into a deep cool

dark endless weight of water.39
While Harrison's immersion into the spring does not share the explicit
connotation of death and acceptance of mortality expressed by Roethke's

watery "North American Sequence," it shares Roethke's relief and

expanded sense of self. Harrison describes the many locations of

177
"Walking" with himself being not much more than the one who is doing the
walking into, through, and over. The poem's final image, of the speaker
sliding into the spring, focuses us on the person in the place, who
becomes not merely an observer but a part of the landscape itself.
Harrison's "larger water" recalls the conclusion of Roethke's "The Long
Waters" in "North American Sequence":
My eyes extend beyond the farthest bloom of the waves;
I lose and find myself in the long water;
I am gathered together once more;
I embrace the world.40
.The flow of water shapes these poets' lives, as well as their Michigan
landscape: as Harrison has it in his long poem "The Theory and Practice
of Rivers," which begins with a description of floating on "the rivers
of [his] life":
. . the current
lifts me up and out
into the dark, gathering motion,
drifting into an eddy
with a sideways swirl,
the sandbar cooler than the air:
to speak it clearly,
how the water goes
is how the earth is shaped.41
Yet like Roethke, Harrison modifies his romantic yearning to be
part of the natural world by insisting on the difficulties posed by such
an embrace. A recurring motif in Harrison's work is the experience of
"getting lost," which literally means to lose one's bearing in the back
country. In "Passacaglia on Getting Lost," Harrison states that
"getting lost is to sense the 'animus' of nature," thereby recognizing
the landscape as a living force, a natural context outside the ordinary,

indoor, social world. "Perhaps getting lost temporarily destroys the

acquisitive sense," Harrison suggests.42 In "The Theory and Practice of

 

178

Rivers," written in the isolation of his Upper Peninsula cabin, Harrison
considers the locations of his life, such as Key West, Los Angeles, and
Grove Street in New York, where at age nineteen he discovered "red wine,
garlic, Rimbaud, / and a red haired girl."43 At the river, which
Harrison says "is as far as I move / from the world of numbers," he
seeks a sense of himself independent of his memories:

What is it to actually go outside the nest

we have built for ourselves, and earlier

our father's nest: to go into a forest

alone with our eyes open? It's different

when you don't know what's over the hill--

keep the river on your left, then you see

the river on your right. I have simply

forgotten left and right, even up and down,

whirl then sleep on a cloudy day to forget

direction. It is hard to learn how

to be lost after so much training.44
Getting lost, according to Harrison, is less dangerous for the body than
for the soul; as Swanson, the narrator of Wblf observes, "the rare
deaths that occur are simply a matter of the lost waiting too long to

"45 Such was the fate of two snowmobilers near Harrison's

turn around.
cabin one winter: "They could have piled deadfall wood around their

machines," Harrison writes in "Passacaglia," "and dropped matches into
the remnants of the gas in the tanks, creating an enormous pyre for the

search planes."46

These men were doomed by their attachment to
machines: their "acquisitive sense" was too strong for them to consider
the one act which could have saved their lives.

For a person in the back country whose resourcefulness would
prevent such a tragedy, the more immediate danger in becoming lost is
psychic: the possibility of projecting one's own psychological crises

onto the surroundings:

When we are lost we lose our peripheries. Our thoughts zoom

 

 

179

outward and infect the landscape. Years later you can revisit an

area and find these thoughts still diseasing the same landscape.

It requires a particular kind of behavior to heal the location.47
By behavior Harrison implies ritual. These places have a spiritual
significance that calls for reverence in visiting them, the kind of
circumspection Roethke means in declaring "I'll be an Indian."48 In
"Passacaglia" Harrison identifies with Michigan's Native Americans for
their traditional expertise in the art of "getting lost," telling about
a Chippewa elder he knows who "carries a folded-up garbage bag in his
pocket":

He claims it is his portable home, keeping him warm and dry if he

gets lost or tired. He finds coyote dens by scent, and whittles

the heads of canes into renditions of his "dream birds." His

favorite drink is a double martini. He asked me to check for a

phone number of a "love" he had lost in 1931. He was somewhat

disturbed, he told me, when it occurred to him that people didn't

know that every single tree was different from every other tree.
Despite his sense of brotherhood with a man so sensitive to nature,
Harrison reminds himself that he isn't literally an Indian; the old man
is carving one of his "dream bird" canes for the poet, but Harrison
plans to hang the cane in his cabin, "being too genetically Calvinist to
have any interest in sorcery."49 As he wrote in an early poem, "Sketch
for a Job Application Blank":

From my ancestors, the Swedes,

I suppose I inherit the love of rainy woods,

kegs of herring and neat whiskey. . . .

(But on the other side, from the German Mennonites,

their rag smoke prayers and porky daughters

I got intolerance, an aimless diligence.)50
Harrison clearly has mixed feeling about his inheritance, but believes
that the personality characteristic of his heritage can as be grounded

in place as the Native American. Roethke expressed a similar ambiva-

lence about his own identity, describing his beloved greenhouses as

 

180
"both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created in the savage climate
of Michigan, Where austere German-Americans turned their love of order
and their terrifying efficiency into something truly beautiful."51
Because ethnic diversity is fundamental to a region's character, a
honest, historically conscious individual will recognize in the past
something of his own disposition; as Gary Snyder says to his Pacific

Northwest ancestors, his "fathers / and grandfathers" who "killd [sic]

off the cougar and grizzly":

Your itch
in my boots too,

--your sea roving
tree hearted son.52

This, finally, is the significance of going "outside the nest / we have
built for ourselves, and earlier / our father's nest: to go into a
forest alone with our eyes open[.]"53 Harrison's experience of "getting
lost" correlates to that of Roethke's "Lost Son" in how the past, both
historical and personal, necessarily colors one's first perception of
the native ground. His poetry of place is in part a ritual observance,
a "particular kind of behavior" that can "heal the location" for the
poet and potentially for the poet's culture--an act in behalf of the
bioregion.

