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

Introduction

Introduction What is so strange about a tree alone in an open field? It is a willow tree. I walk around and around it. The body is strangely torn, and cannot leave it. At last I sit down beneath it. With these lines Robert Bly begins “Hunting Pheasants in a Cornfield ,” a poem in Silence in the Snowy Fields (), his first book and one that celebrates the prairie of the poet’s native Minnesota and other midwestern American landscapes. The speaker’s caution in approaching the willow initially suggests physical awkwardness and feelings of existential absurdity. Hesitation, however, turns to ritual observance, as he circles the tree and comes to dwell in the place just as he dwells on the topic in the poem. The scene is far from idyllic. Late fall has come to Minnesota and the tree has lost its leaves;the scene is quiet (“Only the cornstalks now can make a noise”) and rather colorless. The starkness of the season provokes darker meditations on time and mutability: “The sun is cold, burning through the frosty distances of space./The weeds are frozen to death long ago.” One might expect the poet, conventionally, to remind himself of the promise of spring, of the new life that will emerge from the metaphorical  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. death that is winter. Instead, centered in the place, in his body, and in the moment, he embraces the silence, darkness, and cold, finding that he loves “to watch / The sun moving on the chill skin of the branches”: The mind has shed leaves alone for years. It stands apart with small creatures near its roots. I am happy in this ancient place, A spot easily caught sight of above the corn, If I were a young animal ready to turn home at dusk. () Like a Druid by a sacred oak, or Buddha under the bo, the poet finds enlightenment under a native tree, experiencing a sudden dissolving of ego, a realization of the world’s congeniality to human residence. Just as the cornfield feeds the human body, the landscape as a whole, including its characteristic plants and animals, nourishes the human spirit.This epiphany occurs not in a sublime wilderness, but in an agrarian country where the appreciation of subtle topographical variations like this “spot above the corn” requires patience and circumspection. By identifying his consciousness with the local flora and fauna, Bly enters the landscape not only as an observer, but as a participant and resident in an “ancient place”: a landscape with a history both natural and human. Bly’s poem introduces a number of themes and motifs in midwestern pastoral, the tradition in twentieth-century American literature that is the subject of this book. The spiritual joy and renewal in nature, the admiration of subtle beauty in domesticated as well as wild environments,and the awareness of landscape as the result of historical change evident in“Hunting Pheasants in a Cornfield” appear in the writings of many midwesterners , both preceding and contemporary with Bly. Five important midwestern pastoralists are Willa Cather, Aldo Leopold, Theodore Roethke, JamesWright,and Jim Harrison,each of whom I treat in a separate chapter . In major works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, these writers portray specific locations in the north-central part of the United States, conveying through description and narration dimensions of the region’s landscape, from the aesthetic and spiritual to the social and ecological. They exemplify a literary tradition of place and rural experience in the Midwest.1 My analysis of that tradition follows recent work in American studies on literature and nature. The central conflict in this scholarship, as Law-  The Midwestern Pastoral 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. rence Buell writes in a useful survey, is political: whether pastoral ideology and art “ought to be looked at as conservative and hegemonic” or “as a form of dissent from an urbanizing social mainstream” (). An older tradition, exemplified by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (), viewed major writers such...