The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought
Contents
Articles
Three Poets in Search of Beauty
Bawdry and Purpose in the Novel
Emily Dickinson and Death
Realistic Devices in Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat"
The Ambassadors: Henry James' Method
Franklin's Self-Portrait
Verse
Lonely Children Play a Game
The Poet-Lovers
Solder
Emily Dickinson
A Prayer
All the Rivers Run Into the Sea
Abstract
in this issue. . .
DURING the absence of our hardworking editor-in-chief this past summer the responsibility of seeing the October issue through the press has devolved upon the advisory editor in literature with the helpful assistance of the editorial board. Lest the substitute appear to be claiming too much, she would like to point out that Professor Cornish left his desk in excellent condition, with a supply of articles and poems already chosen, and it was his idea that there would be a certain appropriateness in publishing a special literary number under the temporary guidance of the literary editor. He will be back in the shop for the January and following issues. Changes of a more permanent nature, however, should be noted as we begin Volume IV, Issue 1, of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY.
Regretfully we announce the retirement from the editorial board of our advisory editor in art, Otto Alfred Hankammer, professor (emeritus) of industrial education and art, and head of that department of the College until 1957. He joined the faculty in 1922 as an instructor, attained professorial rank in 1933, and became department head in 1945. The national recognition accorded Kansas State College of Pittsburg for pioneering work in industrial arts can be attributed in great degree to his imagination, initiative, and steady devotion through the years. He began his collegiate education at Wooster College in his native Ohio in 1913, and his degrees include: B. S., Kansas State Teachers College, 1927; A. M. and Ph.D., Ohio State University. He is a member of many learned and professional societies and has ably assisted the work of state and national organizations concerned with teacher education, particularly in the field of industrial art.
Professor Hankammer is the author of a book, The Art of Block Cutting, as well as numerous articles appearing in professional journals, and he has been the recipient of many honors, among them the first award of the Algoma Plywood Products Designs. Joining the staff of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY with its first number, October, 1959, Professor Hankammer served the journal faithfully through its initial three years and leaves the board followed by the regret and appreciation of his fellow editors.
Successor to Professor Hankammer as advisory editor in the fine arts is Reed W. Schmickle, associate professor of art and a member of the College faculty since 1954. Although his name appears for the first time on the masthead of the October issue, Professor Schmickle is no newcomer to THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY. His article "Art and the Modern Mind" appeared in the Spring 1960 issue. A native of Missouri, he holds the B. S. degree from Southwest State College in Springfield and the M.A. degree in art from the University of Missouri. Before joining the faculty of Kansas State College of Pittsburg he taught art in the high school of Mexico, Missouri, and in Central High School, Tulsa. He studied architectural sculpture with Bernard Frazier, working with him as project assistant, and used this experience to good effect in producing the striking thirty-two foot concrete sculpture on the south side of the Industrial Education and Arts Building. He has exhibited his oils and water colors in numerous juried shows about the country and has served as juror in many others. In addition to his creative work he teaches art history, design, painting, and several sections of the Fine Arts courses in the College general education program.
Although our fall literary number suggests that American literature continues to have a strong fascination for our contributors, we note some interesting departures. Our lead article, "Three Poets in Search of Beauty," explores an important facet of French poetry. Literary criticism has increasingly stressed the influence of nineteenth century French literature on recent English and American writers, but it has had little to say about the aesthetic theories underlying French literary practice. RALPH BEHRENS makes good the deficiency by a study of nineteenth century aesthetic theory as exemplified in the work of Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, and Charles Baudelaire. A native of Arkansas, Professor Behrens holds the degrees of B. A. from Arkansas State Teachers College and M. A. from the University of Colorado, and he has done graduate work in English and French literature at the University of Minnesota, Harvard University, the University of London ( Kings College), and Oxford University. In 1949-50 he was the recipient of a Fulbright award to study Keats at the University of London, and last summer he was again in England, doing research at Oxford on contributors to The Savoy and The Yellow Book. Articles by Professor Behrens on nineteenth century French writers have appeared in Comparative Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, The French Review, and The Classical Journal. He began his teaching career at the University of Minnesota, and for the past twelve years has been a teacher at Arkansas State Teachers College where he is now a professor of English.
