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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

The Southern Aristocrat

Wine, Voters, and Song: An Essay on Austrian Politics

The Political Culture in America

Meditative, Ironic, Richly Human: The Poetry of Robert Hayden

Mark Twain Biography: Entering a New Phase

Literature as Knowledge

VERSE

Neighbors

Postcard

Horatio at the Bridge

All Systems Break Down

Quasimodo's Sleeping Song

Old Trails

Coming into New Towns

Elegy for the Whole Ward

We Refer Back to the Original Remake

A Speech Just in Case

Night Cries

Skipper

Abstract

in this issue. . .

THIS APRIL 1974 issue of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY testifies to our continued interest in a wide range of topics having in common a meaningful relation to contemporary thought. One and all, our authors speak in a contemporary voice and to contemporary concerns, whether they demythicize the Southern "aristocrat," discuss the politics of modem Austria or of our own country, argue for the preeminence of contemporary black poet Robert Hayden, spring to the defense of Hamlin Hill's iconoclastic study of a national literary idol, or in a manner reminiscent of the Geneva "Critics of Consciousness," define literature in general as a way of knowing which demands of the reader that he take the risk of subjectivity.

THE AUTHOR of our unromantic study of Southern "aristocracy," Francis Nash Boney, can hardly be dismissed as speaking outside his knowledge. Born in Richmond, Virginia, he was educated, among other places, at St. Christopher's Preparatory School, Hampden-Sydney College (where he received the B. S. degree and election to Phi Beta Kappa), and at the University of Virginia (M. A. and Ph. D. degrees). And except for a two-year stint in the Army's Counter-Intelligence Corps in Germany and a five-year hiatus at Washington State University, he has worked and taught steadily in his native South, where he is now a professor of history at the University of Georgia. We have space only to glance at his many publications, which include three books on Civil War subjects and some thirty articles (not counting numerous book reviews and several short articles in the 1973 Encyclopedia Americana), which appeared in such journals as Alabama Review, Georgia Review, Phylon, Réforme (Paris), and others. He has also made several addresses, most recently at the September 1973 Conference of the Southern Region, Popular Culture Association, where he gave an abridged discussion of the present article.

ALTHOUGH he is now professor of political science at Illinois State University, WALTER S. G. KOHN, author of the present article on Austrian politics, came originally from a spot much nearer his subject. Born in Lichtenfels, Germany, he left his homeland before the war and came to England, where he did his military service with the British War Agricultural Committee and engaged in personnel work with Italian and German prisoners. After taking his B. S. in economics at the University of London, he removed to the United States and completed his M. A. and Ph. D. degrees in political science at the New School for Social Research. Since 1956 he has been teaching at Illinois State University with a special interest in comparative government and politics of Western Europe, especially Britain and German-speaking countries, and of the United States and Canada. His many professional activities have included being consultant to several publishing companies, lecturer at the University of Leeds, England, and the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, and a seminar leader at the University of London. He has published a number of articles in such journals as Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Focus/Midwest, American-German Review, American Journal of International Law, Parliamentary Affairs, Military Review, and a number of short articles in the New Wonder World Encyclopedia. In April 1973 he took part in the Scholar-Diplomat Seminar at the U.S. Department of State.

MARTIN E. SPENCER, author of "The Political Culture in America," is a professor of sociology at State University College, Oneonta, New York. Prior to coming to Oneonta in 1967, he had taught at New York University and earlier at Hunter College. He holds the B. S. degree from C. C. N. Y. and the M. A. and Ph. D. from the New School of Social Research. He has had articles published in the British Journal of Sociology, the European Journal of Sociology, the Sociological Quarterly, and Social Research.

MICHAEL PAUL NOVAK published his first poem in the QUARTERLY (1964), and though he has since gone on to publish in more than forty other magazines, he has not forgotten to send us an occasional poem, most recently in our Kansas Poets issue of last July. Professor Novak is chairman of the English Department at Saint Mary College, Leavenworth. But his present article on Robert Hayden is the first prose he has ever submitted to us, and we are pleased to have the opportunity to publish it. We must not fail to mention that his first book of poetry, The Leavenworth Poems, was published last year by the BkMk Press (Shawnee Mission), and we are happy to congratulate him on his most recent—and substantial—honor as winner of second prize money donated by the Kansas Cultural Arts Commission for the Kansas Quarterly poetry contest last fall. He is now reviewing regularly for the Kansas City Star and has had new poems accepted by The Seneca Review and Kansas Quarterly.

