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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES

British Nature Poetry Now

Swift's Irony and Cartesian Man

The Byronic Pilgrimage to the Absurd

Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Hippolytus

Ulysses and the Post-Modern Temper

Blackwood's

POETRY

Bananas and Grapes

Bethesda Fountain

The Troubadour's Complaint

Bequest

Passengers

Mrs. Jones:

Phase In, Phase Out

An Old-Country Fellow

The Abbot's Depression

Lament

A Charm Against Honesty

Apology to My Unborn Son

Peace, Father, Where You Lie

Ballad

Magic

The Ghost That Walks

The Ancestor

Song of the Scholar of Love

An Ill Will

The Ballad of the Divorcee

The Fool's First Song

The Fool's Second Song

Lament for the End of the Year

Rime on the Bedroom Wall

Angel Rodriguez

Abstract

in this issue. . .

WE RARELY commission articles but are content for the most part to select what appears most suitable to our needs from the more than sufficient number that drop unsolicited on our desk. From time to time we have remarked that our yearly Summer Literary Number appears to attract a preponderance of writers devoted to the American literary scene. Articles on British writers have been far scantier, on Continental European writers almost non-existent. We did not like to think this imbalance betrayed a parochialism on our part (we are conscious of none) or of our writers, and we were just as far from believing that American literature was the only one alive and promising enough to be worth studying. The dim theory we had formed inclined to attribute the overflow to the ebullience of the American Studies area during the past decade or so, and we philosophically awaited a turn in the tide. Very recently we have begun to notice an increased interest in British writers, and with no great surprise but with considerable pleasure we found ourselves assembling the first all-British issue in our decade and a half of existence. In the end we had even an embarrassment of riches-and so we shall be smuggling the surplus into our more generalized numbers from time to time.

THE FIRST contributor to our all-British issue is an American, JULIAN GITZEN, who happens to be living in Shiraz, Iran, and teaching senior and graduate students in English at Pahlavi University. We can, however, make some local claim to him, for before going to Shiraz in 1970 he taught three years at our own University of Kansas. Not only a writer about poets but himself a poet, he has to his credit the seven poems of the "Sangamon River Series" in the Winter 1973 Western Humanities Review, and he has published a number of articles on modern English poets, among them Louis MacNeice, Ted Hughes (two articles), and Charles Tomlinson. Professor Gitzen received his B. S. in Ed. at Eastern Illinois University, his M. A. at Harvard, and his Ph. D. at the University of Wisconsin.

OUR second author, ANNE PATTERSON, has likewise lived and studied, though not taught, for several years abroad, and like Professor Gitzen received her Ph. D. (in Contemporary Literature) at the University of Wisconsin. For the past four years she has taught in the honors program and the classics department of the University of Kentucky, where she is an assistant professor. This is her first published work and is a revision of a small part of her doctoral thesis analyzing the effect of Cartesian science on seventeenth and eighteenth century thought and literature. Here we noticed a certain parallel between the existential despair of nineteenth century poets described by Gitzen, as the full implications of the Cartesian méthode came home to them, and the bleak forebodings of Jonathan Swift respecting that scientism which he saw as leading toward this impasse. Although it would be absurd to blame Descartes for the present world, it is nonetheless true that we live in the Cartesian world and that modem man is indeed Cartesian man.

BYRON' s nihilism, as HOWARD H. HINKEL depicts it in "The Byronic Pilgrimage to the Absurd," is akin to the dehumanized meaninglessness never acknowledged yet never exorcized, which haunts ghostlike the work of Jonathan Swift. As Professor Hinkel points out, Byron could never realize "the stability and sanctity of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's organically unified world, and in that respect he seems much more truly the modem man. Howard Hinkel received his B. A. at Oakland University (Michigan), and his M. A. and Ph. D. at Tulane, where he also taught for two years before coming to the University of Missouri in 1968 as an assistant professor in the department of English. He has published articles on Keats and Blake, has reviewed books on Keats and Wordsworth, and now has in manuscript or in progress additional studies of Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth.

THE NOVELIST and poet Thomas Hardy, subject of DUANE EDWARDS' study, is virtually the type case of the existential despair afflicting nineteenth century man as his faith in a providential Nature melted away under the hot flame of the new science. And is there, or is there not, some slight but curious coincidence in the fact that Professor Edwards is the third author in this issue to claim his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin? Certain it is, as we have but now observed, that in 1968 he took his Ph. D. at Madison, where he specialized in Victorian literature and minored in Greek. He is presently a member of the English department at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Rutherford, New Jersey. He has published other critical studies of Hardy (one of which appeared in the July 1970 issue of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY) and of Saul Bellow, Faulkner, Castle Rackrent, and Aeschylus in such journals as South Atlantic Quarterly, The Thomas Hardy Year Book, Studies in the Novel, and The Dalhousie Review.

RETURNING to the pages of our journal after an absence of five years, SANFORD PINSKER strikes a lighter note in his study of Joyce's Ulysses and the modern temper. Witty but goodhumored, he has his fun at the expense of Leslie Fiedler and other critics hovering in the background who have hastily sold out their stock in the Modern and have with equal haste bought into the Post-Modern—an overtouted and weakish stock, would appear to be the judgment of Professor Pinsker. Besides his article on "The Achievement of Bernard Malamud," which appeared in our Summer 1969 issue, he has had a book in the Crosscurrents Series of the University of Southern Illinois Press, The Schlemiel as Metaphor, and has published a number of articles on Malamud, Salinger, William Empson, Hassidic tradition, plus notes and reviews and a number of his own poems. He took his Ph. D. at the University of Washington (Seattle) and teaches English at Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster).

