Only Remember

The editors wish to thank Michael Winship and Douglas Taylor for their indispensable help in selecting the essays in this issue.

This issue is on remembrance of things (sometimes deliberately) forgotten. It starts with two essays of remembrance of forgotten works and concludes with two essays about poems and novels that thematize remembrance and forgetting. Stephanie L. Hawkins re-examines Jean Toomer's "The Blue Meridian" as a work dismissed because its vision of racial hybridity was anathema to a dominant "critical discourse that requires an author's public identification with either 'black' or 'white' politics." The essay is critically contextual with the recent emergence of hybridity as a critical and political concept in the writing of Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates. Brian M. Reed's complex essay concedes "the thorough-going badness" of Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes but argues that aesthetic evaluation is peripheral to the political intentions and achievements of the work. Reed's is a surprising and persuasive rethinking of the cultural and political moment and meaning of a seemingly justly dismissed work. In Jeff Westover's article the "national forgetting and remembering" is of Native Americans. Westover centers on one of Robert Frost's most uncanny and disturbing poems, "The Vanishing Red," among several Frost poems that enact a return of the repressed of a disgraceful aspect of our history. Finally, James G. Watson traces Peter Matthiessen's tracing of the once-notorious Florida antihero, E. G. Watson (no relative of James G.). Drawing primarily on the rich Matthiessen archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Watson delineates the historical traces, the travels and travails by which Matthiessen pieced together a kind of literary and historical collage based on conflicting accounts and memories in his brilliant Watson trilogy.