IN TAKING on the defense of Mark Twain: God's Fool, Hamlin Hill's carefully documented biography of the last ten years of Samuel L. Clemens, our young critic and friend ROBERT BRAY naturally assumes much less risk than the biographer himself, although risk is always involved in desanctifying and humanizing any figures of irrational reverence—is it predominantly literary figures, as Auden’s elegy on Yeats suggests?—whose following have embalmed them in frankincense and myrrh and buried them in an odor of unnatural sanctity. Because Professor Hill has written with scrupulous objectivity and because his facts are unassailable, the opposition is reduced to the carping objection that he should have left these facts in oblivion. Why bring to light the unedifying last ten years of a great national idol? The answer clearly involved in the question is that they cast light on all the troubled years that went before—and that is why they are feared. We have only to add that Robert Bray, now making his second appearance in the QUARTERLY, is a graduate of Kansas State College, holds the Ph. D. from the University of Chicago, and is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University.

THE AUTHOR of our concluding article, HAROLD P. SIMONSON, is a professor of English at the University of Washington. He holds the B. Phil. degree from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and the Ph. D. in English from Northwestern University. Some few years ago he was a Fulbright lecturer in Salonika, Greece, and subsequently a Visiting Fellow at Princeton Theological Seminary. He has published articles in such periodicals as Antioch Review, Texas Quarterly, and Yale Review. His books are Zona Gale (Twayne, 1962), Writing Essays (Harper & Row, 1966), Francis Grierson (Twayne, 1966), The Closed Frontier (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), and Strategies in Criticism (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). Most recently he has had a book on Jonathan Edwards accepted for publication either late in 1974 or early in 1975.

FIRST AMONG OUR contributors of verse, JOYCE BENVENUTO lives in Michigan. She is spending this academic year in Yorkshire where her husband, who teaches in the English Department at Michigan State, is on a one-year exchange program at Leeds University. . . . DAVID BOTTOMS recently received his M. A. in English from West Georgia College and is teaching high school in Carrollton. His poems have appeared in Kansas Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. . . . CHRISTOPHER HOWELL has published poems in a number of small quarterlies and, with his M. F. A. from the University of Massachusetts, is currently trying his luck in this year's ridiculous job market. He is co-editor of Lynx, published in Amherst. . . . GARY KERLEY holds a recent M. A. in English from the University of Georgia. His work has appeared in the Ann Arbor Review, Cardinal Poetry Quarterly, and the Sewanee Review. . . . LOUIS PHILLIPS lives and teaches in the Bronx. His new book for children, The Animated Thumbtack Railroad Dollhouse and All Round Surprise Book, came out this winter from Lippincott. . . . NORMAN RUSSELL is Dean of the School of Mathematics and Science at Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma. Nearly two hundred of his latest Indian poems have been accepted by over forty journals since last September. . . . With her M. F. A. from the University of Iowa, MAURA STANTON teaches at the University of Richmond. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, and The Carleton Miscellany. . . . THOM TAMMARO comes from Edinboro, Pa., and is a graduate student in English at Kansas State College. His poems have appeared in a number of small magazines as well as in Arnold Adoff's anthology from Harper & Row, It is the Poem Singing into Your Eyes. . . . WILLIAM VELDE, who made his first QUARTERLY appearance in January, is still working on a book of poems for a doctorate at the University of Iowa. . . . RONALD WALLACE teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He has published recent work in the Iowa Review, The Carleton Miscellany, and Poetry Northwest, among others. His first book of criticism, Henry James and the Comic Form, will appear this fall from the University of Michigan Press, while his first book of poems, Songs to See By, is ready for a publisher. . . . PETER D. ZIVKOVIC is currently an associate professor of English at Fairmont State College, Fairmont, West Virginia. He has published a novella, Bezich (about a Serbian immigrant who returns to his homeland to spend his last years), and a book of poems, Little Book, Little Book, Where Have You Been.

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