A number of other contemporary Michigan poets share with Harrison
a sense of place, and have found in Michigan's natural character the
imagery to develop their themes. The sesquicentennial of Michigan's
statehood in 1987 saw the publication of the Contemporary Michigan
Poetry anthology, the preface to which notes how "the Michigan landscape
ranges from Woodward Avenue [in Detroit] to the Porcupine Mountains."54

Judith Minty, in her anthologized poem "A Sense of Place, " remembers an

 

181
occasion in Northern Michigan when the migration of butterflies provided
an analogue to her own peregrinations across the continent:

Summers ago in Leland, I watched a swimmer

walk out of Lake Michigan, her wet hair gleaming

and her skin, with its coat of oil,

glittering in the sun. Behind her, blue

and stretching to the sky, the water sparkled.
Everything shone, even crystals of sand around our blanket.
That was the month of butterflies, thousands

of monarchs on their way to Mexico--

I don't know how they can make it so far.

Once, in California, I walked

through the eucalyptus trees at night

and heard the whisper of their wings while they slept.55

Shores on the Great Lakes occur frequently as settings in Minty's
poetry; as the edge or transition zone between land and lake ecologies,
the beach is a place of great spiritual significance as well as optimum
biotic diversity. Lake Michigan especially figures in Minty's poems as
a simultaneously beneficent and destructive force whose waters define
both the land and Minty's self. "This lake is cruel," she writes in
beginning the poem entitled "Lake Michigan":

This lake chews at dunes,

bites off chunks of sand,

then ebbs back

as firs lean and topple, their roots

dragging deeper roots

until cellars, kitchens, toilets collapse. .

This lake has a memory. It knows

the fingerprints of my cry.

I strip off my clothes,

fall into the waves. I will

go deep, let it lick my skin,

feel its pulse as we sink together.56
"The fingerprints of my cry" suggests Minty's many references to the
common observation that Michigan's Lower Peninsula has the shape of a
mittened hand. Just as residents of the state will point out locations

and give directions using the palm of the right hand as a map, Minty

asks us, in the title of one poem, to "Look to the Back of the Hand."

 

 

182

This "water hand, this right one, / changed by the will and actions" is
at once "the hand perhaps of an artist" and an "atlas surrounded by
lakes, / full of paths and roads, hills valleys plains."S7 This meta-
phor unites Minty's senses of place and self; she lovingly holds the
Michigan landscape, shaping it with words just as the lakes and rivers
shape it with water. In the poem "Grand Valley," Minty considers the
watershed of the Grand River, the longest Michigan river, as a geograph-
ical and spiritual center for her life and art:

I have slept there with long

extended metaphors, caressed the body of syntax,

kissed simile's ear. Appetites

move with a rhythm like tides. They are

seldom satisfied. We eat, knowing we will be hungry again.

The valley fills the cup of the hand

with its gorges and meadows, its reservoirs

named after lakes. Fish swim there

almost free, tethered by invisible silver cords. They roll

in the river, fold their gills back with the current.
Minty admits that she has learned much by travelling and residing in
distant places: "I have traveled to other cities / to fondle their
books, proposition their young verbs." But knowledge in the abstract
will not sustain her—-"desire dies for weak nouns, for prepositions /
that fall limp into voids"--and she longs for the ground, actual and
mythic, of her being:

It is back to that valley we trudge

when we feel ourselves thinning. Only there

can we dance in the fire, chew raw meat,

distill water from Indian lakes. There, baying at the moon,

we can suck eyes from all the little fish heads.58

The symbolically feminine image of a valley also appears in the

poem "Beginnings," in which Minty speaks to the lake in a tender and

confessional tone: "Oh my mother, I always meant / to sleep close to

your breasts, / in that valley of the old sea."59 The mother figure of

 

 

183
the great freshwater sea becomes in Minty's poetry a power to be feared
as well as loved, as in the poem "In the Presence of Mothers" where we
find ourselves "cradled / at the shore's arm, / we fold into the sweet /
breath of her hum / and dream / through flashes of light. Her fury /
rocks us."60 This ironically gentle fury contrasts with the blind,
purposeless anger of a "fisherman, or madman" in the poem "Destroying
the Cormorant Eggs," based on an actual case in which rookeries of that
rare bird were destroyed on Little Gull Island and Gravelly Island in
Lake Michigan. The act is particularly horrible because of its
calculation; the responsible party evidently had a knowledge of birds:
knowing which eggs, only lovely pale blue,
not the gull's and tern's brown or buff, then
to lift out, hurl against the granite,
to punish them for fishing these waters
to crush them under boot or beat with his stick,
2000 eggs.
Minty conjectures that the culprit was driven by a kind of mad jealousy
against another creature taking sustenance from the lake, "fishing these
waters." What Minty calls the "old hungers," which have consumed so
much of the bioregion's integrity over history, have become suicidal,
when one considers acts against ecology as acts against oneself--a
nightmare:
. a man's dream where he gropes
below the surface, groaning with the old hungers,
the luminescence of his skin now covered by something
so thick his arms stroke heavy with it, the water
without end, and no island, no island in sight.61
Poet Dan Gerber, originally of Fremont, Michigan, provides a
synonym for Minty's "old hungers," Harrison's "acquisitive sense," and

Roethke's "progress of the jaded" in his poem "Speaking to Horses."

Recalling a man in his town who handled horses, "pursuing a life

 

184

technology / and economics had declared defunct. . . . a life in the
present, of caring and slow time," Gerber praises his refusal to concur
with "that progress-driven consensus in its race for prosperity and
oblivion."62 Gerber's poetry poses sensitivity to life-cycles, such as
Michigan's distinct seasonal changes and the passing of generations, as
an alternative to such a displaced worldview. Jim Harrison, who was co-
editor with Gerber of the former Sumac magazine and press, has noted
Gerber's "attention to animal and human life, and to the natural world,
that is generally lost in the sump of ego. . . ."63 From his first
poems, landscape has been one of Gerber's central themes. "In Ruts and
Stars" from his first book, The Revenant (1971), finds him "sitting here
in the woods" contemplating nature's rhythms:

There is no greater truth

than what I see in this landscape

0 ever-returning spring!

each man, this earth

and the way he sees it64
Gerber's Michigan is the rural western side of the Lower Peninsula, a
landscape of "huddled fields and creaking woods"65 which he explores
mostly alone, thinking of family, friends, and the inevitability that he
and they will pass as do the seasons. One recent poem owns a revealing
title, "Moral Concerns," which considering the poem's first stanza could
have been "Mortal Concerns":

More and more I think of winter.

