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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

Articles

Opposition Leaders in Wartime: The Case of Theodore Roosevelt and World War I

Culture vs. Power: Randolph Bourne, John Dewey, and The Dial

The Computer and the Composer

Uncle John Quarles' Watermelon Patch

Latin America and the United States--A Study of Origins

Our Earth in Space: Material Evolution and the Emergence of a Planetary Civilization

Verse

Allegro for April's Child

The Turtle

Mr. Yoe, Farmer

Celebratory Relics

To Confront, To Continue

A Poem for John Stewart

Temple Garden

Spring in Cheviot

Swan

Notes

April

Street Vendor

Abstract

in this issue. . .

WHEN ASKED by the director of one of our growing university presses how the "mystique" of THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY was created, the present editor pointed at once to the names listed on the title page, singling out for particular notice that of our former editor-in-chief, Dudley T. Comish, whose eight years of editing have put their indelible stamp on the journal. But since that time I have been mulling over the word "mystique," perhaps a little self-consciously, for it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, rather a large word for this combination of pleasant haphazard, occasional quirkiness, occasional ingenuousness, but, withal, this determination to explore as many ideas as possible and to avoid pedantry and dullness-or at the very least to be no less lively than similar academic journals.

THE FIRST TWO ARTICLES of this April issue form a pair. Both are concerned with war, the first World War, and with strong dissenters from administrative policies toward that war. Current jargon would attach the label "hawk" to the central figure of our opening article, and in the frequent intemperance of his language Theodore Roosevelt has his counterparts in the Sixties. Our author, ROBERT W. SELLEN, deals with his subject fairly and carefully, however, pointing to strengths as well as weaknesses in Roosevelt's position. This is not Professor Sellen's first appearance in our pages, his article "On Providing a Liberal Education" having been published in our January 1962 issue. Since that time he has moved from Baker University, Baldwin, Kansas, to Georgia State College, Atlanta, where he has been an associate professor of history since 1964, with time out for two summers as visiting professor at New York University. During these years he has published articles in Education Digest, the Dalhousie Review, and elsewhere, and scores of book reviews in such periodicals as Canadian Historical Review, Journal of Modern History, and the Kansas City Star and Times.

THE FORTUNES of the latterday Dial magazine, titular successor to Emerson's journal of the early 1840s, have elicited two book-length studies from our second contributor, NICHOLAS JOOST. The present article is concerned with The Dial's history during the first World War, more particularly with the pacifist dissent of one of its contributing editors, Randolph Bourne, and the near foundering of the magazine torn between dedication to culture and the lure of power. Professor Joost received the B. S.S. in 1938, at Georgetown University, the M.A. in 1939 and the Ph.D. in 1947, both at the University of North Carolina. He has taught at the Universities of North Carolina, Loyola of Chicago, and Southern Illinois, and has been a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). He has received several distinguished awards and has published a number of articles and books. At the present time he is a professor of English at Southern Illinois and editor of Papers on Language & Literature.

AS FAR BACK As Autumn 1963 we published an article by DONALD R. KEY, professor of music at Kansas State College, on the differing problems encountered by the Soviet and the American composer. At long last we have persuaded him to write for us again. During the academic year 1966-67 he was a visiting Fellow at Princeton University, and the article that grew out of this experience is a brief description of some of the processes through which a composer goes in utilizing the computer-generated electronic music program in operation at Princeton University. The writing is so lucid that the editor, no musician, believes she understands and is anxious to hear a piece of computer-generated electronic music. Professor Key studied at Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi, the New England Conservatory of Music, and Boston University, from which he received the Ph.D. degree. He has been with our faculty since the fall of 1960.

WHETHER anyone not a Southerner can fully understand the Southern cult of food has been the subject of a lively correspondence between the editor (southern born and not so long exiled as to forget) and ELMO HOWELL, who has written for the QUARTERLY a pleasant and informative study of Mark Twain's nostalgia for the South as expressed in its favorite foods. Not that Southerners eat more-they may eat less-but in no other part of the country, or so memory has it, do Americans set more store by food as the very mark and insignia of hospitality. There is a kind of barbaric splendor to this heaping up of eatables, as Mark Twain's pages--and Professor Howell's-vividly recall. A paper on Faulkner by Elmo Howell appeared in the Summer 1964 issue of the QUARTERLY. Since then his notes and articles have appeared in American Literature, Georgia Historical Quarterly, Mark Twain Journal, and a number of other scholarly journals. He is a professor in the English Department of Memphis State University.

PERSUADED that both North and South America are based intellectually, psychically, on cultural complexes that can be traced back to their European-Middle Eastern origins, HUGH FOX sets out to define the differences between the Anglo-Germanic and the Arabic-Hispanic mystiques. This essay will be incorporated into a book-length study of the cultural history of the Americas, some chapters of which have already appeared or will shortly appear in Politica (Caracas) and in a half-dozen North American journals. Hugh Fox has the degree of doctor of philosophy from the University of Illinois. He has been a Fulbright lecturer at universities in Mexico and in Caracas and has made lecture tours for the U.S. Information Service in several South American countries. His published books include America Hoy and Problemas de Nuestro Tiempo. At present he is a member of the English Department of Loyola University of Los Angeles.

