The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought
Contents
Articles
Emily Dickinson's Palette
James' The Ambassadors: The Trajectory of the Climax
The View From The River: Richard Bissell's Satirical Humor
William Faulkner and the New Deal
Sir Walter Scott, Gentleman Soldier
A Plea for Heresy: A Secular Approach to Tragedy
Verse
Jellyfish
Clouds
The Hat
Tasters
Wonder
A.
The Swimming Lesson
Birth
Parasol Pride
Two Times Over
The Arizona Memorial
News Item
Abstract
in this issue. . .
FOLLOWING the pattern of a year ago, this is our summer literary issue. Whether we can set it down as a hard and fast rule that every future summer issue will be literary, it is impossible to say at this writing. Our five years of publishing experience indicate that we can expect to continue to receive an abundance of manuscripts treating literary subjects--probably at a ratio of three to two over all other subjects. This makes it relatively easy if not down right good sense to devote at least one issue a year to literature. In the case of this issue, we decided even before last winter began, and the accumulation of suitable material went on at an encouraging rate throughout the winter and spring. The result is spread upon the pages that follow: From Emily Dickinson to Henry James to Richard Bissell, from William Faulkner to Sir Walter Scott to, as a sort of frosting on our summer cake, an unorthodox interpretation of tragedy.
EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886), "the chief woman poet of America," has been attracting critical attention ever since William Dean Howells published his "Poems of Emily Dickinson'' in Harpers for January, 1891. Particularly in the last forty years has this "New England anchoress" been analyzed and scrutinized from a variety of points of view. It is, of course, a matter of some professional pride that the editorial staff of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY includes the author of The Riddle of Emily Dickinson, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1951. REBECCA PATTERSON, professor of American literature here, is also the author of numerous articles on other figures in American literature, but her specialty is Emily Dickinson. Therefore, when she told us, some months back, that she was hard at work on an analysis of Miss Dickinson's use of color, we instantly reserved space in this issue. As it turned out, we failed to reserve sufficient space--with the result that her penetrating analysis will appear in serial form, the first half here and its conclusion in our October issue. Professor Patterson has her A. B., A. M., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Texas and had taught there and at Stanford and North Carolina before coming to Pittsburg in 1954.
HENRY JAMES (1843-1916) left his New York birthplace at the age of twelve and, very late in life, gave up his American for British citizenship. Greatest of all his novels is The Ambassadors, and it is small wonder that the post-World-War-II Jamesian renaissance should produce new discussions of it. The analysis here presented came to us from EPIFANIO SAN JUAN, JR., who is completing his doctoral dissertation on "The Achievement of Oscar Wilde'' under the direction of Professor Jerome Buckley at Harvard. Mr. San Juan received his A. B. magna cum laude in 1958 from the University of the Philippines where he taught aesthetics and comparative literature. He took his A. M. at Harvard in 1962 and is now a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. His critical articles have been (or soon will be) published by American Literature, The Centennial Review, The Harvard Theological, Review, Modern Drama, and The Personalist; his poems have appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Harvard Advocate. Two books by Mr. San Juan are scheduled for European publication: Un Traite du Tremblement de Terre, to be published later this year by Edition Olympique in Paris, and Der Begriff und die Funktion des Raum im literarischen Kunstwerk, scheduled for publication next year by Kleist Verlag in Berlin. Earlier essays have appeared in various Philippine periodicals.
