The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought
Contents
ARTICLES
Count Rumford and His Panaceas for the Poor
Recent Trends in the Japanese Student Movement
The Kansas Prairie: Pre-History of Crawford County
The Bandarlog and the Paper Jungle
Reflections on the New Feminism
Robert Southey and the Standard Georgian Style
VERSE
Mrs Arbeeny
For Lester Stevens' Painting "Sugar Maple in Spring"
The List
Porcupine
morning
a brother with a different song
god is giant
Poem
Why We Bought the Owls
Spaces
The Headmaster
Abstract
in this issue. . .
FOR this April issue THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY offers considerable variety-an article dealing with an early attempt to solve the problems of poverty, a report on presentday unrest among Japanese students, a nostalgic re-creation of the all-but-forgotten beauty of the Kansas prairie, an. inquiry into a curious linguistic split that may confront us with undreamt-of-problems, more news from the Women's Lib Front, and last of all an analysis of Robert Southey's style that is as graciously styled as its subject. Scattered among these several articles· are a dozen poems no less worthy of serious and grateful attention.
OUR prose authors are PHILLIP DRENNON THOMAS, Associate Professor, Department of History, Wichita State University; EDWARD R. BEAUCHAMP, Coordinator of the University of Hawaii's American Samoan Contract and of the University's Program of Student Teaching in Taiwan, and teacher and administrator. in the Honors Program of the College of Education, University of Hawaii; THEODORE M. SPERRY, Professor, Department of Biology, Kansas -State College of Pittsburg, and Associate Editor of this journal; ROBERT T. OLIPHANT, Professor, Department of English, San Fernando Valley State College, California; MARGARET B. McDOWELL, who teaches in the Rhetoric Program of the Department of English, Iowa State University; and DAVID R. SANDERSON, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Beloit College, Wisconsin.
ONCE BEFORE we have had the pleasure of publishing an article by Phillip Drennon Thomas in which he calls attention to a helpful parallel with our own times. His article, "An 18th Century Dropout: Edward Gibbon, Student Dissident," appeared in the April 1969 issue of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY. Exactly two years later he is concerned with the panaceas for poverty advanced by that early American expatriate, Benjamin Thompson, formerly of Woburn, Massachusetts, made Sir Benjamin on his removal to England, afterwards created Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire--a man whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt thought worthy to stand with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as one of America's three greatest thinkers. In recent months Professor Thomas has been kept very busy with his responsibilities as Co-Director for an EPDA Experienced Teachers Fellowship Program, as speaker at Phi Alpha Theta Conferences and chairman of a session of the Kansas Academy of Sciences, and as a contributor to Scribner's Dictionary of Scientific Biography. The award of a Younger Humanities Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities has enabled him to get away to England for a nine months study of the relationship between medieval scientific thought, scholastic philosophy, and medieval music. While abroad he was invited to read a paper at Bucharest on the reaction of medieval physicians to the Black Death. His most pleasant honor these past two years has been the Wichita State University's Regent's Award for Distinguished Teaching.
INTO his thoughtful examination of recent trends in the Japanese student movement Edward R. Beauchamp has put much firsthand experience as well as a careful study of documentary sources. After living, working, and studying in Japan, Okinawa, and Western Europe for almost seven years he returned to the United States in January of 1966 and began work on a doctoral program at the University of Washington which permitted him to spend the major part of his time studying Japanese history, politics, and language. He is currently completing his dissertation, "William Elliot Griffis in Meiji Japan: A Cross-Cultural Case Study," and is also working on a study of higher education in the South Pacific. He is a member of several historical and educational societies, including the Association for Asia Studies, and has contributed articles and book reviews to such journals as the Malaysian Journal of Education, the Journal of Developing Areas, the Journal of Higher Education, and Social Studies. His work as Coordinator of the University of Hawaii's Taiwan and American Samoa programs has kept him in close touch with Asian education and enabled him to spend a month last fall in the Far East, including a fortnight in Japan, where he met and talked with a number of Japanese students.
