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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

The Role of the Mexican Revolution in Contemporary American Policy

Women and the Family in the U. S. S. R.

Reactionary Rebels: Agrarians in Defense of the South

Billy Budd: Melville's Paradise Lost

Melville's Judgement on Captain Vere

VERSE

(S)Ages Apart in a College Bar

The Drowned Man's Plea to the River

Deer Park in Winter

At Shinyodo

Object and Shadow in Fours and Fives

City Landscape

Predicament

Interruption

Quilacahuin

Two Ways to Retort to a Woman's Bad Mood

The Other Room

Love's Distance

Abstract

in this issue. . .

TAKING UP our pen on the afternoon of election day, we are more than commonly aware of the suspense, the troubled uncertainty, on the threshold of what we feel in our marrow will prove to be a new age. Of course we could wait until tomorrow and put one minor suspense behind us, that is, the identity of our new president; but, partisan as we were in casting our ballot, and stoutly as we cheered one man in preference to another, we are nevertheless of the opinion that the new president will have little more effect on the strong tides now running than did old King Canute when he ordered the tide to come so far and no farther. There is that finger on the nuclear button, we will be reminded. Perhaps, perhaps. Yet we still incline to think that this dread power would paralyze the hand that reached for it. And if not, then it would only demonstrate that mankind was never worth a moment's concern on the part of the universe anyway.

THE FIRST of the five articles in this January issue was in our hands months before an outburst of violence and bloodshed in Mexico brought sharply into question some comfortable illusions of the United States. If Mexicans themselves are wondering whether the violent phase of their revolution is to be renewed, there is special irony in the complacent recommendation of Mexico as a model of peaceful evolution. KENNETH J. GRIEB, author of this study of American attitudes toward the Mexican revolution, has specialized in the history of Latin America. He has the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Buffalo and the Ph.D. from Indiana University and has been teaching at Wisconsin State University, Oshkosh, since January, 1966. He has held Board of Regents Research Grants from the Wisconsin State University System and spent a year in Mexico on a Doherty Foundation Fellowship. He has presented a number of papers at professional conferences and has published articles and reviews in The Americas, Caribbean Studies, The Journal of Inter-American Studies, The Journal of Economic History, and numerous other scholarly journals.

PERHAPS the editor may be allowed to feel a special interest in our next article, which is concerned with the position of women in the U.S. S. R. It is a fact noted occasionally, and somewhat casually, by historians of the twentieth century that revolution has made a particularly strong appeal to women, who all too often have had only the most gruelling chains to lose. KAREL HULICKA, author of this study of Soviet women and the family, has had articles in the QUARTERLY on two earlier occasions. Back in January,1961, of we published his "Soviet Nationality Policy" and, in October of the same year, his study ‘'The Welfare State: Soviet Ideology and Practice." A native of Prague, Czechoslovakia, Professor Hulicka received his early education there, but took his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. After some initial teaching at the Universities of Minnesota and Oklahoma, he joined the Faculty of Social Sciences at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he is at present a professor of history. Last year he traveled, did research and lectured for several months in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. In the spring semester, 1968, he lectured in the American Institute of the Sorbonne and observed some of the disturbances at that much troubled school. His seven-year-old son, Charles, he tells us, was in Prague for ten weeks and witnessed the occupation of Czechoslovakia before Professor Hulicka could arrange the boy's departure, alone, by train from Prague to Vienna and then by plane to New York City. After traveling quite on his own, young Charles looks forward to such another trip next year.

THE SOUTHERN AGRARIAN movement of the 1930's rightfully continues to attract the attention not alone of critics and scholars interested in the now somewhat elderly New Criticism but, even more importantly, of students concerned with political thought. Although fashions in criticism wax and wane, "reactionary apologies for the Southern social order" appear to renew themselves like the phoenix. JAMES L. McDONALD, author of this study of Tate, Ransom, Davidson, et al, approaches his southern interests from a midwestern background. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he took his B.A. from Notre Dame, his Ph.D. from Northwestern, and taught for a time at Loyola University in Chicago. Currently he is an associate professor of English at the University of Detroit. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Tri-Quarterly and the little magazines, and he has published criticism in Serendipity, Arizona Quarterly, and University Review.

ONE GOOD ARTICLE on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd struck us deserving still another, and so we conclude this January issue with paired studies of immortal Billy. ROBERT L. PERRY, who looks at the novel and finds evidence of strong Miltonic influence, is no stranger to THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY. In our 1965 Summer Literary Number (VI, No. 4) we published his interesting study of “Porter’s ‘Hacienda’ and the Theme of Change.” Since that time Mr. Perry has left his native Nebraska and is now working on a Ph.D. at the University of Colorado. In 1966 the University of Nebraska Press published his monograph on Hart Crane and Waldo Frank.

OUR SECOND study of Billy Budd is by a newcomer to our pages, EVELYN SCHROTH. A member of the English faculty at Western Illinois University, Macomb, Professor Schroth will be on leave during the academic year 1968-69 doing advanced study in language and stylistics at the University of Wisconsin. She holds the B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin and the M.S. and M.A. degrees from the University of Illinois. She has published articles in the English Journal and the Wisconsin English Journal and has written weekly columns for various newspapers.

