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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

The Government and the Economy

Soldier and Worker: A Reevalution of the Selective Service System

Black Militancy and Organized Labor: An Historical Parallel

Reich, Roszak, and then New Jerusalem

A Chaser of Phantoms: Mark Twain and Romanticism

Wallace Stevens: Executive as Poet

VERSE

Fenner's Chickens

Bloom Falling Awake

"His Whole Life Was a Missed Opportunity"

the lives of the people

the dust settles from the day

our medicine man

Sisyphus Blind

The Lesson

Girl Behind Glass

Abstract

in this issue. . .

IN A GALLANT EFFORT to stay on top of the news-no easy matter for a quarterly journal in swiftly changing times, and with a presidential surprise-of-the-month to distract us-we have updated copy, made changes in galleys, and on one occasion inserted fresh copy into our almost sacrosanct page proofs. This currency we owe to the vigilance of our authors, one of whom submitted new copy with the desperate comment that he believed he had now allowed for every possibility except a presidential defection to Russia!

IN THIS ISSUE our first article is a timely discussion of the federal government and its economic policy. Our author, JAMES CICARELLI, is at present teaching in the economics department of the State University of New York at Oswego and is working on a textbook and a book of readings to be published by Holden-Day of San Francisco. Recent articles of his have appeared in Oregon Business Review, The New Republic, and American Economist. Dr. Cicarelli graduated (with honors) from the University of Connecticut in 1963 and remained there for his M. A. and his Ph. D. Before coming to S. U. N. Y.-Oswego in the fall of 1970, he taught for four years at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

AT THE TIME we accepted an article proposing a reevaluation of the Selective Service there was no Selective Service. The draft act had expired and draft-eligible young men waited in suspense. But we were as sure as our author that by the time his recommendations appeared in print there would be a revived Selective Service as badly in need of reevaluation as the old one. Author ALBERT A. BLUM has done much thinking and writing on manpower requirements and kindred subjects. A graduate of City College of New York, with an M. A. and a Ph. D. from Columbia University, he has taught at Queen's College and Brooklyn College, at New York University, Cornell University, and American University, was a lecturer in the Salzburg (Austria) Seminar in American Studies in the spring of 1963, a research associate in the International Labour Office of Geneva, Switzerland, during 1966-67, a Fulbright research professor at the University of Copenhagen during the spring and summer of 1968, and since 1960 has been professor and chairman of the School of Labor and Industrial Relations and professor of the Urban Studies Field of James Madison College, at Michigan State University. He is author or editor of more than twenty monographs, books or pamphlets, and has written some ninety or more articles, most of them dealing with problems of labor or military manpower requirements. He is presently writing articles on unionization in Denmark and in Mexico and a book, Labor in Twentieth Century America, for Random House.

BEFORE the New Deal and World War II enabled organized labor to achieve recognition and power, there existed, as IRWIN YELLOWITZ points out, an interesting resemblance between the attitudes of the struggling labor movement and the presentday black militants. Although "the present experience of the labor movement has little relevance for militant black leaders," he observes, an understanding of the historical parallel could lead to greater understanding and tolerance. Professor Yellowitz has the Ph. D. from Brown University and teaches in the history department of the City College of the City University of New York. He has published two books, Labor and the Progressive Movement in New York State, 1897-1916 (Cornell University Press, 1965) and The Position of the Worker in American Society, 1865-1900 (Prentice-Hall, 1969). A recent article on unemployment appeared in Labor History, and he has written reviews for several journals including Labor History and The American Jewish Historical Quarterly. He is now completing a book on American labor and industrialization in the late nineteenth century.

WE HAVE NOTICED, over the past few months, a considerable greening among the manuscripts submitted to us and have become aware of a new wave. Having at an earlier date gone patiently through the work of Herbert Marcuse, we have been asking ourselves whether we should do the same by Reich, Roszak, Norman 0. Brown et alii, when there arrives an illuminating article by SCOTT EDWARDS and saves us a world of reading and confusion. Professor Edwards is a graduate of San Fernando Valley State College and has the Ph. D. from Claremont Graduate School. He has taught at the University of California, Riverside, and at the University of Nevada, and he is presently an associate professor of political science at California State College, Hayward, where for the past three years he has been chairman of the Department of Political Science. His article "On Compensating Minorities" is to appear in an early issue of The Humanist, and he is now at work on a book about politics and the methodologies of political science.