WHEN we described the third of our current articles as a nostalgic
re-creation of the Kansas prairie, we of course voiced our personal
nostalgia-a nostalgia confessedly born of our reading, for we had
never seen or imagined a prairie or imagined what we had lost by
not seeing a prairie. Now we know. And now we must hope for
the establishment of a national prairie park in Kansas to restore some part of that magnificent ocean of color and scent and sound through which the pioneers voyaged. This re-creation of the Kansas prairie is Professor Sperry’s second article for the QUARTERLY, an earlier study of land management in tropical areas having appeared in the October 1960 issue. Butler University, the universities of Illinois and Wisconsin, the U. S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and Air Force have contributed to his academic and professional background. During 1951-52 Professor Sperry spent a year in the Congo as a consultant for the Institut National pour L’Etudie Agronomique du Congo Belge (INEAC). He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, past president of the Kansas Academy of Science, and a member of many other scientific and ecological associations. He has become increasingly involved with the problems of conservation and has served on the committees of a number of organizations devoted to this work. His recent publications have appeared in scientific journals in the fields of ornithology and botany and have been technical in nature.
UNDER a surface of genial and lighthearted banter Robert Oliphant makes the suggestion—and it is a formidable suggestion—that our times are witnessing the emergence of a technical and scientific idiom, an “idiom of scribbled silence,” largely untranslatable into the common language, which will be the special property and tool of its initiates, the new mandarins, and will leave the vast majority of us in the position of the new illiterate, unable to comprehend and therefore unable to control. It comes as no surprise to learn that Professor Oliphant has a special interest in the new science of linguistics. He has the B. A. degree from Washington and Jefferson College and the M. A. and Ph. D. from Stanford University. An instructor at Stanford from 1955 to 1959, he then moved to San Fernando Valley State College, where he is now a professor in their English Department. He has published in the Virginia Quarterly, the Antioch Review, and the Philological Quarterly.
CONTINUING the interesting and witty analysis of the rhetoric of the Women’s Liberation Movement which she began in our January issue, Margaret McDowell now makes a more detailed examination of certain writers dealing with what the nineteenth century liked to call “the Woman’s Question,” and compares the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Ellman, Eva Figes, and Doris Lessing with the more strident and attention-getting rhetoric of the current bestseller, Kate Millett. Mrs. McDowell has been chary of details about her own work, but we personally think it a matter of some interest that before going to the University of Iowa for her Ph.D. and becoming a teacher in their Rhetoric Program she taught English at Kansas State College of Pittsburg, where she was the immediate predecessor of this editor. Like the figures on the weatherman's clock, one necessarily went out as the other went in, and therefore they could not have met despite a persistent local legend. As to which tells the sunny hours, deponent saith not.
OUR final article, dealing as it does with the question of the "standard" or "normative" quality of Robert Southey's style, is best judged in the light of its own style. We shall therefore let it speak for itself and turn our own attention to some remarks by the author, David R. Sanderson, which claimed our particular interest. Speaking of his studies in the prose of Southey and the latter's contemporaries, Lamb, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and DeQuincey, he remarks that his attempt to define normative stylistic qualities of a particular period has led him to "more general or philosophical issues concerning language and style." He has become especially interested in metaphor, he says, whether of poetry or of prose; his study of Coleridge, in particular, has made him "think about the relationships between language and religious or mystical experience."
“In every case of stylistic analysis [he adds], I try to make the analysis a means to discovering the writer himself, his world-view, his values, his attitudes and images. Sometimes the method works; at least it's more pleasurable and, I hope, more meaningful than merely quantitative analysis for its own sake.”
From the viewpoint of certain formalistic schools this is no doubt heresy, but it is a heresy we are happy to endorse. Professor Sanderson has the B. A. degree from Gordon College, the M. A. from Johns Hopkins, and the Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. His article "Metaphor and Method in Mill's On Liberty" appeared in The Victorian Newsletter, and a study of Wordsworth's style in The Wordsworth Circle. He is now in his second year of teaching at Beloit College, Wisconsin.