NOT SINCE we began publishing poetry back in April, 1960, according to research sedulously pursued through thirty-seven issues of the QUARTERLY, have we had the pleasure of introducing so many as nine poets new to our pages, although we came close with eight newcomers in the October, 1964, issue. Statistics of this kind are by no means frivolous. We like our poets and are well aware of their role in publishing our name and spreading our influence. We are pleased to welcome BARBARA DRAKE, THOMAS KRETZ, S.J., WILLIAM MCLAUGHLIN, STANLEY PLUMLY, EDITH SHIFFERT, D.L.W. SMITH, ROBERT STOUT, JOHN WHEATCROFT, and MICHAEL WILKES. Although Barbara Drake is personally new to the journal, we do recall publishing a poem by husband Albert Drake some years since. Mrs. Drake lives near East Lansing, where her husband teaches at Michigan State University, and she works at writing English texts, poems, and a novel in the intervals between overseeing three children and a household. . . . Father Kretz, whose poem clearly emerges from his pastoral work, has been for sometime a member of the Colegio San Mateo, Padres y Hermanos Jesuitas, at Osorno, Chile. He has published his poems in more than a hundred quarterlies and newspapers, including the New York Times, Prairie Schooner Literary Review, and Trace. . . . William D. McLaughlin: whose “'(S)Ages Apart in a College Bar" suited our present jaundiced mood, has the B. A. with honors and a Phi Beta Kappa key from Western Reserve University and an M. S. from the University of Wisconsin. For the past thirteen years he has been a high-school teacher of social studies in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where he lives on a street veritably called Chagrin. He has published a number of poems and in recent years has won two prizes for poems submitted in the poetry workshop of Cleveland State University. . . . Stanley Plumly teaches creative writing at Ohio University, where he is currently working on a Ph.D. His work has appeared in The Arlington Quarterly, Concerning Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Nation, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. . . . For our next poet we cross the Pacific. Edith Shiffert, who is now in her sixth year at Kyoto, Japan, and who has taught English and modern poetry at several Kyoto universities, was born in Toronto, Canada, but spent much of her life in the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, and has studied creative writing and Far Eastern Studies at the University of Washington. In 1961 and again in 1964 volumes of her poetry were published by Alan Swallow, and she is presently preparing a volume of translations from the Japanese in collaboration with Yuki Sawa. Her poems and reviews have appeared in numerous journals. . . . D. L. W. Smith, who has her B.A. degree from Louisiana State University, now lives in University Park, Pennsylvania, where her husband is doing graduate work. She has published in Bitterroot, The Quest, and other small magazines. . . . Our next poet, Robert Stout, pretends to some embarrassment at "not being a, whats-the-term? ‘member of the academic community,’" but we may be allowed a certain reserve on that point. Mr. Stout does free-lancing for western history magazine and expects to have a novel and a book of poems published shortly. . . . Professor of English at Bucknell University and Associate Editor of The Bucknell Review, John Wheatcroft is well equipped academically. Two volumes of his poetry, Death of a Clown, 1964, and Prodigal Son, 1967, have been published by A. S. Barnes and Company, Inc., and Thomas Yoseloff, Ltd., New York and London. Recent work has appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Carleton Miscellany, Ladies Home Journal, University Review, New York Times, and Beloit Poetry Journal. His play "Ofoti" received an Alcoa Playwriting Award, ran on NET Playhouse two seasons ago, and in April, 1967, received the National Educational Television Award for the best original of the year. Another play was produced at Yale m their Drama Festival three years ago. . . . our ninth poet, Michael Wilkes, has been neither "a lumberjack nor an academic,” but has had a varied career as ship's purser, editor of a Chinese newspaper, and warden for juvenile delinquents. He writes plays, two of which have been given public performance, and his short film Doggo has had professional distribution.

TURNING to our three old friends, JAMES BINNEY has had poems in our issues of July, 1962, July, 1963, October, 1963, April, 1966, and July, 1966. He holds the Ph. D. from the University of Pittsburgh and is a professor of English at West Chester State College, Pennsylvania. His articles, stories, and poems have appeared in many publications. . . . We first published the poems of IMOGENE BOLLs in our October, 1966, and January, 1967, issues. When we heard from her last May, she mentioned recent appearances of he work in Discourse, Georgia Review, Kansas Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere, and was looking forward to a family camping summer in Europe with a new VW Campmobile. . . . EMILIE GLEN, bird-watcher and poet laureate of Greenwich Village needs no introduction to constant readers--we trust we have such-- of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY. Since October, 1961, some dozen of her poems have appeared in our pages.

BEFORE taking leave of our poets this January, we must acknowledge a very handsome bilingual (Greek-English) edition of twenty-one poems from Land of Manna by our old friend and contributor the genial editor of Bitterroot, Menke Katz. We are charmed by this glimpse of Menke Katz in Athenian chiton and only wish we had Greek enough to venture into the translation. The English is clear and estimable. Indeed some of it we remember for we reviewed the American edition some years ago and had the pleasure of reading one more verses that had originally appeared in our journal. Certain poems still have our warm personal approval-- “A Yiddish Poet,” “On the Birth of My Son," "A Hero in Bronze,” and more indeed than we have space to mention. We can only echo the words of his Athenian editor Hugh McKinley: "Menke. na zeis pantoteina!”

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