More and more time I spend

with those I love who are gone now.66
Among those people loved and lost is Gerber's father, who plays a
central role in Gerber's poetry. Like Roethke, Gerber finds consolation

for grief in nature's recurrence, perceived in the life of places he and

his father once shared, as in the poem "Adumbratio":

 

 

185

In his death, my father has been wandering
through the forest. He enters a clearing
and stops to ponder the living sweep of the
sky.

Sometimes he takes the form of
a bird or a pebble or the wind's high rejoinder
in the pines. When clouds build over the
afternoon, his shadow dissolves into moss,
lichen, the dry carpet of leaves. I walk
eastward along the bed of a stream where
a stream once was or will be.67

While human relationships in Gerber's poetry are problematic, and
communication always tenuous (from "Afterwords": "We say I love you, /
acknowledging the failure / of whatever there was / to speak for
itself"),68 contact with nature as experienced in particular places is
always a potential restorative, as in "A Clatter of Wings," when the
sound evoked by the title breaks the morning silence over a lake, "and

the world / that has been my world all along, / suddenly has my

69

attention." The locations and the realization of Gerber's early poem

"In Michigan" are characteristic:

Here like the tropics

in summer

in the forest, in the lake

or where the forest ends

a desert of dry grass and stone
over dirt roads, the heat
making you one with

the air

and thus not being one
separate

from that which surrounds you70

"When you're in a landscape," Gerber has said in an interview, "or a
waterscape or a combination thereof you become absorbed in it. You lose
yourself . . . you cease to be aware of yourself as separate from your

71

surroundings." Gerber's experience of nature is informed by Zen

Buddhism, one objective of which is to transcend the ego, or "little

 

 

tbs-I .

II... I

It

 

. ..w—avr-r. .- __

186
self," to assume one's greater being in unity with nature. As Zen
Master Dogen stressed, "to study the self is to forget the self. To
forget the self is to be enlightened by all things."72 The study and

forgetting of self is the theme of Gerber's poem "The Way Back," which

 

begins with the poet locating himself, as in "In Michigan," at the edge
where the forest ends (and begins):

At the edge of the woods, I take off my skis and
sit back against a tree, enjoying the midwinter

sun. The sky, a blue bowl after weeks of grey F”
and listless snow. All day long now I've been watched, i
an intruder, lumbering through the dark trees.

He feels awkward, alien, as one separate from his surroundings until he

 

stops and closes his eyes, so as to be absorbed into the natural
environment. Once he is quiet and still, the animals return, and he can
"see through their eyes, many eyes all / together." There is no "man"
and no "nature," only consciousness and observation; a soaring hawk is
"a white spot against the sky," the skier "a blue spot / against the
snow, borne away by some instinct / from this thing I have been."73
Related to Gerber's Buddhism is the influence on his work of
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, American transcendentalists for whom, as
Emerson wrote, "Nature is the symbol of spirit."74 This philosophical
idealism, by which natural forms and phenomena are perceived as symbols
of an ineffable spiritual reality, concludes Gerber's "I Have Often
Thought with Women," which from a series of erotic reminiscences shifts
to declamation: "It's the pineness of the pine I love, / not its
semblance, / the hardness of the stone, all the way through. . . ."75
These lines echo the "Idealism" section of "Nature," in which Emerson
argues that the "magnitude of material things is relative, and all

objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet."76 Gerber

187

himself cites Emerson in "Solitude in Michigan" (the poem that considers
Michigan as "a water with some land running through it"), in lines that
connect a sublime experience of place (similar to Emerson's "naked
eyeball" epiphany in "Nature") with a transcendental striving to see
through and beyond the beauty of nature:

Emerson said his finest toy

was a woodlot and an axe for opening vistas.

Revelation isn't discovery
but a clearing away of impediments.

 

Coming to the edge of the forest,

the sudden glimpse of a field

fills me with exultation,

and the lone tree out there,

a great dark pine in the evening wind,
calms me

as the night calms the sky.77

 

 

Poetry such as Roethke, Harrison, Minty, and Gerber have written
contributes to the ultimate objective of bioregionalism-~a spiritual
regeneration based on the love of place and landscape. Gary Snyder
argues that

by being in place, we get the largest sense of community. We learn
that community is of spiritual benefit and of health for everyone,
'that ongoing working relationships and shared concerns, music,
poetry, and stories all evolve into the shared practice of a set of
values, vision, and quests.78
This evolution is occuring in Michigan, in schools, in the print media,
even around campfires. At the Stone Circle just north of Elk Rapids,
Michigan, poet Terry Wooten sponsors weekly events in the summer that
can only be described as tribal gatherings. Tourists, children from
youth camps, the young and old, gather at a bonfire inside concentric
rings of boulders to hear professional poets, singers, and storytellers,

and to share their own tall tales and songs. The general rule is that

work must be recited, not read. Wooten himself is a bard in the oral

188

tradition, reciting poetry from hours of material he has committed to
memory. He decided upon his calling in life while hitchhiking through
Death Valley in California one summer as a teenager:

I made a silent pledge to myself

that if I made it

I would become a Michigan poet

and absorb the land, lakes, rivers,

and rhythm of the folk

to the best of my ability.79
For several years now Wooten has done just that, making his living by
bringing poetry to schools and other public forums across the state and
beyond. He fits his performance to the audience, reciting (for example)
classic and modern poetry, children's verse, poems about his youth in
northern Michigan, and versions of Indian myth--including the classic
story explaining the origin of the Sleeping Bear Dunes and the Manitou
Islands, one of the areas most sacred to Michigan's native people.

The oral tradition practiced by Wooten and others is likely to
become more common, as poets seek to expand their audiences. Theodore
Roethke knew his poetry by heart, and his readings have become the stuff
of legend. Gary Snyder considers locally sponsored poetry readings,
either dramatic or subdued, "the pinnacle of poetic activity and
precision"80 because the "decentralization of 'culture' is as important
to our long-range ecological and social health as the decentralization
of agriculture, production, energy, and government."81 Considering as
equal honors his invitations to read the Library of Congress and the
North San Juan (California) Fire Hall, Snyder observes that

if a poet keeps on living in one place, he is going to have to
admit to everyone in town and on the backroad that he write poetry.
To appear locally is to put your own work to the real test--the
lady who delivers the mail might be there, and the head sawyer of

the local mill. What a delight to mix all levels of poems
together, and to see the pleasure in the eyes of the audience when

 

189

a local tree, a local river or mountain, comes swirling forth as
part of protoepic or myth.82

The pleasure for the poet is in reliving the moment of creation, seeing
one's effort to know the land and learn the lore come to fruition, as
generations meet to share history and personal experiences in the place.
In his tenth "Chinese Poem," Dan Gerber recalls a memorable exchange
that took place in Fremont:

When I read my poems to the locals

an old teacher said

"It doesn't seem like writing could be work."