The problem of censorship is always with us, but it has its moments of special acuteness. The current raiding of library shelves, the inquisition held on college and high school librarians, and the circulation in recent months of a private Index Expurgatorius give a particular timeliness to our second article, "Bawdry and Purpose in the Novel." The author, BERNARD F. ENGEL, is associate professor of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University and editor of University College Quarterly. He has published articles on the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, and is currently writing a critical study of Miss Moore's work for the Twayne U. S. Authors Series. An Infantry veteran and a graduate of the University of Oregon, he was city editor of the Eugene (Oregon) Register-Guard before taking an M. A. at the University of Chicago and the Ph.D. at the University of California. His wife Adele is a practicing poet.
How an author treats death is no less than an index to his religious thought and, it may be, to his value as a writer and an influence upon his own and succeeding ages. That Emily Dickinson was preoccupied-one might well say, obsessed-with death appears from the number of her poems on that subject. Of a total production of some 1775 poems nearly a third examine death from all possible aspects. THOMAS W. FORD, whose article "Emily Dickinson and Death" appears in this issue, first became interested in the poetry of Emily Dickinson while attending preparatory school at Andover, Massachussetts. He took his B. A. at Rice University and his Ph.D. at the University of Texas. He has been a member of the English department of the University of Texas and at present is an assistant professor in the English department of the University of South Carolina. Among his previous publications are articles in The Mark Twain Journal and the Walt Whitman Review. He is not only a student of poets but a poet himself, his work having appeared in Pegasus, Patterns, New Athenaeum, and Sonnet Sequence.
Stephen Crane has been called both a realistic and a naturalistic writer, but, as CHARLES R. METZGER points out, the attempt to fit any writer into a particular critical pigeonhole can lead to the neglect or distortion of elements of his work that embarrassingly will not fit. In his "Realistic Devices in Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat,' " Professor Metzger avoids the dangers inherent in categorizing by concentrating his attention on particular elements in Crane's well-known short story. A native of Seattle, Washington, he has the B. A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University of Washington. He is now an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has published two books, Emerson and Greenough (University of California Press, 1954) and Thoreau and Whitman (University of Washington Press, 1961), as well as articles in The Journal of Aesthetics, Modern Fiction Studies, The Western Humanities Review, the Annals of Science, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. His article on Crane's "The Open Boat" was first presented as a public lecture in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he was Fulbright Professor of American Literature at the University of Sao Paulo in 1960.
During recent decades the work of Henry James has steadily mounted in the estimation of critics and scholars, but it has not attained any real popularity with the general public. The explanation may be that James, as Joseph Warren Beach pointed out, did not treat the usual historical, social, or political "subjects.'' Accustomed to the work of such nineteenth century novelists as Dickens, the uninitiated reader might conclude that James had no subject and was too esoteric for him. Our own JOHN Q. REED, in his study of The Ambassadors, shows that James was absorbed in character, in the conflicts and the subtle relationships of one person with another. The conclusion may well be that James strikes nearer to the heart of the human predicament and has more to say to the modem reader that his more popular contemporaries. John Reed is a professor of American literature in the language and literature department of the College. He has published a number of articles on Artemus Ward and is currently preparing studies of Ward's lectures. His "Mark Twain: West Coast Journalist" appeared in the January 1960 issue of the QUARTERLY, and he served on the board as literary editor during the sabbatical of the present literary editor.
The final article in this issue of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY deals with a famous American who has become almost a folk hero to his fellow Americans. Franklin daring the lightning or the British House of Commons, Franklin walking down a Philadelphia street with a loaf of bread under each arm or charming French society in his homespun garb or with his homespun wisdom: Who does not have at least one of these pictures in mind?