SHOCKING is the word to describe the contrast between Henry James, urbane and cosmopolitan expatriate, and Richard Bissell, minor American novelist of Dubuque, Iowa. But why, as Mr. Dooley once asked, should authors have to be dead to be recognized? And summer fare, whether culinary or literary, ought to be varied. After the involved complexities of James, the straightforward, slangy simplicity of Bissell is a welcome relief. FRANK J. ANDERSON is librarian at Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina. Born in Chicago, he managed to get an A. B. degree at the Indiana University between tours of duty in the U. S. Navy; he also has a master's degree in library science from Syracuse University. He first came to Kansas in 1952, leaving Salina in 1956 for a year at the Baring Avenue branch of the East Chicago, Indiana, Public Library and three more years as director of the Submarine Library at Groton, Connecticut. In 1960 he returned to Kansas Wesleyan. He has been writing off and on for fifteen years or so; professional library journals have published a number of his articles. Last November, the Shoe String Press of Hamden, Connecticut, published his bibliography of submarine literature, Submarines, Submariners, and Submarining, and the article on submarines in Collier’s Encyclopedia is from his hand. Eventually he may write a book of criticism on Bissell and his various works.
AMERICAN hardly fits Henry James, but it certainly suits William Faulkner. Some will probably insist that the proper adjective, Southern, is an essential modifier of American where the late great Mississippi novelist is concerned. Fortunately, ELMO HOWELL, associate professor of English at Memphis State University, is a native Mississippian possessing a natural empathy for Faulkner and the Deep South. Professor Howell took his master's and doctor's degrees at the University of Florida and taught two years at Jacksonville, Alabama, State College before moving to Memphis in 1957. His principal published works on Faulkner have appeared in The Arizona Quarterly, College English, The Explicator, The Journal of Mississippi History, The Northwest Review, The Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Tennessee Studies in Literature, and The Southern Folklore Quarterly.
FOREMOST author for the Old South was Sir Walter Scott, and it seems only logical to move from Professor Howell's discussion of Faulkner's ante-bellum antecedents to a consideration of Sir Walter's life-long interest in military affairs. The author of this article is RICHARD FRENCH, assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University in New Orleans, who has previously taught at Texas A. & M., the University of Texas, the University of South Carolina, and the University of Southern Mississippi. He received his A. B. and A. M. degrees at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas. A lieutenant commander in the U. S. Naval Reserve, he served six years on active duty during World War II and the Korean War. "My interest in the military," he says, "thus parallels Sir Walter Scott's."
RELIGIOUS terms and religious theories crowd into nearly every explanation of tragedy, even into twentieth century concepts of its nature. The implications of the use of these religious terms and theories have come under the examination of JOHN WILLCOXON, director of the College Theatre here. The result is, quite precisely, a plea for heresy; his is indeed a secular approach to the whole subject. Professor Willcoxon was born in Richmond, Virginia, and took his bachelor's degree at Washington and Lee before going to the University of Minnesota for his master's and Ph.D. degrees in drama. He joined the faculty here in the fall of 1961 and, in addition to teaching a number of drama courses, has since produced a commendable variety of plays of which, he says, his favorites have been A Hatful of Rain, Antigone, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Desire Under the Elms. His article here published was first presented at the April meeting of the Faculty Seminar in Liberal Education.
