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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

Of Weavers and Warriors: Peace and Destruction in the Epic Tradition

A Tradition of Male Poetics: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as an Allegory of Art

Power and Intuition: A Comparison of Women's Perception as Reflected in the Heroines of Henry Adams and John W. De Forest

A Love Supreme: Jazz and the Poetry of Hayden Carruth

Thomas Jefferson's "Poor Woman": A Symbol of Sentiment or Social Inequality?

On Autobiography and Myth: Puer and Senex

POEMS

Earth

Bass Boat Fishing Trip

Wilson's Creek Battlefield, Green County, Missouri

Codex Rescriptus

Finally in February

Settlement

Ptolemy's Survivors Begin to Regret Their Apostasy as the Stars and Planets Degenerate into Mathematics

Weather

On Behalf Of Myself And The Crew Of

The Coronation

Mother Never Sings

Magritte, Study for Luna

Two Seasons

Canine Day

April 29, 1997

REVIEWS

Jonathan Kozol; Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson; The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism

Abstract

VICTORIA WODZAK elegantly limns the distance, interaction, and tension between warriors and weavers, the heroic code and the domestic code, in classical epics, notably those of Homer and Beowulf. Wodzak is a Ph.D. candidate in the English program of the University of Missouri-Columbia, teaches composition for that Department, and not least is the mother of seven children, ages one to sixteen, to whom she attributes at least part of the inspiration for her essay. This is her first published scholarly work.

A. JAMES WOHLPART discusses the deft use Mary Shelley made of Frankenstein to comment on the isolation of both Percy Shelley and Lord Byron from feminine influence and of the misbegotten result of the lack of domestic affection. Leader for the English Program and Coordinator for the Humanities Cluster at Florida Gulf Coast University, Wohlpart has published papers on Hawthorne, Whitman, Douglass, Byrd, Eliot, and Joyce, in a variety of scholarly journals. He is currently working on a book-length development of Hawthorne's theory of fiction as a response to the interaction of political and cultural forces in antebellum America.

B. H. GILLEY compares Henry Adams and John W. De Forest on the capacity of women for social and political perception, on their recognition and exercise of power, and by extension, on their entitlement to intellectual freedom and enhanced expression of personality. Though different in their treatment of the subject and unclear just how this outcome might be realized, both transcended the traditional image of Victorian womanhood. McGinty Professor of History at Louisiana Tech University, Gilley edits McGinty Publications and the McGinty Monograph Series on Louisiana history and has published essays and presented papers on many subjects, most of them on Louisiana history and late-19th century American writers.

MATTHEW MILLER thoughtfully explores the verse of Hayden Carruth, finding its themes in the great instability of self-identity, the dynamic process by which we continually realign ourselves to changing relationships with people and ideas, and amply demonstrates how both spontaneity and hard work have fused with a jazz approach to make poetry of vision and wonder. A graduate student at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Miller has had poems and reviews published in a number of journals.

LAURA LEE WASHBURN is a poet-in-residence at Pittsburg State University for the 1997-98 academic year, where she is teaching creative writing and literature. The three poems in this issue are her first poems to appear in the The Midwest Quarterly. She has been invited to be guest poetry editor of the Summer 1998 issue. Ms. Washburn's chapbook, Watching the Contortionists, appeared in 1996 from Palanquin Press, University of South Carolina at Aiken. Her poems have appeared or will be appearing in such journals as Quarterly West, The Sun, and Yellow Silk. Ms. Washburn studied for her B. A. at Old Dominion University on the Virginia coast and went to the desert for her M. F. A. at Arizona State University. She attended Breadloaf in 1990 on a working scholarship and in 1997 received the John Williams Andrews Narrative Poetry Award from Poet Lore.

PRISCILLA ATKINS has published poetry in Passages North, The Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives and works in Holland, Michigan.

ERIC GARDNER, Saginaw, Michigan, reports that he teaches, writes, reads, listens, and gets paid for some of each. His poetry has appeared in several magazines, including Plainsongs and Willow Review.

KIM HORNER has published poetry in Poem, Potpourri, and Georgetown Review, and short fiction in Midland Review. She lives in Joplin, Missouri, where she teaches at Missouri Southern State College.

MICHAEL HUDSON, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, works as a sales coordinator for a "cherry picker" manufacturing company. His poems have appeared recently in New Orleans Review, Poetry East, Lullwater review, and other journals.

GARY LECHLITER has published in Coal City Review, Poetry Motel, Poem, and other magazines. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, and works as a vocational rehabilitation specialist in Topeka. Mr. Lechliter is a Psychology alum of Pittsburg State University.

ROBERT LEE, Austin, Texas, has published a poem in Borderlands. He won the 1997 Andrew Julius Gutow Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets.

SUSAN MARSHALL holds a James A. Michener Fellowship in poetryat the Texas Center for Writers in Austin. She is a volunteer editor of Borderlands, and has published poems in 100 Words, a recent Calyx anthology, di verse city, Borderlands, and American Writing. She also writes fiction and works in the visual arts.

DENNIS SALEH's recent chapbook, This Is Not Surrealism, won the first Willamette River Books chapbook competition. His poetry, prose, and artwork appear most regularly in Art/Life, Caprice, Lucia Stone, and Santa Barbara Review.

JAMES SCOFIELD lives and writes in Olympia, Washington, His poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly. A collection of Mr. Scofield's poems will be featured in the Fall 1998 issue.

LAUREN SMITH, Champaign, Illinois, is a poet, essayist, and teacher. Her book, Swaying, a collection of essays on intercultural marriage, was published by the University of Iowa Press.

RON WALLACE's sixth collection of poems, the Uses of Adversity, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburg Press. He directs the Creative Writing Program at the Universtiy of Wisconsin-Madison and is editor of the Wisconsin Press poetry series.

ARTHUR SCHEER examines Thomas Jefferson's celebration of equality in America and poverty in Europe as a means of assessing the current fashion of denigrating the third president's commitment to equality and belief in the sentiments his eloquence emblazoned as the epitome of the American Revolution. A frequent contributor of essays for this journal, on an astonishing variety of topics, Scheer teaches in the Department of History at Bronx Community College, has been a social worker in New York, and seived on many historical editing projects, such as The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, The Papers of Robert Morris, and The Diaries of Elizabeth Drinker. His articles have appeared in diverse historical, psychoanalytic, and literary journals, such as Mid-America, Eighteenth-Century Life, American Imago, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and The Psychoanalytic Review. He has asked that this article be dedicated to the memory of his parents, Belle and Saul Scheer, who died together in August 1994.

NANCY CLASBY reveals the play of puer (the ego's drive for power and self-control, birth of separate identity) and senex (both the positive, an attempt at self-knowledge, and the negative, intolerance, detachment) as exemplified in the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass. Clasby is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. Among her recent publications are articles on Native American myth, Flannery O'Connor, and Karl Rahner's theology of symbols. She is currently working on a book-length treatment of scared myth in American literature.

ADONNA ZORDEL HELMIG is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Pittsburg State University. She recently gave the opening address for the Tri-County Women's fall symposium for Ottawa, Delaware, and Craig counties in Oklahoma.

KENNETH ROBBINS, Professor of Theatre at the University of South Dakota, has written award-winning novels and plays. Some of his writing has reflected the influence of his international travels. In addition, he has done some theatrical directing.

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