The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought
Contents
ARTICLES
The Czechoslovak Crisis and the European Balance of Power
American Education and French Assimilation: A Comparison
The Statue of Irony
The Church, the Stage, and Shaw
The Glamor of the Glittering Rails
Wallace Stevens: Radical Transcendentalist
VERSE
Thirty Seven Hours High
Bombing Mission
High Octane Near Mountain Grove
Peyote Country
Deus Ex Machina
The Seed of the Man
Orcacoke Island
Point the Bastard South: For Robert Huff
Training in Air
The Old Switzer
Upon the Mountains of Bether
Seaward at the Equinox
Abstract
in this issue. . .
DURING the past ten years we have had several opportunities to welcome a new member to our editorial board but always under the regretful necessity of bidding goodby to a valued old friend who was moving away or had taken on a heavy load of work or for some other reason felt he could no longer serve the journal as faithfully as he would like. With this April 1970 issue we have the pleasure of welcoming a new associate editor who is an addition and not a replacement and is therefore pure gain. Our new poetry editor, MICHAEL HEFFERNAN, first became acquainted with our part of the country through the pages of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY, which published his poem "Epithalamium" in the April 1969 issue. He was then teaching at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He came to see us, liked what he saw, and was persuaded to stay on as assistant professor in the English Department of Kansas State College of Pittsburg, specializing in modem poetry. Mr. Heffernan has the A. B. degree from the University of Detroit, the A. M. from the University of Massachusetts, and is now an "ABD" of the latter institution, where he participated in the creative writing program under Joseph Langland. He has published his poems in Massachusetts Review, Poetry (Chicago), and of course our own QUARTERLY, has spent two happy summers (1965 and 1966) "bumming around in Europe with emphasis on Ireland and Greece," has given a number of poetry readings in Amherst, Mass., and most recently before an enthusiastic audience at Kansas State College. Iri his own words, he is "living at present, happily, with wife and eleven cats (one old dog) two miles east of Pittsburg on a farm."
RANGING widely in this April issue, from the Czech crisis to colonialism in education to current dissatisfaction with Liberty and her torch to G. B. Shaw and the stage vis-a-vis the church to the vanished glory of railroading to the radical transcendentalism of poet Wallace Stevens, we are bound to hope that there will be something to satisfy a considerable range of taste and interest. Geographically our authors range almost as widely: two Pennsylvanians, Professor JOHN W. KELLER of Pennsylvania State College, California, Pennsylvania, and Librarian DOROTHY J. SMITH of Allegheny College, Meadville; one Californian, Professor JOHN POVEY of the University of California at Los Angeles; one Virginian, Professor CHARLES VANDERSEE of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and two Midwesterners, Dean RAYMOND S. NELSON of Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa, and JAMES E. MULQUEEN of Bloomington, Indiana.
IF THE UNTIMELY REJOICING of western nations did not heighten the unease that led the Soviet Union and its allies to invade Dubcek's Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, it was at the very least ill-founded and unwise. To give Communism a face, to loosen the straitjacket of bureaucratic centralism, is not precisely to somersault into westernstyle capitalism. The Czech experiment, according to John W. Keller, is important because it sought, among other things, "to transcend old political patterns and ideological cliches, to achieve a reasonable flexibility, to shake off the glaring weaknesses of Western democracies" no less than those of the Soviet Bloc. Professor Keller, a former lecturer in European history and international relations at Georgetown and American Universities, is a member of various learned societies, has published in Current History, ORBIS, and several issues of The California Bulletin, has presented papers before various learned groups, and has written three books on Germany. Contemporary German politics is his particular field of study. He has taught U. S. Air Force officers at overseas schools and German graduate students at the Heimvolkshochshule in an American Studies Seminar sponsored by the American Embassy at Bonn. He is now Director of International Studies at Pennsylvania State College in California, Pennsylvania.
IN A VERY REAL SENSE John Povey has been acquiring all his life the experience that underlies his study of colonialism in education. Though born in London, he spent most of his life in various parts of Africa and received his initial education in South Africa before earning his doctorate in English at Michigan State University and becoming an American citizen in 1968. Most of his publication has concerned African literature in English and he is chairman of the African Literature Committee of the African Studies Association of America. His collection of this writing called African Writing Today has just been published in New York. Under a grant from the Bureau of Indian Affairs he has been visiting BIA High Schools to examine their English programs and has encouraged young Indian students to attempt creative writing, setting up the African success as a model of the potential of English in differing cultural circumstances. It was this experience in particular that led to his article for the QUARTERLY. He is at present associate professor in the English as Second Language Program at the University of California at Los Angeles and assistant director of the African Studies Center there. He also edits the new journal African Arts, which publishes new poetry and short stories from Africa as well as studies of traditional and contemporary African art.
THE AUTHOR of our somewhat disrespectful tribute to the lady of the harbor is Charles Vandersee, assistant_ professor of English at the University of Virginia. His articles on Henry Adams and Henry James have appeared in such journals as South Atlantic Quarterly, Journal of American Studies, American Quarterly, Studies in Bibliogrophy, and American Literary Realism, and his note on the MLA dissension will be forthcoming in a spring issue of PMLA. During 1968-69 he was Bruern Fellow in American Literature at the University of Leeds. He has the Ph. D. from UCLA, with Danforth and Woodrow Wilson fellowships.