LAST of our six authors, CLIVE ANTHONY MARIN is a Canadian, and though he nowhere gives a clue, probably the youngest of our fairly young group. His academic experience has been varied: a B. A. with Honors in modem history at McGill University, a Diploma in African Studies and an M. Litt. at Edinburgh University, where his thesis "Blackwoods and Africa" dealt with the relationship between this important publishing house and British imperial history and literature. Most recently he took his B. Ed. at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and is presently "teaching history in a small high school near Cornwall, Ontario, Canada." His book Fogo Island, published this year, is about life in a small island off the north coast of Newfoundland, and he has published poetry in The Antigonish Review, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia. As for his study of Blackwood' s ("Maga") in our current issue, it makes us think of good bread, crisp, pleasant of taste, satisfying to the appetite for information and quite unlikely to produce an indigestion. A good article with which to end a meal or a "Maga."

IN ORDER TO DISPLAY some of the continuing possibilities of what may appear to be practically a lost art, we have decided to devote our entire poetry section this issue to poems in rhyme. Our interest in rhyme grows from the suspicion that, contemporary poetics to the contrary, a great number and perhaps a majority of the best poems of the twentieth century have relied on rhyme, and even among poets of major reputation as proponents of free form, very few have managed to leave rhyme totally alone: rhymed lyrics appear occasionally throughout William Carlos Williams' Paterson: the Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara include at least eighteen regular sonnets; and, more recently, Allen Ginsberg's National Book Award-winning The Fall of America ends with a 152-line "mantric lamentation rhymed for vocal chant"-in couplets. We do not wish to suggest that we are in any way opposed either to poetic experimentation in general or to free verse in particular, but we confess we have nonetheless often found ourselves unmoved or simply bored by many poems that seem, to no apparent purpose, "all out of shape from toe to top," and we have therefore concluded that rhyme and meter might still be available to the serious poet who wishes to "make it new."

Poems by CHARLES EDWARD EATON have appeared most recently in Harper's, The Antioch Review, and Colorado Quarterly. His sixth volume of poetry will come out next year. . . LAURENCE JOSEPHS teaches at Skidmore. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Shenandoah, and Southern Review. Greenfield Review Press published his chapbook, Six Elegies, in 1973. . . . X. J. KENNEDY spent the last year on a Guggenheim for poetry. His brilliantly useful "schoolbook," An Introduction to Poetry (Little, Brown), is now in a new edition. For the last few years he and his wife produced Counter/Measures: A Magazine of Rime, Meter and Song, which ceased publication as of its third number a few weeks ago. We congratulate them for a spirited venture. Their efforts made a difference. . . . Though he works mainly in free verse, TED KOOSER can handle the sonnet with remarkable dexterity. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and edits The New Salt Creek Reader. Best Cellar Press published his Twenty Poems early this year. . . . PHILIP LEGLER's latest book, The Intruder (University of Georgia Press), is getting good reviews all over. He teaches at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. Some of his recent work has appeared in Poetry Northwest and Shenandoah. . . . WILLIAM McLAUGHLIN is in England this summer. His work has been published in dozens of magazines, including Poetry Northwest, The Little Magazine, and New American Review (#12). . . . TOMAS O'LEARY continues to live on his wits in Cambridge, Mass. So far this year he has given a number of readings in New York and New England. He spent part of the winter in the West Indies. . . . On leave of absence next year from the University of Delaware, GIBBONS RUARK will be leaving shortly for Italy to work on a new book of poems. He and his family will live in Fiesole. Poems of his have recently appeared in The Massachusetts Review and The New Yorker. . . . LARRY RUBIN teaches at Georgia Tech. in Atlanta. He received the annual award of the Poetry Society of America last year. . . . JAMES SCHEVILL's new book of poems, The Buddhist Car & Other Characters, is just out from Swallow Press. His play, Cathedral of Ice, will be performed by the Trinity Square Repertory Company in Providence this fall. He teaches at Brown. . . . GRACE SCHULMAN edits poetry for The Nation. Her own poems have appeared in Poetry, Hudson Review, The American Poetry Review, and others. . . . JUDITH JOHNSON SHERWIN s Uranium Poems was the Yale Series of Younger Poets selection for 1969. Her second book of poems, Impossible Buildings, was published by Doubleday last year. She lives in New York City. . . . DAVE SMITH teaches at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. His two collections of poetry are Mean Rufus Throw Down (Basilisk Press) and The Fisherman's Whore (Ohio University Press). He has had poems recently in Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and American Scholar. . . . JOHN STONE is a physician who teaches at Emory University School of Medicine. He also serves on the staff of Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. His first book of poems, The Smell of Matches, was published in 1972 by Rutgers University Press. DABNEY STUART is one of this year's recipients of the National Endowment on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. He has published poems in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Quarterly Review of Literature, and a number of other magazines. His third book of poems, The Other Hand, will be published this fall by the Louisiana State University Press. He is poetry editor of Shenandoah. . . . LEWIS TURCO has written two considerable books on poetic form and technique: The Book of Forms (Dutton, 1968) and Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing (Reston, 1973). His latest collection of poems is The Weed Garden (Peaceweed Press, 1973). HELEN J. WILLIAMS teaches English at Kansas State University in Manhattan. Her poems have appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Kansas Quarterly, The South Dakota Review, and Counter/Measures. . . . For the past twenty years HAROLD WITT has been publishing his poems in a variety of magazines, including The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, The Hudson Review, and The New Republic. Selections from his work-in-progress, Winesburg by the Sea, have been issued by Hearse Press and Best Cellar. He lives in Orinda, California.

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