"Only getting ready is work." I laughed.83
-That work is underway across the state of Michigan, by authors in the
wilder north and the variously developed south. Poetry is one element
among many--the water, the air, the soil--that makes Michigan what it
is. Any sustainable political change must begin with a renewal of
culture and a resensitizing to nature. It is up to people, including

poets, to effect this transformation with an informed love of place and

landscape.

 

 

190

 

NOtOI

1These four poets are representative of a growing Michigan
literature. Other well known and prolific poets who often write with a
strong Michigan sense of place are Charles Baxter, Michael Delp, Jack
Driscoll, Janet Kauffman, Thomas Lynch, Stephen Tudor, and Robert
VanderMolen. The first four mentioned have also written outstanding
fiction set in Michigan, as have Jim Harrison and Dan Gerber. Though
urban Michigan is outside the scope of the present study, important
poetic visions of Michigan cities have been written by Jim Daniels,
Murray Jackson, Phillip Levine, and Naomi Long Madgett. Michigan in
Literature by Clarence Andrews (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1992) is a bibliographical survey of the topic. Wayne State University
Press's Great Lakes Books is the best current series of Michigan litera-
ture and history.

2William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos
Wdlliams (New York: New Directions, 1967), 391.

3Dan Gerber, "Solitude in Michigan," as yet unpublished poem.

4Michigan shares this major biotic and cultural division with the
Canadian province of Ontario to the east and the neighboring states of
Wisconsin and Minnesota to the west; the distinction is quite evident on
maps showing soil type, forest cover, land use, or population density.
James R. Shortridge traces the line of transition, "separating a
traditionally agricultural southern sector from a northland of lumber
mills, mines, and more recently, tourism," westward from Bay City,
Michigan on Saginaw Bay:

It passes just north of the Grand River, intercepts Lake Michigan
at Muskegon and Manitowoc [Wisconsin], and then follows the Fox
River southwest to Portage, Wisconsin. Some observers have said
that the line continues west from Portage along the Wisconsin River
to the Mississippi, but others opt for a northwesterly tack. . . .

(This transition zone includes Aldo Leopold's Wisconsin farm, described
in A Sand County Almanac. See Chapter 4, above).

Because the central perceptual definition of the Midwest is
pastoral, the mixed economy states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota
are perceptually less Midwestern than states closer to the region's
perceptual core in Iowa. Michigan has a particularly complex regional
identity: Midwestern, Eastern industrial, Great Lakes, north woods, and
so forth. Of course, regions are defined not only by their cores but by
their peripheries; Michigan is part of the "Upper Midwest," or in
Shortridge's phrase, the Midwestern "Northern Fringe." James R.
Shortridge, The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture (Lawrence,
KS: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 109-110.

5Bruce Catton, waiting for the Morning Train (Garden City:
Doubleday, 1972; reprint Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987),
1-2.

6Roethke's images of nature and place are both literal and

 

 

 

 

Fl,

191

 

symbolic, as in his noted poem "In a Dark Time": "That place among the
rocks--is it a cave, / Or winding path? The edge is what I have"
Theodore Roethke, "In a Dark Time," The Collected Poems of Theodore
Roethke (hereafter Collected), (Garden City: Anchor / Doubleday, 1975),
231. The edge is an ecotone, or ecological transition zone in nature,
as well as a psychological frontier.

7Allan Seager, The Glass HOuse: The Life of Theodore Roethke
(hereafter Glass Heuse), (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968; reprint Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 90-91.

8Theodore Roethke, On the Poet and His Craft (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1965), 7.

9Theodore Roethke, The Selected Letters of Theodore Roethke
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 90-91.

loRoethke, On the Poet and His Craft, 8. Roethke portrays his
father Otto as a variant of the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, whose
pastoral middlescape is largely indoors, within glass.

11Theodore Roethke, "The Rose," The Collected Poems of Theodore
Roethke (hereafter Collected), (Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975),
196.

12T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1970), 189.

13Roethke, "The Longing," Collected, 183.
14Roethke, "The Far Field, Collected, 193-195.
15Roethke, "Idyll," Collected, 31.

l6Roethke, "Highway: Michigan," Collected, 31.
l7Roethke, "Moss Gathering," Collected, 38.
18Roethke, "Highway: Michigan," Collected, 31.
19Roethke, "The Waking," Collected, 104.

20William Carlos Williams, as Seager tells us, was instrumental in
encouraging Roethke to abandon the terse, formal, rather abstract voice
of his first book, Open HOuse (1941), and to undertake the stylistic
experimentation which led to the vivid and deeply personal "greenhouse
poems" of The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948). Seager, Glass House,
148, 154. Roethke and Williams corresponded and often met at writers'
conferences.

21Roethke, "On the Road to Woodlawn," Collected, 21.
22Roethke, "The Lost Son," Collected, 50-51.
23Roethke, "The Premonition," Collected, 6.
24Roethke, "The Lost Son," Collected, 55.

25Roethke, "Meditation at Oyster River," Collected, 184-186.

 

192

 

26Roethke, "Journey to the Interior," Collected, 187-189.

27Lisel Mueller, "Versions of Reality" (Review of Locations by Jim
Harrison and books by other poets), Poetry 117 (February 1971): 322.

28Jim Harrison, correspondence with author, September 29, 1989.

29Harrison made a reputation for himself as a poet before
publishing his first novel, Nblf. He has since become more famous for
his fiction, much of which is set in Michigan. The following works of
Harrison fiction are at least partially set in Michigan: the novels wolf
(1971), Farmer (1976), warlock (1981), Sundog (1984), and "Brown Dog,"
one of three novellas in The woman Lit By Fireflies (1990). The
experience of landscape and place is as important in Harrison's fiction
as in his poetry; Farmer, for example, is a pastoral comparable to the
Nebraska novels of Willa Cather in its interweaving of characterization,
conflict, and rural and wild landscapes. Many of Harrison's journal-
istic and literary essays, collected in Just Before Dark (1991), also
deal with Michigan life and landscape.