THAT BERNARD SHAW "was an incurably religious man who chose the theatre" is the lively theme that Raymond S. Nelson sets out to demonstrate. Professor Nelson has his Ph. D. from the University of Nebraska, where he worked with Dr. Louis Crompton on Shaw's religious views. He has been chairman of the English Department at Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa, since 1965, and chairman of the Division of Humanities since 1966. Last summer he was appointed Acting Dean of the College but expects to continue also in his role as division chairman and to teach one class each semester in the English Department.
THERE ARE, we doubt not, young people who have never ridden on trains, to whom the passenger train will soon be as distant an object of thought as the Deadwood stage--and perhaps as romantic? For in the midst of our nostalgic wallow the compunctious thought overtook us that author Dorothy J. Smith must have been drawn to write about the passenger train from sheer youthful romanticism rather than out of antediluvian memories like our own. Her article concerns itself with the manner in which writers of an earlier age threaded their stories on railroad tracks. Miss Smith is a librarian by profession and has been for several years assistant librarian at her alma mater, Allegheny College. She has the M. S. in library science from Case Western Reserve and the A. M. in English from Yale. Her articles have appeared in a number of periodicals, among them Kenyon Review, Huntington Library Quarterly, and Texas Quarterly.
OUR LAST ARTICLE makes a stout case for Wallace Stevens as radical transcendentalist rather than hedonist or materialist. Its author, James E. Mulqueen, received his A. B. degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University and his A. M. from the University of Wisconsin. He has taught at Clarkson College but is now working toward a Ph. D. at Purdue under an NDEA fellowship. His major interest is in American literature, and he has published articles in American Notes & Queries, The Ball State University Forum, The CEA Critic, and the Emerson Society Quarterly. Other articles are to appear soon in American Literature and The Walt Whitman Review.
WITH THE POETRY of this issue the QUARTERLY conspicuously enters the air age. We did not plan it that way or even notice the coincidence while picking up our poems one by one over the past seven or eight months. Not till we brought the round dozen together to set them up as printer's copy did we discover that this is our Special Aviation Number. Afterwards the thought did cross our mind that the editor might be dreamily anticipating a flight planned for next summer to the Osaka Expo, but no, almost the entire dozen were selected by our hardworking new poetry editor, who has no immediate plans to fly anywhere. Rereading our dozen, however, we are even more pleased than when we originally chose them. They set each other off, we think.
A HEARTY welcome to BERNICE AMES of Los Angeles, who returns to our journal for the fifth time, and with two of our current aviation poems; she has published a number of poems in the past year in such journals as the '69 Literary Review, North American Review, Kansas Quarterly, and many others, as well as a story in Cimmaron Review . . . BRANLEY BRANSON, a frequent contributor and author of another flying poem, has enjoyed a summer sabbatical researching alpine creatures in the Cascades and writing poems of an evening; this past year he has published several poems, one of which won second prize in the Stephen Vincent Benet Narrative Poetry Contest . . . COURTLAND MATTHEWS appeared in our pages as recently as last October . . . and LEONARD UBERMAN was with us as late as January just past.
NEW to our pages are TESS GALLAGHER, ARNOLD JOHNSTON, THOMAS LYNCH, D. M. ROSENBERG, GIBBONS RUARK, and ALAN SEABURG . . . Tess Gallagher writes from Seattle, Washington, that she is a native of the Olympic Peninsula (but visits in Missouri), a student of the late Theodore Roethke, and a tolerably new poet who has had some gratifying acceptances; she has interests beyond reckoning but on the whole favors horseback riding . . . Arnold Johnston is an assistant professor of English at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, but is currently on leave to finish his dissertation at the University of Delaware. He came to the United States from Scotland in 1951 and is now an American citizen. He sings professionally and visits at various universities to perform a program of songs and poems of Robert Bums. He has his own radio show in Kalamazoo and a record album of Bums songs forthcoming, and has published stories and poems in Human Voice and Colorado Quarterly . . . Thomas Lynch, born in and brought up around Detroit, was attending Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, at the time his acquaintance with the QUARTERLY began, but is now living with distant relations in a cottage in West Moveen, Kilkee, County Clare, near the mouth of the Shannon, hoping to make his fortune or at the very least to find work in Dublin . . . D. M. Rosenberg, an associate professor of English at Michigan State University, East Lansing, is the author of several scholarly studies of John Milton as well as a number of poems . . . Gibbons Ruark, a North Carolinian "by birth and temperament," went to school at the Universities of North Carolina and Massachusetts and is now teaching at the University of Delaware; he has published thirty-odd poems in various magazines, most often in Poetry and Massachusetts Review, and two of his poems have won places in national anthologies . . . Alan Seaburg holds the A. B. and B. D. from Tufts College and the M. S. in library science from Simmons College and has taken graduate courses in religion at Boston University. He has held various library posts and was for a time minister of the Charles Street Meeting House, Boston; at present he is poetry editor of Snowy Egret and librarian and archivist of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Articles, fiction, poetry, bibliographies and book reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications.
OUR NEW poetry editor Michael Heffernan reviews Rockrose by Menke Katz.
Recommended Citation
Keller, John W.; Povey, John F.; Vandersee, Charles; Nelson, Raymond S.; Smith, D. J.; Mulqueen, James E.; Ames, Bernice; Branson, Branley; Gallagher, Tess; Rosenberg, D. M.; Seaburg, Alan; Ruark, Gibbons; Johnston, Arnold; Uberman, Leonard; Lynch, Thomas; Matthews, Courtland; and Midwest Quarterly Editors
(1970)
"The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 11 No. 3,"
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 11:
Iss.
3, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol11/iss3/1