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M O R T O N L. R O S S University of Wyoming Alan Swallow and Modern, Western American Poetry The span of Alan Swallow’s attention to the nature and dimen­ sions of modern, Western American poetry covers a thirty year period. The arc of that span is particularly illuminating. Shortly before his nineteenth birthday, he editorialized on “Regionalism” in the undergraduate magazine he had founded at the University of Wyoming. There he scored H. G. Merriam’s anthology, North­ west Verse, for expressing “merely the outward signs and habits of the region,” thereby neglecting the unique contribution the region might make “to the national culture.” The root of that contribution, he insisted, was “the fundamental influence of environment that disinguishes the Northwest and its peoples from any other region in the country.” 1 This statement indicates one premise, one direction explored during his thirty-year, off and on, quest for that peculiar sensibility which might order the creation of poetry distinctive enough to be grouped and identified as “Western.” The present status of this search was announced by Swallow in an essay contributed to a 1964 symposium on Western literature. At the eminence of his career as a one-man, Rocky Mountain literary establishment —a career as publisher, editor, reviewer, critic, aes­ thetic theorist, literary historian, teacher, fictionist, and poet —Swal­ low again surveyed the “poetry of the West.” He apologized twice in the essay, once for the persistent ambiguity of a topic which still requires careful definition and once again for listing “Western” 1 Sage, I (January, 1934), p. 1. 98 Western American Literature poets in such amazing variety instead of drawing from them gener­ alizations which would make the adjective meaningful. What the list does indicate is that he has been forced to abandon his original environmentalist premise: “It is clear from this recital that the West as a place has not been a determining factor upon these many poets.” Yet if Swallow now believes that a sufficiently unique West­ ern sensibility has not emerged from the massage of regional topog­ raphy, he also believes that he has found that “significant common denominator which marks this as ‘Western’.” After admitting that this quality may be “as much a well-known wish of mine as it is a possible reality,” Swallow now gives a name to what he was only pointing toward in 1934. It is “rationality,” “the over-all attitude that poetry itself is responsible human behavior (most notably spelled out in the criticism of Yvor Winters.)” 2 What Swallow means by this and by what process he arrived here from the 1934 departure may be inferred from a review of his observations on the subject scattered over the thirty year interval. While still a senior at Wyoming, and later as a graduate student at Louisiana State University, Swallow commented extensively on poetry in the pages of Ray B. West’s Intermountain Review. In a 1937 review of the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, he had already moved a bit from his 1934 editorial position on the influence of environ­ ment, beginning with the observation that “a man’s personal culture is not directly conditioned by his geographical environment.” But the landscape is still relevant, for in the rugged California coast, “the poet has found the setting fit for his culture,” 3 a medium for the expression of that which Jeffers brought to it from elsewhere. Here the landscape has moved from the category of “inspiration” to that of “technique,” two terms which Swallow had earlier used to divide the elements of poetry. In the next issue Swallow rejoiced that Story magazine had broken precedent by publishing poetry, and that the poems chosen belonged to a poet of the Rocky Moun­ tain West, Brewster Ghiselin. But he used the occasion to lament the literary tradition hitherto dominant in the West which he la­ beled “romanticism” and saw as “a direct contradiction of the real­ ism, the appropriation, the pragmatism which is the tradition of practical life on the frontier and in the later West.” 4 Swallow here 2 “Poetry of the West,” South Dakota Review,” II (Autumn, 1964), pp. 86-87. 3 “The Poetry of Robinson...

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