DESPITE a prolonged, occasionally prolix correspondence over two years and more, the author of our last article remains somewhat mysterious. MICHAEL TOBIN is an Irishman from County Cork, now living in Kent, England. He has studied for the priesthood and has given it up. Distinguished men have shown an interest in his disturbing, unprovable, oddly persuasive theory, yet the QUARTERLY has offered first publication, and his grateful willingness to submit to the most violent operation on his manuscript has had the contrary effect of suspending the editorial pencil. That is all we know about him. Yet it is impossible to read his article to the end without realizing that the basic impulse is religious still. One editor was reminded of Teilhard de Chardin. Another thought of Dante's final vision. But the individual souls in Dante's vision retain the consciousness that they are part of the greater Consciousness. Their pride must be reckoned inordinate when compared with the total abnegation of Tobin's vision. Here the only comparison is with a cell that is imagined to have a momentary dream of being part of a body, and to derive its total sense of value, in the face of its next-instant annihilation, from the dream that it has even so briefly helped to compose some greater, on-going entity. For the crux of Tobin's vision, if I understand him, is that we as individual human beings will never know and the dream alone must have the cell’s devotion.

OUR DOZEN April poems are the work of eleven poets, no less than six of these, or a clear majority, being newcomers to the QUARTERLY. We welcome the pleasant opportunity to extend our friendships. HOWARD McKINLEY CORNING of Portland, Oregon, describes himself as a grass-roots, bootstrap poet who grew up in Nebraska and central Ohio in the old carefree days before a poet had to have the doctorate in order to be with it. His early poems, including two books, were published in the distant days before 1940 and received the critical praise of Harriet Monroe, Robert Frost, and William Rose Benet. Now that he is retired, he tells us, the old joy of words is on him again and he writes out of "a kind of poetic remembering." A group of his poems appeared recently in Prairie Schooner . . . SONYA DORMAN, now living in Stony Point, New York, has had poems in The Nation, Saturday Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere, and her short fiction has appeared in an assortment of magazines from Cavalier through Redbook to Galaxy. At present she is working on a short novel and a book-length collection of poems . . . Our third newcomer, LEON V. DRISKELL, is a native Georgian teaching English at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. He earned his B. A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Georgia and his Ph.D. at the University of Texas. His poems, articles, and short stories have appeared in a wide range of journals, and he is presently anticipating the publication by the University of Georgia Press of a study which he and co-author Joan T. Brittain have made of the late Flannery O'Connor and her work . . . When TOM GALT got back to his home in New York after six weeks in Paris and London, he acknowledged our letter accepting his sonnet "Temple Garden" and we swallowed our envy, not having been in Paris ourself since the day that a seagull in a port engine obliged us to make an unscheduled hop to Orley Field. Paris never looked lovelier, we recall. Mr. Galt is the author of six books for young people. His How the United Nations Works and Peter Zenger Fighter for Freedom have been published in nineteen languages, and between the first acceptance of his verse in January 1966 and his letter to us of November 1967 he has placed forty-five poems in twenty-five maga zines Spenard, Alaska, is the home of poet HELEN WADE ROBERTS, whose "Spring in Cheviot" seemed to us happily appropriate for April. Mrs. Roberts describes herself as housewife, free lance writer, and artist. Formerly a Southwesterner who took her master's in English at the University of Arizona, she has published in Arizona Quarterly, New Mexico Quarterly, and a number of the small poetry magazines. Since coming to Alaska she has received two Alaska poetry society awards and has founded and directed (since last October) her Poetry Workshop North in Anchorage. This April she is conducting a Fine Arts Week at Alaska Methodist University . . . The sixth of our newcomers CHARLES WEBER is a 1961 graduate of Yale, now employed by a publishing firm in San Francisco. He has had poems published or accepted for publication in a number of journals, including Western Humanities Review, Prairie Schooner, and Michigan Quarterly.

OF OUR FIVE remaining poets, JAMES C. BALOIAN of Fresno, California, had a poem in our journal as recently as this past January . . . SAM BRADLEY, poet-in-residence at St. Augustine's College, Raleigh, North Carolina, is a frequent contributor, whose poem honoring Shakespeare's birth struck us as a happy addition to the April number . . . It has been a little more than two years since we published any poems by CHARLES EDWARD EATON. We note that he is back in Woodbury, Connecticut, that he has new poems and short stories coming out in The Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, The University of Missouri Review, and a number of other journals, and that he is putting together his fifth book of poetry . . . KINLEY E. ROBY of State College, Pennsylvania, is continuing the pleasant series of poems that began with our January issue. The poem in this issue is appropriately titled "April" . . . Our final contributor, PETER WILD, whose poems appeared in the January 1966 and January 1967 issues, has in the meantime completed his M.A. in English at the University of Arizona and has begun work on the M. F. A. at the University of California, Irvine. His first full-length book of poems, The Afternoon in Dismay, was published this last fall.

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