 

‘ _3

30Jim Harrison, "Northern Michigan," Selected and.New Poems _
(hereafter Selected) (New York: Delacorte / Lawrence, 1982), 9. V”

 

31Roethke, "The Far Field," Collected, 193.
32Harrison, "Northern Michigan," Selected, 9.
33Jim Harrison, wolf (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 18.

34Jim Harrison, "Passacaglia on Getting Lost," (hereafter
"Passacaglia") Just Before Dark (Livingston, MT: Clark City, 1991), 263.

35Gary Snyder, "The Real Work," The Real Wbrk: Interviews and
Talks, 1964-1979. (New York: New Directions, 1980), 62.

36Harrison, "Passacaglia," Just Before Dark, 262-263.
37Harrison, "Walking," Selected, 31.

38Harrison, "Passacaglia," Just Before Dark, 263.
39Harrison, "Walking," Selected, 32.

40Roethke, "The Long Waters," Collected, 192.

41Jim Harrison, "The Theory and Practice of Rivers," The Theory
and Practice of Rivers and New Poems (hereafter "Rivers"), (Livingston,
MT: Clark City, 1989), 3.

42Harrison, "Passacaglia," Just Before Dark, 262-263.
43Harrison, "Rivers," Rivers, 20.

44Ibid., 15-16.

4SHarrison, Wblf, 18.

46Harrison, "Passacaglia," Just Before Dark, 264.

47Ibid., 262.

193

 

48Roethke, "The Longing," Collected, 183.

49Harrison, "Passacaglia," Just Before Dark, 264-265.
50Harrison, "Sketch for a Job Application Blank," Selected, 4.
51Roethke, On the Poet and His Craft, 8.

52Gary Snyder, "Dusty Braces," Turtle Island (New York: New
Directions, 1974), 75.

53Harrison, "Rivers," Rivers, 17.

54Michael Delp, Conrad Hilberry, and Herbert Scott, eds.,
Contemporary Michigan Poetry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1988), 19.

55Judith Minty, "A Sense of Place," Delp et al. 214.

56Judith Minty, "Lake Michigan," Lake Songs and Other Fears
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 7.

57Judith Minty, "Look to the Back of the Hand," In the Presence of
Mbthers (hereafter Mothers), (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1981), ll.

58Minty, "Grand Valley," Mothers, 35.

59Minty, "Beginnings," Mothers, 7.

60"In the Presence of Mothers," Mbthers, 69.

61Minty, "Destroying the Cormorant Eggs," Delp et al., 211. See
also Minty's long poem Counting the Losses (Aptos, CA: Jazz, 1986), a
meditation on place, sexuality and gender roles, relationships with
family and friends, and death. In that poem, Minty recalls her child-
hood in Detroit and experiences in Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula and
Yellow Dog River country. The Yellow Dog is also the scene of Minty's
Yellow Dog Journals (1979), poems resulting from a Walden-like retreat
to a cabin in the Upper Peninsula.

62Dan Gerber, "Speaking to Horses," A Last Bridge Heme: New and
Selected Poems (hereafter Last Bridge), (Livingston, MT: Clark City,
1992), 83.

63Jim Harrison, dust jacket of Gerber's Last Bridge.

64Gerber, "In Ruts and Stars," Last Bridge, 14.

65Gerber, "Return," Last Bridge, 85.

66Gerber, "Moral Concerns," Last Bridge, 160.

67Gerber, "Adumbratio," Last Bridge, 128.

68Gerber, "Afterwords," Last Bridge, 123.

69Gerber, "A Clatter of Wings," Last Bridge, 140.

7°Gerber, "In Michigan," Last Bridge, 4.

 

 

194

 

71William Barillas, "An Interview with Dan Gerber," Passages North
13, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 23.

72Dogen Kigen, cited in Stephen Mitchell, ed., The Enlightened
Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry (New York: Harper & Row, 1989),
157.

73Gerber, "The Way Back," Last Bridge, 81.

74Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," Essays and Lectures (New York:
Library of America, 1983), 20. A famous example of philosophical
idealism in American poetry is the sixth section of Whitman's "Song of
Myself," beginning "A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me
with full / hands. . . ." Whitman ends a catalog of speculations about
what the grass symbolizes by stating that

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,

And ceas'd the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward-~nothing collapses;

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Poetry and Prose (New York:

Library of America, 1982), 192-194.

Given Roethke's botanical affinities and explicit allusion to Whitman
("Be with me, Whitman, maker of catalogues"; Roethke, "The Abyss,"
Collected, 212), the passage would have made a fitting epigraph for
Roethke's collected poems.

Gerber's work shows strong affinities with major Midwestern
writers whose transcendentalist feelings about nature and culture were
deeply influenced by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman: Grass Fires (1987),
his book of short stories, echoes Sherwood Anderson and Willa Cather in
its representation of Midwestern small town life. Anderson is a
particularly important antecedent for Gerber because of both authors'
experience in corporate industry--Gerber was heir to the baby food
company founded by his grandfather and father. While he did not
renounce the life of business so emphatically as did Anderson, he did
decline to pursue a full time career that would have included presidency
of the firm. Gerber's first novel, American Atlas (1973), is a comedy
(set partly in Michigan) involving a heir to a major pie company who
does renounce all family and corporate expectations. In Gerber's most
recent novel, A Vbice from the River (1990), the retired president of a
fictional Michigan lumber company reevaluates his life after reading
Thoreau and resolves to vivify his atropied spiritual life. The
conflicts of these fictions echo the concerns of Sherwood Anderson, who
also knew American business at first hand.

Two contemporary poets in the American transcendental tradition,
Robert Bly and James Wright, are important recent antecedents to
Gerber's poetry. Gerber's Snow on the Backs of Animals is resonant with
Bly's first book, Silence in the snowy Fields, not in title alone. The
poem "Dogwood," from the "New" section of Last Bridge, concludes with an
image of a "rust-rimmed hole in an old board / lying out in the summer
grass" (Gerber, "Dogwood," Last Bridge, 152) that echoes Bly's poem "Old
Boards":

I love to see boards lying on the ground in early spring
The ground beneath them is wet, and muddy—-
Perhaps covered with chicken tracks--

 

 

195

And they are dry and eternal.

Robert Bly, "Old Boards," Silence in the Snowy Fields.