IT HAS BEEN four years since we published a poem by FRANKLIN
BRAINARD, and in that time he has done a good deal of publishing—in The Horn Book Magazine Jewish Frontier, The Educational
Forum, Epos, Plainsong The Hiram Poetry Review, Abraxas, and other Journals—some forty-eight in all, an dmore indeed than we have space to mention. Three years on merchant ships and acceptance of himself as a Midwesterner and a street poet have been important to him, he says, adding that he is currently Poet in Residence for the Mounds View School District K-12, where he has taught some fifteen years, and which we believe to be in or near New Brighton, Minnesota. . . . A more recent “old poet” is JACK FLAVIN, whose first poem for us appeared in our recent January issue. Mr. Flavin works in the Springfield (Mass.) Public Library and Publishes in the Atlantic Monthly, the Massachusetts Review, and other journals. . . . NORMAN H. RUSSELL, professor of history at Central State College, Edmond, Oklahoma, whose poems have begun to appear widely in the journals, had a first poem in the QUARTERLY last July. Since that time we have had from him a Christmas card with his own fine poem and have accepted the three new Indian poems that appear in this issue. . . . The economically titled “Poem: of JOE SHEFFLER is one of three accepted for this journal, the other two having appeared in the recent January issue. He is now living in Granby, Mass., while completing work on his dissertation for the University of Massachusetts.
FIVE of the poets whose work appears in this issue are new to the QUARTERLY. Taking them in alphabetical order, PETER COOLEY is a graduate of Shimer College, the University of Chicago, and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has published in Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Quarterly, and other magazines. He is now teaching creative writing at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. . . . PHILLIP DACEY is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is presently Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at Southwest Minnesota State College. His poems have appeared in the New York Times, North American Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal, and others will soon appear in Poetry Northwest, Minnesota Review, and College English. . . . KENNETH GIBBS is a 1970 graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Massachusetts. A recent editor of Quabbin, poetry quarterly, he is now editing an anthology of contemporary poetry which will appear this summer. He spends the rest of his time instructing Worcester State College students in creative writing and American literature. . . . EMMETT JARRETT has had a second book of poems, Greek Feet, published by New/Books within recent months. He lives in New York City with his wife Carol and is an editor of Hanging Loose. . . . Our fifth new poet, JOHN LEAX, is co-editor of Ktaadn, one of the “little” magazines. He has had poems in The Tennessee Poetry Journal, The English Record, and the English Journal, and he has a group of poems scheduled to appear in an anthology, Contemporary Christian Poets, being edited by Virginia Mollencott. He has the master’s degree from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and is presently Assistant Professor of English at Houghton College, New York. As of last July, he was compiling a bibliography of the poetry and prose of Elliott Coleman and looking for some one to publish it. . . . And at this point we pause and muse, as we occasionally do, over the “little” magazines, the creative writing courses, the poetry workshops, the poetic paperbacks that stream across our desk—the poetry itself, some of it very good, and much of it reasonably competent—all the evidence of a creative ferment, a buzz and a stir of poeticizing like nothing, surely, that was seen in this country in the early days. Having just completed, for our own mysterious purposes, the monstrous task of reading through the better-known American journals of the mid-nineteenth century, we know how very bad poetry can—how mawkish, priggish, puerile, and written with a tin ear—and we ask ourselves whether the general run of our poetry will be as painful to readers a century hence as that of the mid-nineteenth century to us. There are ages—the early Tudor period, for example—when the general level appears high though not supremely great; we can still read this poetry without pain. Perhaps our own mid-twentieth century has not reached so high a plane of general excellence, but surely we shall not be found to have fallen so low as mid-nineteenth century American.
IN THIS ISSUE our poetry editor, Michael Heffernan, reviews a number of the new books of poetry which have recently crossed our desk.
Recommended Citation
Thomas, Phillip D.; Beauchamp, Edward R.; Sperry, Theodore M.; Oliphant, Robert; McDowell, Margaret B.; Sanderson, David R.; Jarrett, Emmett; Brainard, Franklin; Gibbs, Kenneth; Dacey, Philip; Leax, John; Russell, Norman H.; Sheffler, Joe; Flavin, Jack; Cooley, Peter; and Midwest Quarterly Editors
(1971)
"The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 12 No. 3,"
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 12:
Iss.
3, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol12/iss3/1