AS WE HAVE OBSERVED on earlier occasions, there appears to be no end of good, stimulating discussions about American literary figures, and of these American writers Mark Twain is easily central. Our current Mark Twain investigation is carried on by DON W. HARRELL, an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston. Professor Harrell has the B. A. from Hendrix College, the M. A. from George Washington University, and the Ph. D. from Vanderbilt. Besides his interest in Mark Twain, he has published several articles on Henry Adams and Hart Crane.

ALMOST NINE YEARS AGO we published our first article by ARTHUR M. SAMPLEY, a study of modern English and American poets. His present article on Wallace Stevens is evidence of a continuing interest—on our part as well as his. It pleases us to think that we were almost fellow students, Professor Sampley having received his Ph. D. at the University of Texas a few years earlier than the editor. Since the publication of his article in our journal he has had articles on Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot in South Atlantic Quarterly, which has recently accepted another of his articles on Frost. An article on E. A. Robinson will appear in Colby Library Quarterly. Since 1962 he has published verse in Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and has won three annual awards of the Poetry Society of America. He is a professor of English at North Texas State University.

OF THE SIX POETS whose work appears in this January issue, only one is, strictly speaking, new to our pages, and JAMES RAGAN is by no means a novice poet. Most recently his poems have appeared in such journals as The Little Magazine, Confrontation, The Ohio Review, and West Coast Poetry Review, and he has completed a book of poetry, In the Talking Hours, and a play, Landlord, produced at the Ohio University Theater, and has read at the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A Ph. D. of the 1971 vintage, he is presently teaching English and Creative Writing at Ohio University and in his spare time editing Lotus, a journal of poetry and fiction.

ALTHOUGH this is his first poem in our journal, ROBERT ABEL is no stranger to our pages or to our editor, whose student he was in a Henry James Seminar some years ago. His fine article on the sick heroes of Henry James and Andre Gide appeared in the July 1968 issue of the QUARTERLY. One of his poems appeared in The Little Magazine, and he has completed a cycle of haiku and a novel. Currently he is teaching English at Northern Illinois University. . . . Our first poem by PHILIP DACEY appeared in the April 1971 issue, at which time we noted that he had had poems in a number of periodicals ranging from College English to the New York Times. Some of his work appeared recently in Just What the Country Needs, Another Poetry Anthology, edited by James McMichael and Dennis Saleh, and other poems will appear in an anthology as yet untitled to be edited by John Logan and Al Poulin, Jr. . . . Poems by WILLIAM VIRGIL DAVIS graced the pages of our July 1969 and October 1970 issues, and we welcome the opportunity to publish still another. He is now teaching at Tunxis Community College, was a 1970 Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and is still publishing widely in the journals. He has also been in several anthologies, including The Best in Poetry 1969 and New Generation: Poetry. . . . NORMAN RUSSELL, whose fine Indian poems are becoming a fairly regular, and admired, feature of our journal, has returned from a summer's work in the mountains of Colorado and is once more engaged in teaching botany at Central State College, Edmond, Oklahoma. We have received and do gratefully acknowledge his Night Dog & other poems with the handsome cover illustration by Arline Russell. . . . It has been some years—seven this January—since we last had the pleasure of publishing a poem by LUCIEN STRYK. Our loss has been others' gain, for in that time he has published in many journals, brought out several books, and given poetry readings at numerous schools and colleges as well as radio and TV readings both here and abroad, and has received many distinguished honors and awards. He is still teaching poetry, creative writing, and Oriental literature in the English department of Northern Illinois University, where we note he is a colleague of young Mr. Abel.

THE BRIEF REVIEWS in this issue are the work of Editor Rebecca Patterson.

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