(Hanover,
NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 58.

Aldo Leopold used the same image:

The autobiography of an old board is a kind of literature not yet
taught on campuses, but any riverbank farm is a library where he

who hammers or saws may read at will. Come high water, there is
always an accession of new books.

Aldo Leopold, "Come High Water," in A Sand County Almanac with

Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York: Ballantine,
1970), 27.

The recurrence of this image is partly a matter of coincidence, partly
of osmotic influence (Bly's was an important book to Gerber's poetic
generation), and partly of a shared regional affinity for the spiritual

symbolism of ordinary and humble things, from boards and chicken tracks
to people and landscapes.

75Gerber, "I Have Often Thought with Women," Last Bridge, 150.
76Emerson, "Nature," Essays and Lectures, 35.

77Gerber, "Solitude in Michigan."

78Snyder, "The Bioregional Ethic," Real work, 141.

79Terry Wooten, "Emergency Message," Jutting Out into the water
(Kewadin, MI: Stone Circle, 1991), unpaginated.

80Snyder, "Poetry, Community & Climax," Real work, 164.

31Ibid., 169.

82Ibid., 168.

83Gerber, "Chinese Poem" number 10, Last Bridge, 59.

 

 

Conclusion

In his essay "The Spirit of Place," novelist Larry Woiwode recalls
Theodore Roethke's observation in "The Rose" of "those to whom place is
unimportant," citing lines from that poem that distance Roethke from
such company. Having lived and written fiction set in a number of
places, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and New York City, Woiwode has
returned to his own place of origin, North Dakota: "not a North Dakota
of the mind, or a visitor's or Easterner's misconception of it, nor one
you may encounter in a general book about the Great Plains, but a real
place; a region, perhaps: now my home."1 Against the homogenizing power
of the mass media and distant market forces, Woiwode defends regional
and local awareness, offering a familiar argument for the spiritual
function of language and literature:

I write about an infinitely smaller region than North Dakota;
actually about the size of a fist: the heart. . . . I believe
that American writing now stands at the threshold of being able to
speak of the habitations of spirituality, or the lack of them,
within the human heart as in no other period in history. And if
those of us at the center of America can retain what we presently
possess or, even better, turn farther inward toward what we've
inherited, clearing away the falseness and superficiality that is
constantly and electronically beamed into us from either coast, as
if by its repetitiveness it could become the truth, and approach
the land and the people who live on it as our ancestors did, with
the cautious reverence of mutual regard, then I believe that a new
form of expression, if not a new manner of literature, could, by
the grace of God, be created for any generations who might come
historically after us and wish to listen to our voices speak the
truth to them about the places we have inhabited and that inhabit
us through the unmerited gift of particular love.2

Woiwode lyrically recapitulates the same hope for Midwestern culture
that Sherwood Anderson and Willa Cather expressed three quarters of a

196

 

L...

 

 

197
century earlier: that people would love, understand, and sustain the
life around them and not unnecessarily elevate the pursuit of wealth,
fashion, and technology. The difference between Woiwode and his
predecessors is that he has their work to refer to as example and
encouragement. The literary map of the American Midwest features a
number of major landmarks, including Roethke's Saginaw, as well as
Anderson's Clyde, Ohio, Cather's Red Cloud, Nebraska, among others. The
authors who first brought the muse to these patria struggled to affirm
the literary value of their native ground; the task before Woiwode, his
contemporaries, and succeeding generations is to be worthy of an already
rich regional tradition.

One expression of contemporary interest in regional culture is the
publication of regional and state literary anthologies, particularly of
poetry, the genre best lending itself to such treatment. Popular col-
lections including Heartland: Poets of the Midwest (1967) and Heartland
II (1975), edited by poet and translator Lucien Stryk, serve what Stryk
calls "a uniquely spiritual purpose: to raise men to an awareness of the
wonders around them, the perennial gift of poetry wherever it is made."3
Yet the introductions to these volumes are often marked by a curiously
apologetic tone, such as David Wagoner strikes in The Third Coast:
Contemporary Michigan Poetry (1976):

A Michigan poet may be undistinguishable [sic] from an Illinois
poet or an Arizona poet (except for subject matter), but the publi-
cation of this anthology serves to underline one layer of regional
cultural strength, even though these are not "regional poets."4
Wagoner correctly recognizes, as Stryk writes, "that to be an effective

writer a poet need not respond constantly to place and that there are

some whose works do not in the least suggest where they happen to be

 

 

198

produced. . . ."5 But what of writers who are distinguishable from
others elsewhere, who speak to the exigencies of citizenship in local
communities, both human and natural? And why should "subject matter" be
whispered in parentheses, as if the content, origin, and inspiration of
a literary work are secondary considerations? Why is there such
resistance to regionalism and sense of place as conceptual approaches to
literature?

There are a number of reasons for this situation. One is the
understandable desire of writers for recognition beyond their homelands.

They wish for favorable judgement of their work on aesthetic grounds,

 

and to win a larger readership. In the United States, that usually
means being accepted by literary critics and publishers on the ocean
coasts, particularly New York, where the label "regional" wins friends
for no one. Jim Harrison, whose writing has won grudging acceptance
from the Eastern establishment (largely due to his wide popularity and

growing international reputation), goes so far as to say "there's no

 

such thing as regional literature," but his subsequent remarks suggest

that he means "regional" as understood (or misunderstood) by certain New

York intellectuals:
In the view of those on the Eastern seaboard, everything which is
not amorphous, anything that has any peculiarities of geography, is
considered regional fiction, whereas if it's from New York, it's
evidently supposed to be mainstream. . . . years ago it struck me
that the Upper East Side of New York was constitutionally the most
provincial place I'd ever been.6

Such ignorance in the guise of cosmopolitanism led one New York

publisher to reject A River Runs Through It (1976), Norman Maclean's now

classic collection of stories about his Montana youth, because there

were trees in Maclean's book. That sort of story can be attributed to

199
what Paul Shepard terms "an urban attitude toward nature which is
insular, cultivated, ignorant, dilettante, and sophisticated."7 Among
intellectuals on the heavily urbanized Atlantic and Pacific coasts of
the United States, there is a tendency to view the continental interior
(which is rural and wild as well as urban) as a hinterland, its people
as "flyovers," and its culture and literature as "regional"--that is,
limited in importance to its place of origin.

