The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland

Notes

Notes Preface . John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and theVision of Nature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ); Frederick Turner, Spirit of Place:The Making of an American Literary Landscape (NewYork: Sierra Club Books, ). . For more on this history, see my essay “Michigan’s Pioneers and the Destruction of the Hardwood Forest,” Michigan Historical Review , no.  (): –. .Edmund G.Love,The Situation in Flushing (NewYork:Harper and Row, ). .Jim Harrison,“The Road:A Love Story,”Men’s Journal, May ,ff. Introduction .This study recognizes the Midwest as the area encompassed by the twelve-state definition of the U.S.Census:Ohio,Indiana,Michigan,Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota.A number of ecological zones fall within those political boundaries. Broadleaf deciduous forests dominate in the east, while piney north woods characterize the upper Great Lakes; the agricultural heartland or “corn belt” centered in Iowa, which occupies the former site of the American tallgrass prairie, gives way in the western parts of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas to the relatively arid shortgrass Great Plains. In addition to this geographical variety, major cities such as Detroit , Chicago, and Minneapolis, with their ethnic diversity and mixed economies, complicate definitions of midwestern cultural identity. They contradict the rural, Euro-American image of the Midwest, which has long been an oversimplification. .The term “topophilia” was given academic currency by University of Wisconsin geographerYi-Fu Tuan, author of Topophilia:A Study of Environmental Perception,Attitudes, andValues (NewYork: Columbia University Press, ).  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Chapter 1: Midwestern Pastoralism . I draw here on Lawrence B. Gamache’s definition of modernism in “Toward a Definition of Modernism,” in The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, ed. Lawrence B. Gamache and Ian S. Macniven (London:Associated University Presses, ), –. Gamache associates the movement with disillusionment and a “sense of crisis in human existence reflected in many late nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural products.” He further characterizes modernism by its “preoccupation with the present, usually urban and technical rather than rural and agricultural in its sense of place and time . . . related to the loss of a meaningful context derived from the past, from its forms, styles, and traditions; this sense of loss gives rise to a search for a new context—cosmopolitan, not provincial, in scope—and for new techniques to evolve an acceptable perception of reality, often, paradoxically, in the form of an attempt to rediscover roots in the depths of the past” (). .The phrase “poetry makes nothing happen” appears in Auden’s poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” in Collected Shorter Poems, – (New York: Random House, ), –. Thomas Wolfe contributed a commonplace to the American vernacular with the title of his  novel You Can’t Go Home Again (NewYork: Harper and Row, ). .Among Jefferson’s influences, Leo Marx lists “the continuing dialogue of the political philosophers [of the eighteenth century] about the condition of man in a ‘state of nature’; and the simultaneous upsurge of radical primitivism (as expressed, for example, in the cult of the Noble Savage) on the one hand,and the doctrines of perfectibility and progress on the other” (The Machine in the Garden, ). Jefferson’s reading of English poetry and classical literature, including the pastorals ofVirgil, also shaped his pastoral idealism. . On the early political history of the Northwest Territory, see Peter S. Onuf ’s Statehood and Union:A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, ). . Despite the rhetoric of his public speeches, Jefferson’s actual Indian policies as president were provocative and at times underhanded. He directedWilliam Henry Harrison, for example, to go beyond law and ethics in securing land cessions in the Indiana Territory.While some of Harrison ’s purchases were aboveboard, he obtained others with the help of whiskey, bribery, and intimidation of minor chiefs who had no authority to act on behalf of the tribes at large. Such treaties were rushed to Washington for quick approval by Congress and the president. Lest Harrison’s  Notes to Pages ‒ You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Machiavellian tactics be taken as the actions of...