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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

Articles

Voting and the Responsible Citizen: A Fresh Look

Political Satire: John Gay's The Beggar's Opera

The Irrationality of the Nuclear Rationale

John James Ingalls: Geographic Determinism and Kansas

Overhauling Logic

Pericles at Gettysburg

Verse

The Ice Separates

There Is No Death in Kansas

Olympia in Early Spring

Domestic Poem

Flower Show

In Doubt

The Vieux Carré

Nantucketers

Trees and Waters

This Dust-Bowl Area

In the Time of Cranes

A Week Later

Abstract

in this issue. . .

GENERALLY SPEAKING, spring is a non-political season. Certainly, with the snow and ice melting away, the winds of March rattling the windows, and the elm buds burgeoning against the blue sky, political practice and theory seem to belong somewhere else in time and space. But, the news constantly, forceably, shockingly thrusts politics into eye, heart, mind, and viscera every day, whether that news comes from Saigon, Selma, Topeka, or Washington. Your American is first and foremost a political animal. If he isn't he needs to be. John Adams and Tom Jefferson understood this; Henry Thoreau and his friend Waldo understood it, even if at times they seemed to reject it or at least to reject personal participation in the politics of their own time. Abraham Lincoln knew it. and became a martyr to it. Felix Frankfurter and Winston Churchill knew it, too. In short, this journal of contemporary thought finds it impossible to ignore the political area, and this spring issue is heavily freighted with all manner of political discussion. Naturally, the editor-in-chief would prefer to claim all the credit for the material here published, but both honesty and justice require him to recognize the simple fact (and to acknowledge it with thanks) that Rebecca Patterson, acting in his stead, was instrumental in securing by far the greater portion of the articles and poems which follow.

LAST SUMMER at the height of the presidential campaign came a fresh analysis of the old American Get-Out-the-Vote syndrome. This analysis arrived too late for inclusion in our fall issue, and we returned it with a shrewd request for a post-election revision. The author, WILLIAM WELCH (no kin to Robert), is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado, where he is also assistant director of the Honors Program. His bachelor's, master's, and doctor's degrees are from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, in that order, which is about as Ivy as you can get without touching Princeton. After seven years in Washington as research analyst for a government agency, he was visiting lecturer in political science at the University of California (Berkeley) before joining the Colorado faculty in 1961.

POLITICAL SATIRE has been a highly sophisticated art form for at least two and a half millenia already, although it has become increasingly difficult to write recognizable satire, especially in our own century. Avoiding this nasty dilemma altogether, C. F. BURGESS associate professor of English at Virginia Military Institute, drops back 200 years to analyze The Beggar's Opera of John Gay. His conclusions suggest that political satire was no easier to handle in the early eighteenth century than it is in this present. Professor Burgess holds the A. B. from Yale and the A. M. and Ph. D. from Notre Dame and taught at both New Haven and South Bend prior to going to Lexington in 1962. His special field is eighteenth-century drama, and Clarendon Press will publish is The Letters of John Gay this spring, thanks in part to an American Philosophical Society Research grant in 1963-64. A score of his articles have appeared in such journals as Explicator, Literature and Psychology, Nineteenth Century Fiction, Notes and Queries, and Philological Quarterly.

NUCLEAR POLITICS is a larger subject and requires a broader view than American voter behavior or Whig-Tory machinations. It follows logically that BALJIT SINGH comes to this international subject from an international background: His bachelor’s is from Agra University and his master’s from Aligarh, both in India, but his Ph.D. is from the University of Maryland. Now associate professor of political science at Michigan State University, he was earlier lecturer in political science at Baroda, India, an~ Fellow at the Indian School of International Studies, New Delhi. He has contributed to Eastern World, Ethics, India Quarterly, Journal of Human Relations, Pacific Affairs, Review of International Affairs, and United Asia.

UNIVERSALS are constructed of particulars, and among the curious particulars going into the accumulated folklore of Kansas politics a certain Senator J. J. Ingalls stands out. Remembered chiefly for the unflattering fact that the Populist Revolt (in the person of a bearded radical named William Peffer) sent him into "deserved retirement" in 1890, Ingalls deserves some attention for other earlier activities. At least BURTON J. WILLIAMS thinks so, and we listened to him long enough to be persuaded. Mr. Williams holds the A. B. and A. M. degrees from Southern Illinois University and confidently expects to receive the doctor's degree in history from the University of Kansas this June. He first presented this article at the thirty-eighth annual meeting of the Kansas Association of Teachers of History and Social Science on the campus of Washburn University, Topeka, in March, 1964.

