•  
  •  
 

The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

Articles

The Public and Private Character of Good

An Animadversion upon Spoof

"The Little Regiment" of Stephen Crane at the Battle of Fredericksburg

The Reluctant Radicals of 1866

C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and the Modern Myth

Verse

Serenade

City Directory

Apprentice

The Local Time

Charles Ives and the Sparrows

Awaiting Your Return--To Barbara

Bloodroot

Prospero

On Pilgrimage

A Mutation

At My Piano

While You Played

Abstract

in this issue. . .

PHILOSOPHY, cinematic literature, literature and history, history and politics, and final cosmography – these compose the menu we spread before you on this spring table. We consider it attractive and nutritious; we hope our readers enjoy the various courses as much as we enjoyed their selection and preparation. One can argue the precision of the categories. Certainly philosophy is or ought to be concerned with the nature of good. Almost as certainly, literary critics can be concerned with the form, fabric, and intent of movies and television productions which, one supposes, begin somewhere with written scripts. There is little room for argument on our third and fourth choices, and on the last, well, our desk dictionary gives as one definition of cosmography, "the science that treats of the constitution of the whole order of nature." That’s comprehensive. One can also consider the contents of this issue in terms of comparative reality, whether philosophical, literary, historical, political, or cosmological. Marshal McLuhan to the contrary notwithstanding, words are still fundamental to our enterprise, to most academic enterprises. We offer you a hundred pages of words, then, some in poetry, some in prose, some in earnest, some in a lighter vein, all, for the most part, well chosen.

PHILOSOPHY is or ought to be concerned with the nature of good. That is one of the convictions of R. D. LAKIN of Fort Collins, Colorado, a frequent contributor to this journal who requires small introduction. He is working on a novel, he reports, writing some short stories and poetry, and publishing now and again in Bitterroot, Cardinal Poetry Magazine, Colorado College Magazine, and Minority of One. This summer he will paint some houses in Cripple Creek and earn some money.

VICTORIAN literature is a far, far cry from contemporary cinema and television "drama," but DAVID SONSTROEM, assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut, finds both fields fertile. His essay here published established a new record for winning quick and unanimous editorial approval, in part because of its clarity, freshness, and pertinence. Favorable reader reaction to Stanley Trachtenberg's article, "Undercutting with Sincerity: The Strategy of the Serious Film," which we ran last spring, suggested the wisdom of another venture into that area. It also seemed appropriate that that venture be the work of a Storrs associate of Professor Trachtenberg's. Professor Sonstroem is very much a New Englander, by both birth and training. His A. B. is from Amherst, his master's and Ph.D. from Harvard. His book on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite woman is now being considered for publication, and his shorter works have appeared in The North American Review and Victorian Studies.

REALISM is usually associated with Stephen Crane and for good sound reasons. His classic treatment of Civil War combat, The Red Badge of Courage, has drawn many readers and much critical attention. Less well known is a short story of his dealing with soldiers in action, "The Little Regiment," which attracted the attention of C. B. IVEs, assistant professor of English at Douglass College, Rutgers University. Professor Ives has done a convincing job of identifying both the little regiment and the major battle in which it earned that title. In the course of his analysis, he shows how a realistic writer draws factual details from extant records and reports. Professor Ives' degrees are from Yale, Harvard, and North Carolina; before World War II he was a lawyer; since then he has taught at Ransom School in Florida, at Wake Forest College and Guilford College in North Carolina. He has published one novel, The Realists (Dodd, Mead, 1947) and several articles, one on Billy Budd in American Literature (to be included in a revision of William Stafford's Billy Budd and His Critics late this year or early next).

RADICALISM has various meanings, depending on times and tempers. LEE ALLEN DEW, associate professor of history at Arkansas State College, has been studying aspects of American radicalism during and after the Civil War for the past decade. He here explores the personal racial attitudes of a selection of Radical congressmen instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Professor Dew's degrees are from the University of Arkansas, this College, and Louisiana State University; he taught three years at Murray State College in Kentucky before returning to Arkansas. He is currently working on a history of his college and in research on the J. L. C. & E. R. R., an important Arkansas short-line railroad of the early twentieth century.