Yet many a reader has confessed to disappointment in Franklin's own account of himself, the famous autobiography which paints a Hat picture of a man who is somehow a little too prudential, a little too much the Bonhomme Richard to be the fully representative American. We are left to feel that Franklin was not fair to himself and that he was a much bigger man than he cared to remember. It is the contention of WALTER SHEAR that this was precisely the effect Franklin intended, that he did not write his biography as a characterization of himself but as a sustained and lengthy exemplum.
This is Walter Shear's first appearance in the QUARTERLY and his first publication. A native of Wisconsin, he has a B. A. degree from his State University, an M.A. from the State University of Iowa, and the Ph.D. from Wisconsin. He began his teaching experience two years ago at Kansas State College of Pittsburg, where he is now an assistant professor in the department of language and literature. His major interest is in American and modern literature.
Of the six poems in this issue three are by writers who have not previously appeared in THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY. MENKE KATZ, Lithuanian by birth but American since his childhood, has had an active career as a poet. Eight books of his poems have appeared in Yiddish, and he has a book of poetry ready for publication in English. His poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Discourse, Epos, Commentary, Canadian Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and other journals and newspapers. A new poem will appear shortly in the Sewanee Review. Poet and Critic has published two essays on his poetry, one in the January 1962 issue by William Tillson and another in the February 1962 issue by Margaret L. Buxton. Besides his creative work Mr. Katz is also active as a teacher and as editor of a poetry magazine, Bitterroot: A Quarterly, published in Brooklyn. R. WILLIAM CONRAD, whose poem on Hemingway "was written in a burst of emotion upon learning of his death," is no stranger to Kansas State College, where he received his M. S. degree. His busy career has included serving four years in the Air Force (in Korea, among other places), loading ice cream trucks, teaching in high school and college, working as city editor of the Pittsburg Sun, operating a photographic business, and writing considerable fiction and poetry. He has also found time, in his thirty-two years, to marry and father six children. EDSEL FORD, our third new poet, has so he tells us no relation to automobiles. Born in Alabama, he has spent most of his life on a farm in the Arkansas Ozarks. After taking his B. A. degree at the University of Arkansas, he spent two years in the army, mostly in Germany. He has published two books, The Manchild from Sunday Creek, winner of the twenty-sixth Kaleidograph Press book award in 1956, and A Thicket of Sky. His poems have appeared in the New York Times and Herald Tribune, Saturday Review, Ladies' Home Journal, Look, Kansas Magazine, New Mexico Quarterly, The Christian Science Monitor, and many other magazines and newspapers. His work is represented in a textbook, Easy in English, and in a forthcoming anthology of western Americana. He prefers fishing to writing and finds it "a great deal more profitable."
FLORENCE J. GOODMAN, a native of Michigan, now teaching English at Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California, first appeared in the pages of the QUARTERLY in the Winter 1962 issue. MARION SCHOEBERLEIN, a frequent contributor, had poems in the issues of July and October 1961 and July 1962. By a pleasant coincidence the poem which appears in this issue is an appreciation of Emily Dickinson. Miss Schoeberlein is a resident of Illinois but admits to an affection for the Deep South of New Orleans. Her work has appeared in various literary magazines and in an anthology, Prismatic Voices. Poems by L. W. MICHAELSON appeared in the October 1961 and July 1962 issues. An English teacher at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, he has found time to write and publish poems in a number of literary reviews and in many of the college quarterlies. In recent months he has sold short fiction to Ramparts and Mutiny.
Recommended Citation
Behrens, Ralph; Engel, Bernard F.; Ford, Thomas W.; Metzger, Charles R.; Reed, John Q.; Shear, Walter; Goodman, Florence J.; Michaelson, L. W.; Ford, Edsel; Schoeberlein, Marion; Katz, Menke; and Conrad, R. William
(1962)
"The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 4 No. 1,"
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 4:
Iss.
1, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol4/iss1/1