This cosmopolitan provinciality is not limited to New York, nor to
literary critics who ignore writing from west of Pittsburgh. When a
writer of unquestionable importance emerges from the Midwest (or the
South or West, for that matter), there are critics everywhere ready to
deny the regional dimension of his or her work. Such critics stress an
author's style and relation to the literary canon at the expense of
historical and geographical considerations; they seek to claim writers,
even those with deep attachments to particular places, for the world of
ideas, the rarefied realm of literature. One such critic is Kathy
Callaway, as suggested by her 1983 Parnassus article on James Wright's
This Journey. After elucidating Wright's book in terms of a European
"iconography" (in particular, the Roman past of the poet's beloved
Italy), Callaway dismisses "poetry of place"—-a phrase that Wright
himself found useful--in a particularly revealing manner:

Poetry of place? Not in the sense of regionalism with which it's
usually applied. "Regionalism" has no meaning in poetry. Regional
poems are local messages, and the label of "regional poet" applied
to writers of the stature and complexity of James Wright . . . is
insulting and incorrect. What's more it ignores a fact we've been
ignoring ever since that fact became uncomfortable: that major
American writers are still being nourished by something not
American. . . . Among poets and their serious readers there is no

room for xenophobia-~a special danger in circles that like to talk
about regionalism.

 

 

200
In the considerable body of scholarship on Wright, it would be hard to
find a reference to him as a "regional poet." Many critics have
discussed regionalism as an aspect of Wright's poetry, in which localism
of imagery and idiom complements and even validates his broad range of
cultural reference. In accusing those who "like to talk about region-
alism" of being reductive, Callaway is herself reductive——she denies the

importance of a writer to his human community:

Supposed poets of place like James Wright . . . seem to have
located their dynamos wherever they felt it, on terra firma that
Martins Ferry . . . would never have understood-~past a literal

reading of the iconography, which looked like a moral, and wasn't.
Those readers and fellow-poets who hoped to use Wright and other
"poets of place" to shore up their own spiritual uneasiness are
going to have to let them go.
Callaway's argument is essentially modernist, as I have defined the term
in Chapter 1--her attitude is cosmopolitan and intellectual, her
aesthetics formalist and elitist, her own senses of place and time
Eurocentric and linear:
There is, I think, a spirit of place. Although a person or an
animal or even an insect can carry it, it most often exudes from
those human locales where trouble and thought and attention of the
have impressed the stones for several millennia, through more than
one culture, more than one people. . . . It takes considerably
more than two hundred years . . . to impress a stone.
Callaway here espouses the outdated landscape aesthetic of early nine-
teenth century Europe, which valued places with ruins and towers from
centuries past as the ideal inspiration for art. Figures such as Thomas
Cole and Ralph Waldo Emerson countered the contention that America had
no history by celebrating the newness of its culture and the wildness of
its terrain. Wright's problem was quite the opposite--by his lifetime,

America had a history, and the ruins to show it: the strip mines and

factories of Martins Ferry which so often palsied Wright in his effort

 

201
to embrace the American landscape. Claiming a culturally subservient
role for Americans, who in her view "so love and envy" Europeans,
Callaway argues for Wright's poems as "examples of the American's only
way of having any history, of taking part in the larger, slower pageant
of peoples."8 Wright does indeed take part in that pageant, as shown by
his long and fruitful meditation on Roman poetry and landscape. Yet his
primary "way of having a history," like other American neo—romantics, is
the transformation of local particularities into symbolically rich and
thematically universal art. His relationship with the great traditions
was one of joyful participation, not fawning admiration.
A special danger among those who denigrate regionalism is
aestheticism, in the negative sense of "art for art's sake." Wendell
Berry speaks of a "Territory of artistic primacy or autonomy, in which
it is assumed that no value is inherent in subjects but that value is
conferred upon objects by the art and the attention of the artist."9
This "Territory" is coterminous with Callaway's "Terra Firma" and the
"common ground" that editor Mark Sanders seeks to establish in his
anthology and study of four important Nebraska poets:
Not one of these poets will be remembered by where he lived; not
one of these poems will be remembered by where it was created. I
would rather think the worth of the poem is due to its intrinsic
qualities, the stuff in the verse. . . . the common ground is the
immutable perception of each poet, that drive to see and explain in
terms that create the image of knowing.10

No one denies the importance of close textual reading in literary study;

as mid-twentieth century "New Critics" properly admonished, scholars

should respect texts for their form, and give the poem itself the first

and last say. But formalist and aestheticist approaches risk abnegating

the moral and cultural function of art, including its role in creating a

 

202
sense of responsibility and love for nature and place. Leonard Lutwack,
who believes that the "maturation of an individual is not possible
without the successive abandonment of places," concludes The Role of
Place in Literature by calling for an "accommodation with placeless-
ness"11 on the part of writers and society. For such ecologically
defeatist (and ultimately amoral) rhetoric, Wendell Berry's defiant
localism may be the best tonic:
The test of imagination, ultimately, is not the territory of art or
the territory of the mind, but the territory underfoot. To assume
that the context of literature is "the literary world" is . . .
simply wrong. That its real habitat is the household and the com-
munity--that it can and does affect, even in practical ways, the
life of a place--may not be recognized by most theorists and
critics for a while yet. But they will finally come to it, because
finally they will have to. And when they do, they will renew the
study of literature and restore it to importance.12
Berry's defense of the referentiality and purposiveness of
literary art is in direct line with the spiritual and democratic ideals
of American Romanticism, which held the individual experience of nature
in primary regard, with books and all other art playing a supporting
role. The same refrain repeatedly emerges in Nature, walden, and Leaves
of Grass: that any sensitive individual may perceive the sacredness of
nature; that anyone, as Whitman says, "pocketless of a dime, may pur-
chase the pick of the earth, / And to glance with an eye, or show a bean
in its pod, confounds the learning of all times. . . ."13 In a similar
but more critical vein, Emerson complains in The American Scholar that
"instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm":
Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as
related to nature and the human constitution, but as making sort of
a Third Estate with the world and the soul. . . . Books are the
best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the

right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect?
They are for nothing but to inspire.14

 

 

203

Emerson's ideal intellectual is a Man or Woman Thinking who has been
inspired by books (ironically enough) to leave books behind and go
directly to nature for its deeper tuition. If so moved, he or she will
write poems, essays, and fictions that invite readers to do the same,
perpetuating the relation of literature, nature, and location.