CUSTOMARILY, for the past year at least, new poets have contributed a minority of the poems published in each issue. Perhaps this issue marks a kind of point of departure in that seven of the twelve poets whose work appears here will be new to most of our readers. Five of our even dozen poems are the work of men and women who have become old favorites; the other seven we introduce to our public for the first time. BERNICE AMES is a Los Angeles housewife active in several writing groups including the Santa Monica Writers' Club, of which she has been president for the past two years. Her poetry has appeared most recently in such places as Approach, Bitterroot, The New York Herald Tribune, The Western Humanities Review, and Yankee. . . . BRANLEY A. BRANSON, assistant professor of biology at Kansas State College of Pittsburg, is internationally known for his articles in ichthyological journals as well as his monographs, two short books, and a few poems. He holds the B. S., M. S. and Ph.D. degrees with graduate and research work at the universities of California and Oklahoma. He joined the faculty here in 1960 after some teaching experience at the University of Oklahoma Field Station. He is currently doing field research on an ambitious two-year program of investigation into the olfactory organs of cyprinidae in the waters of North America; a grant from the National Institutes of Health supports the project. His primary professional interest is in the sensory adaptations of fishes and in molluscan taxonomy and animal zoogeography. . . . JAMES HEARST belongs to an Iowa family of farmers and deacons and was, he says, ''side tracked into teaching college students." This is now his main road, and fortunately the State College of Iowa at Cedar Falls gives him time to write as well as teach. His last book of poems, Limited View, was published in hardback by Prairie Press (Carroll Coleman), and in paperback by Alan Swallow. . . . PETER LORDEN unloads trucks in Toronto. He left school at seventeen to join the army and has since worked in construction, forestry, and insurance. His verse has been accepted by Ave Maria, The Ball State Forum, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Canadian Forum, Canadian Poetry, The Catholic Home Messenger, The Colorado Quarterly, Discourse, Epos, Four Quarters, The Green World, International Poetry Review, Lyric, and Voices. . . . MICHAEL PAUL NOVAK is a graduate of the Writer’s Workshop (in fiction) at the State University of Iowa, Iowa City, where he received his M. F. A. degree in 1962. He is an instructor of English at St. Mary College at Xavier, Kansas. Although he has previously published some assorted prose this is his first published poem. . . . RICHARD SCHRAMM teaches English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, while finishing his doctoral program at Duke University. He has taught at Ohio University and this fall will join the faculty of San Fernando Valley State College in Northridge, California. His poems have appeared in American Weave, Elizabeth, Cresset, and Impetus, and his article on Yeats's poetic technique was published in The Ohio University Review. . . . SANFORD STERNLICHT is professor of English at New York State University College at Oswego where he received his bachelor's degree in 1955, later taking his M.A. at Colgate and his Ph.D. in English at Syracuse University. After trying his hand at acting (off-Broadway), he belonged to the U.S. Navy from 1956 to 1959, and it was while serving as a line officer aboard U.S.S. Fort Manden that he wrote many of the poems appearing in Gull's Way, his first book, published by Richard R. Smith of Peterborough, New Hampshire. His verse has already appeared in The Canadian Forum, Dalhousie University Review, The New Mexico Quarterly, The Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He won The Writer's New Poets Award in 1960 and is now at work on his first novel.
OUR OTHER FIVE poems are by three New Yorkers, a Buckeye, and a temporary resident of Japan. EMILIE GLEN of New York City needs no introduction to our readers; LEONARD S. BERNSTEIN of Westbury, Long Island, contributed "Treatise" to our April issue and here carries his penchant for satirical verse against another windmill. . . . MENKE KATZ of Brooklyn, editor of Bitterroot, has published widely and has had his work translated into Czech, Italian, Japanese, and even Shonna. A new volume of his verse, "Land of Manna," is scheduled for publication in late August. . . . MARY OLIVER of Cleveland, Ohio, and London, England, plans to stay in America until the January publication by Houghton Mifflin of her No Voyage which originally appeared in England last fall. TRACY THOMPSON continues to teach in Japan and to uphold his well deserved reputation as the world's most prolific poet. Not a month passes without the arrival of ten or twenty new poems from his overworked typewriter; hardly an issue of a journal publishing poetry appears without something from him.
REVIEWS are contributed by our literature editor and by CHARLES CAGLE of our Language and Literature Department whose examination of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye we published last summer.
Recommended Citation
Patterson, Rebecca; San Juan, Epifanio Jr.; Anderson, Frank J.; Howell, Elmo; French, Richard; Willcoxon, John W. III; Ames, Bernice; Lorden, Peter; Branson, Branley; Hearst, James; Katz, Menke; Novak, Michael Paul; Oliver, Mary; Thompson, Tracy; Glen, Emilie; Schramm, Richard; Sternlicht, Sanford; and Bernstein, Leonard
(1964)
"The Midwest Quarterly; Vol. 5 No. 4,"
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought: Vol. 5:
Iss.
4, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol5/iss4/1