•  
  •  
 

The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

Articles

The Love Songs of J. Swift, G. Bernard Shaw, and J. A. A. Joyce

Women and Negroes March

The British Crisis in Higher Education

History in the Fourth Dimension

Presidential Libraries: New Dimension in Research Facilities

The Role of the Area Research Center on the College Campus

Verse

Oedipus

Power and Innocence

The Halfway House

By Firelight

Traveler

Hofmann Playing Chopin

Witness for the Defense

Sonnet

Diplomacy

In the Year of the Tiger

Ishmael

Theme in Yellow

Abstract

in this issue. . .

EVERY laborer, and particularly the editor of such a journal as THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY, is deserving of a little time off. Not only does he need to rest and recruit himself, but more importantly he needs that holiday of the spirit that comes with putting the old routine behind him and sallying into fresh fields, from which, hopefully, he will bring back a rich harvest. There is also, we are bound to add, a very human need of recognition and appreciation, and he will never be more appreciated than when he is missed. Not a day passes this winter during the sabbatical absence of Editor Dudley T. Cornish when his harassed substitute fails to cast a wistful glance at his vacant chair and to wonder how in heaven he managed to get so many things done. This winter issue of the QUARTERLY is his. He made the final selections long since and laid down the general plan. It is the tidying up of details and coping with daily routine that keep the acting editor’s nose to the editorial grindstone.

THAT SWIFT, SHAW, and JOYCE have more in common than their indomitable Irishry is the theme of our introductory article. The "Love Songs" of the title hints at Eros as the common denominator, and the opening paragraph evinces the author's intent to demonstrate a shared attitude toward love and the place of woman in the human comedy. A formidable assignment, thinks so mere a woman as the acting editor, but looks with respect at the qualifications of our author. For some two decades C. N. STAVROU has been teaching literary courses and writing about the insights he has achieved into his favorite authors. He received his A. B. in 1946, his A. M. in 1947, and his Ph. D. in 1952, all at the University of Buffalo. Between 1945 and 1957 he taught a varied program of English courses at the University of Buffalo, and from 1957 through 1963 he taught English at Lamar State College, Beaumont, Texas. Currently he is once more in Buffalo as professor of English at Canisius College. He has written numerous articles on such literary figures as Byron, Blake, Lawrence, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Hawthorne, and others, which have appeared in various scholarly journals and reviews, among them The University of Kansas City Review, Colorado Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Literature and Psychology. His book-length study, Whitman and Nietzsche, has just been published by the University of North Carolina Press.

LAST SPRING we received a letter asking whether we would be interested in an article comparing two protest movements in American history, one the struggle for women's rights and the other the struggle for Negroes' rights. We were immediately interested and said so. Our correspondent was CARLETON MABEE, at that time Director of the Division of Social Studies, Delta College, University Center, Michigan, and now Chairman of the Humanities and Social Studies Department, Rose Polytechnic Institute, Terre Haute, Indiana. Professor Mabee has a Ph.D. from Columbia. His book The American Leonardo: The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse won the 1944 Pulitzer Prize for biography. In 1961 Macmillan published his Seaway Story, a history of the St. Lawrence seaway. Since that date he has been increasingly absorbed in one of the crucial struggles of our times and has published some half-dozen articles on civil rights in The Christian Century, Nation, Liberation, Negro History Bulletin, The Reporter, and Antioch Review. We are pleased to present the seventh article, which examines the problem from a different and somewhat unusual point of view.

WARREN O. AULT, a former Rhodes Scholar from Kansas, has traveled a long way from his native state. After taking three degrees in history (A. B. and A. M. at Oxford and Ph. D. at Yale), he taught history at Baker University for one year and at Boston University for fifty years. He is the author of several volumes and numerous articles on European and English history, is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds the honorary degrees of LL. D. from Baker University and Litt. D. from Boston University. He was in England in October, 1963, when the Robbins Report was published, and he decided to write something about it, believing that what the British are doing and planning to do in higher education has considerable relevance for us.

OUR THREE REMAINING ARTICLES were selected and brought together in the expectation that they would support and complement each other. All are concerned with extra dimensions in history, with regional libraries or research facilities which, though of special interest to the historian or graduate student in the Midwest, offer resources of significant value beyond regional limits. The first and most general of these articles is concerned with the role of the National Park Service as a conservator of history. It was originally presented last March, as part of the Seventh Annual Missouri Valley Conference of Collegiate Teachers of History at Omaha. The author, MERRILL J. MATTES, formerly Regional Chief, History and Archeology Division of the National Park Service at Omaha, now bears the enigmatic title of “Acting Resource Studies Advisor." He explains that this is a new office with primary responsibility for the Park Service research programs in history, archeology, and the natural sciences, including coordination with the National Survey and National Landmark programs. Mr. Mattes took his A. B. degree at the University of Missouri and his A. M. at the University of Kansas. In 1938 he attended Yale University on a fellowship in history and archeology. He has been with the National Park Service since 1935, most of this time in the Midwest. His publications include two books and numerous articles on western history.