Midwestern authors concerned with place participate in such a
continuum with the Transcendentalists, as their frequent citations of
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman attest. Cather titled O Pioneers! as a
nod to Whitman; Leopold alludes to Emerson's late essay "Civilization"
on the very first page of his "Almanac"; Roethke and Wright both address
Whitman in their lines--an impulse shared by Dan Gerber, who confesses a
desire "to talk with Whitman / of the origin of poems."15 These
references speak to a broader cultural relationship between the Midwest
and the east coast. The first major American settlement in the Midwest
was by people from New York and New England, whose belief in free labor,
agrarianism, and education provided the basis for all future social
development in the region. Political division by township, Greek
Revival architecture, and liberal arts colleges founded by Yale grad-
uates are visible reminders of what historian Thomas J. Schlereth calls
"the New England presence on the Midwest landscape."16 The persistant
Romanticism of certain Midwestern authors--their reverence for place and
nature, their individualism and egalitarianism--as well as explicit
allusions to their Eastern literary forebears is evidence of the
continuing New England presence on the Midwestern literary landscape.

A region, of course, is known by its cultural singularity as well
as by its relationship to other traditions. That Midwestern authors are

beginning to allude to Midwestern precursors and to acknowledge their

 

204
influence suggests an increasing regional self-awareness. In her poem
"Counting the Losses," for example, Judith Minty approvingly quotes
James Wright on the writer's sense of place. Wright himself used
dialogue from Hemingway's story "The Killers" as the epigraph for Two
Citizens; one of the epigraphs for To a Blossoming Pear Tree is from
Sherwood Anderson's Midamerican Chants--a stanza that speaks of being

17 Awareness of

"long alone in a strange place where no gods came."
tradition-~regional or otherwise--enables an artist to feel less alone,
to perceive his or her place as numinously familiar rather than strange,
thereby summoning the gods. The central message of literary topophilia
is spiritual; it teaches us, as Gary Snyder encourages, "that community
is of spiritual benefit and of health for everyone, that ongoing working
relationships and shared concerns, music, poetry, and stories all evolve
into the shared practice of a set of values, visions, and quests."18
This commitment to human ecology and natural communities, rather than a
merely aesthetic awareness of environment, is the true meaning of a
"spirit of place."

Midwestern authors of place-~the likes of Willa Cather, Aldo
Leopold, James Wright, Theodore Roethke, and their literary descendants
--sustain the region's spirit of place: the pastoral ideal of a predomi-
nantly agrarian landscape where natural processes of birth, growth, and
death are the immediate context of human life. In opposition to the
dominant American worldview, which thinks of nature as an abstract
other, as a mine from which to extract material wealth, these writers
speak of human nature in unity with the land. Having married nature for

vision rather than possession (to invoke Robert Bly's terminology). they

value places for their intrinsic beauty and organic integrity, as well

205
as for what the phenomenal world of biology and geography reveals of the
nouminal world within and beyond. In the individual's spiritually
charged experience of place--represented in Midwestern literature by
Cather's Alexandra on the Divide, Leopold hunting in a Illinois marsh,
Wright releasing milkweed seeds to float across the prairie, Roethke
collecting moss in a Saginaw forest-~aesthetic and moral imperatives
originate that are essential to the political defense of natural and
cultural diversity. We cannot sustain what we do not love and respect,
and these writers, visionaries all, show us how to cherish our

inheritance of the land we live upon--the land that lives within us.

Notes

 

1Larry Woiwode, "The Spirit of Place," in Inheriting the Land:
Contemporary voices from the Midwest, ed. Mark Vinz and Thom Tammaro
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 53.

2Ibid., 65.

3Lucien Stryk, Heartland II: Poets of the Midwest (DeKalb, IL:
Northern Illinois University Press, 1975), xxiii.

4David Wagoner, "Preface," The Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan
Poetry, ed. Conrad Hilberry, Herbert Scott, and James Tipton (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1976), 15.

SStryk, Heartland II, xviii.

6Jim Fergus, "The Art of Fiction CIV: Jim Harrison" (interview)
Paris Review 107 (1988): 64.

7Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the
Esthetics of Nature (New York: Knopf, 1967), 64.

8Kathy Callaway, "The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Fano: James
Wright's This JOurney," in James wright: The Heart of the Light, ed.
Peter Stitt and Frank Graziano (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1990), 403-405.

9Wendell Berry, "Writer and Region," in What Are People For? (San
Francisco: North Point, 1990), 82.

10Mark Sanders, "Foreword," in On Common Ground: The Poetry of
William Kloefkorn, Ted Kooser, Greg KUzma, and Don welch, ed. Mark
Sanders and J.V. Brummels (0rd, NE: Sandhills, 1983), 15.

11Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1984), 236.

12Berry, "Writer and Region," What Are People For?, 83-84.

13Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" verse 48, Poetry and Prose (New
York: Library of America, 1982), 244.

14Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," in Essays and
Lectures (New York: Library of American, 1983), 57.

15Leopold's Emersonian allusion occurs in his description of a
skunk track, which "leads straight across country, as if its maker had
hitched his wagon to a star and dropped the reins." Aldo Leopold,
"January," A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 3;

206

207

 

Roethke addresses Whitman in "The Abyss": "Be with me, Whitman, maker of
catalogues." Theodore Roethke, "The Abyss," The Collected Poems of
Theodore Roethke (Garden City: Anchor / Doubleday, 1975), 212; Dan
Gerber, "A Fine Excess," A Last Bridge Heme:.New and Selected Poems
(Livingston, MT: Clark City, 1992), 50.

16Thomas J. Schlereth, "The New England Presence on the Midwest
Landscape," The Old Northwest 9, no. 2 (Summer 1983).

17Judith Minty, Counting the Losses (Aptos, CA: Jazz, 1986), 9.
Minty cites James Wright, "The Pure Clear Word: An Interview with Dave
Smith," in Collected Prose (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
1983), 194; James Wright, Two Citizens, in Above the River: The Complete
Poems (New York: Noonday and University Press of New England, 1990),
221; Wright, To a Blossoming Pear Tree, in Above the River, 282.

18Gary Snyder, "The Bioregional Ethic," in The Real work:
Interviews & Talks 1964-1979 (New York: New Directions, 1980), 141.

 

 

 

 

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