LOGIC ought to be more closely related to political behavior than the facts suggest, but then logic itself is not always logical. Trying to put logic on the right track is no easy job, but R. D. LAKIN has never been one to avoid a challenge or shirk a duty. Back home with his family in California after a Fulbright winter in a London garret, he has pushed "to about the half way point in the novel" and has some things appearing in Descant and Limbo. Dean hardly needs any introduction to readers of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY; this is his fifth appearance in our pages. We ran his previous articles in July 1960, January 1961, April 1962, and July 1963. Welcome back again.

ONE HUNDRED years ago this month, the American Civil War came to an end, at least in a formal military sense. And less than a week after Appomattox, Abraham Lincoln was dead of an assassin's bullet, among the last casualties in a war which, among other things, helped the home of the brave become the land of the free. Our most articulate, poetic, and political president, Mr. Lincoln left among his papers several eloquent readings of the American democratic faith. So much legend and folklore have grown up around this "first among the folk heroes of the American people," as Ralph Henry Gabriel has put it, that scholars have been busy for these hundred years analyzing and explaining what Lincoln said or meant to say. When FLORENCE JEANNE GOODMAN of Pierce College, Los Angeles, sent us her probing examination of the Gettysburg Address, our first inclination was to throw up editorial hands and say "No more!" Fortunately, however, we read it and discovered a fresh look which is fresh. Mrs. Goodman's article struck us as entirely appropriate for this issue and for our commemoration of the centennial of the death and transfiguration of the Great Emancipator. Her article has the further distinction of having won kudos in advance of publication (in the form of an illuminated resolution) from the Los Angeles City Council, the city fathers and mothers having been impressed by her presentation of "Pericles at Gettysburg" at the Pierce College Lincoln's Birthday observance. Stimulated by a lawyer-husband, a son at Harvard, and a daughter at the University of Padua, Mrs. Goodman teaches twentieth-century literature with particular reference to the theater. This is her third appearance in our pages.

VERY LIKE our January issue in which the ratio of old to new poets was eight to three, this April number carries the poetic work of seven old friends and two new. From New Haven where he is working toward a Ph.D. in religious studies at Yale, comes a poem by BURTON L. CARLSON, a native of Sierra Leone who has lived in Oregon and California and spent a Fulbright year in Germany. He has an A. B. from Wabash College, a B. D. from Yale, and his present concentration is in Old Testament and Near Eastern languages. A Woodrow Wilson Fellow as well as a Danforth Fellow, when not studying or writing poetry he has cooked in a resort hotel, instructed in philosophy, and chaplained handicapped children; he will "probably be ordained a Presbyterian minister." His work has previously appeared in The Arizona Quarterly, Kentucky Writing, and The Wabash College Review. . . . DON WELCH, associate professor of English at Kearney State College, Nebraska, teaches American literature and creative writing. A doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, his dissertation deals with Thoreau's poetry. Previous publications include The DePaul Literary Magazine (whose recent demise we mourn) and Prairie Schooner.

TRIED & TRUE poets in this issue include JOHN CLARKE, A. D. FREEMAN, STUART FRIEBERT, JAMES HEARST, JOSEPH JOEL KEITH, JAMES RUOFF, and (who else?) TRACY THOMPSON. John Clarke teaches English at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, and two of his poems have already appeared in our pages. . . . Mrs. Freeman of Wellesley, Massachusetts, is a frequent contributor to this journal and a solid list of others including The Saturday Review. . . . Professor Friebert is currently rejoicing over his tenure appointment (as of July 1) at Oberlin College; further reason for rejoicing is the fall publication of his first collection of poems, Dreaming of Floods, by Dodd, Mead and Company. Back in the summer of 1963, THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY distinguished itself by publishing his first poem, "Odenwald," thus launching what bids fair to become a formidable career: his poems have since appeared in nearly everything from Bitterroot to Dust to Trace. After seventy-five acceptances in the last year he is hot on the tracks of Tracy-and his jealous colleagues are accusing him of "facility." . . . An Iowa farmer at heart, James Hearst teaches at the State College in Cedar Falls; he first appeared in this journal last summer. . . . Joel Keith of Los Angeles is familiar to poetry readers around the world; he contributes to magazines in a dozen or so countries. Windfall Press published Across the Dark, his third volume of poems, last fall, and a fourth is scheduled for publication later this year. . . . James Ruoff is a member of the department of English at Wichita State University; he first appeared in our summer literary number in 1963 when we published his "Katherine Anne Porter Comes to Kansas." That milestone issue also included work by Dean Lakin, A. D. Freeman, and Stuart Friebert. . . . Some years ago Tracy Thompson of San Francisco set sail for the far reaches of the Pacific, and at frequent intervals ever since he has sent us generous sheaves of poems. No poetry magazine worthy of the name dares publish an issue without at least one Tracy Thompson; flamboyantly, we top them all this time with four of his best.

THE REVIEW of Mary Oliver's No Voyage is by our literary editor, REBECCA PATTERSON. Whom else?

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