"SAVING the appearances" is a phrase with curious meaning; science fiction is a literary category with various possibilities, and "an escaped metaphor . . . may be a poisonous thing." W. D. NORWOON, associate professor of English at Texas Technological College, Lubbock, takes these esoteric ingredients, mixes them well, and produces some perceptive comments on the nature of the universe, particularly those parts of the universe unknown to man's direct experience until quite recently. Professor Norwood's degrees are from Baylor University, Lamar State College at Beaumont, and the University of Texas; he taught at Southwest Texas State College, San Marcos, before joining the Texas Tech faculty in 1965. Currently he teaches contemporary British and continental literature with a seminar on James Joyce. His publications have concerned chiefly men and women not of first rank in English literature: Winston S. Churchill, J. R. R. Tolkien, Doris Lessing, and Somerset Maugham. His articles have appeared in The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Mankato Studies in English, and Studies in Short Fiction.

UNCHARACTERISTICALLY but appropriately, this spring number contains twice as many poems by men and women new to our pages as poems by those with whom we have become familiar over the years. Usually the ratio of new to old runs quite the other way. Our "old" contributors are EMILIE GLEN of New York with two musical pieces, ROSE MENENDIAN of Chicago with a handful of spring flowers, and HOLLIS SUMMERS of Athens, Ohio, with a timely lament. The other eight poems have come in to us over the past year from seven men and women in as many separate states from the Atlantic to the Pacific. KAY DAVIS of Utah has two; PAUL ANDERSON of Colorado, ALBERT DRAKE of Oregon, ROBERT MORGAN of North Carolina, NANCY PRICE of Iowa, HARLAND RISTAU of Wisconsin, and JAMES SCHEURICH of Kansas each has one. And just as the poets write in widely scattered geographical locations, so their poems reflect many attitudes and moods, treat a variety of subjects and points of view.

WINNING wider recognition (one poem in Poesie Vivant of Geneva, Switzerland, an evening of her work in London, plus "several small awards''), Emilie Glen reads her poems in Greenwich Village coffee houses, acts in off-Broadway plays, and collects material in both arenas. . . . Rose Menendian, native upstate New Yorker and world-traveler, has done editorial work for the Encyclopedia Britannica for some nine years; her poems appear in a wide assortment of journals. . . . Hollis Summers of Ohio University was named Distinguished Professor there two years ago and as a happy result lived a year in Spain where, he says, he wrote "a mess of poems." He is already the author of three novels and books of poems including The Walks Near Athens and Someone Else (for children) and Seven Occasions (Rutgers University Press, 1965).

INTRODUCING our new contributors is a pleasant task. A captain in the U.S. Air Force, Paul Anderson teaches English in the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. His A. B. is from Notre Dame, his A. M. from Wisconsin, and for his Ph.D. he completed a volume of original poems with a critical preface (under John Williams, director of the Creative Writing Program) at the University of Denver. Captain Anderson's work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Mad River Review, Quartet, The South Dakota Review, and Verb. . . . Kay Davis of Salt Lake City won her A. B. and A. M. degrees at the University of Nevada and has taught freshman English at Idaho State College and at the University of Utah where her husband teaches mathematics. She has been writing poetry for about four years-and working at three "continually unfinished" novels. Some of her poems have appeared in American Haiku and The South Dakota Review. . . . Assistant professor of English at Michigan State University this year, Albert Drake has taught at the University of Oregon and recalls "a delightful year spent mostly in Greece, at Korfu, in 1962-3." Recently he has had fiction published in The North American and Northwest reviews and poetry published or scheduled to appear in West Coast, Western Humanities, and Wormwood reviews, Descant, international, Prism, and Trace. . . . A graduate student in English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Robert Morgan was graduated with honors in creative writing at Chapel Hill in 1965. He has also lived in New England and Washington, D. C., traveled in Florida, and worked at a number of jobs ranging from house painting to personnel administration. His publications and acceptances include The Carolina Quarterly, Lillabulero, Poetry Review, Red Clay Reader, The Southern Poetry Review, and Steppenwolf. He has published several stories and is at work on a novel. . . . Wife of a professor of history at the State College of Iowa, Nancy Price (Mrs. Howard J. Thompson) is an instructor in the Cedar Falls Department of English Language and Literature and (like Kay Davis) mother of three. Her poems have appeared in America, The Atlantic, Commonweal, Hornbook Magazine, The Nation, The Reporter, and The Saturday Review. . . . The poems of Harland Ristau of Milwaukee have been published in The Beloit Poetry Magazine, The Christian Century, Etc., The Nation, and Today. His fourth book of poems, Rocks Are Thrown at Night, will be issued this year. . . . And finally there is James Scheurich of Baxter Springs, Kansas, who attended the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis for four months before discovering that he and engineering were incompatible, then spent three semesters in this College where his poetic career was inaugurated by the publication of his first poem in Matrix, student literary magazine. This June he will be graduated from the University of Kansas at Lawrence with a B. S. in Education and a major in English.

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.