OUR NEXT article was also presented last March at the Missouri Valley Conference in Omaha. The author, WILLIAM D. AESCHBACHER, took his B. S. in Education in 1940 at the University of Nebraska. After wartime service in the Army Air Corps he returned to the University of Nebraska for his A. M. and Ph.D. He has been a professor of history at Murray State College, Kentucky, and director of the Nebraska State Historical Society. He is now director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library at Abilene. Secretary-treasurer of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association for the past eight years, he has published articles and reviews in numerous historical publications.

THE LAST article in this group of three is also based upon a paper, originally presented at the annual meeting of the Wisconsin Association of Teachers of College History, Wisconsin State University at River Falls. JAMES T. KING took his A. B. at Hastings College and his A. M. and Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska, where he held a Sheldon Fellowship for research. He has been a member of the faculty of Wisconsin State University since fall 1962. He has presented papers at various conferences and has published numerous scholarly articles, book reviews, and newspaper magazine- section articles. His first book, War Eagle: A Life of General Eugene A. Carr, was a 1963 publication of the University of Nebraska Press. During this past summer he held a Regents' Grant to continue research on a forthcoming book, a biography of General George Crook.

AMONG the eleven authors of our dozen poems we number eight old friends. TRACY THOMPSON, whose "Ishmael" and "Sonnet" are in this issue, is a frequent contributor and a generous correspondent; for some time now his letters have been coming to us from Japan. Returning to our pages exactly one year after his January 1964 debut, JOHN JUNSON is currently finishing an M. F. A. and beginning work on a Ph.D. at the State University of Iowa. JAMES WORLEY makes his third contribution to the QUARTERLY, his "Summer's Gone" having appropriately closed our recent fall issue. LEONARD GILLEY also makes his third appearance after contributing to the recent October issue, and DAVID PEARSON ETIER is with us for the second time in succession. Among the women, MARGARET PURCELL, a New Englander now living in Pasadena, California, appeared for the first time in our October number and impressed us so happily that we· carried one of her poems over into our current issue. MARY GRAHAM LUND is another Californian (Los Angeles) whose poems pleasantly span these two issues. WILLIAM SALLAR has been absent for a year but returns strong with his whimsically nostalgic "Hofmann Playing Chopin."

WELCOMING our three new poets, we note that they are from as many different states and have still more widely varied interests and professions. CHARLES EDWARD EATON makes his home in Woodbury, Connecticut. His work in poetry and prose has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Sewanee Review, Harper's Magazine, The Saturday Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, The Reporter, Poetry (Chicago), and he has published four volumes of poetry, The Bright Plain, The Shadow of the Swimmer, The Greenhouse in the Garden, and Countermoves, and a volume of short stories entitled Write Me from Rio. Most recently, he has been giving readings from his poetry at Duke University, University of North Carolina, North Carolina State, and at other colleges on the North Carolina Poetry Circuit and before the New England Poetry Society at Harvard. LUCIEN STRYK teaches creative writing and Oriental literature at Northern Illinois University, De Kalb, Illinois. He has held a Fulbright in Iran, has twice been a visiting lecturer in Japan, and has held foundation grants at Yale and the University of Chicago. Last summer he shared the New Chicago Poem Contest prize, sponsored by The Chicago Daily News, with John Berryman and Hayden Carruth. At the present time he is preparing his third volume of verse for publication. ROBERT CLAYTON CASTO was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and spent the greater part of his life there, but is now employed in New York as an advertising copywriter for a proprietary drug firm. He received his A. B. from Yale University in 1954 and has done graduate work in musicology and musical composition at Columbia University. At the invitation of Richard Eberhart, he recorded many poems for the Archives of the Library of Congress, and he has had poems published in Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Colorado Quarterly, American Weave, and elsewhere. He has been sought out as a speaker, among other places at Dartmouth, Smith, and Vassar, and has seen his verse adaptation of Racine's Britannicus given professionally in New York City. A first book of poems, A Strange Fitful Land, with a prefatory note by Padraic Colum, appeared in 1959. Work in progress includes a new book of poems and the first draft of a new verse play.

BRIEF REVIEWS of three new volumes of poetry by poets who have appeared in the QUARTERLY are the work of our literary and temporary chief editor.

Download

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.