The Midwest Quarterly articles from September 2001

The Midwest Quarterly archives from September 2001

A Providential Theology: Shakespeare's Influence on Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address
September 22, 2001... The subject of Abraham Lincoln's religious beliefs has occupied students of Lincoln lore since 1865. Some historians, for example, have noted that Lincoln's religious outlook was influenced by the American puritan religious tradition. Other...

Hemingway in Constantinople
September 22, 2001... ON SEPTEMBER 30, 1922, Ernest Hemingway arrived in Constantinople to cover the Greco-Turkish War (1920-1922) for the Toronto Star. Beginning with "British Can Save Constantinople" dated September 30, 1922, to his last article, "Refugees from...

The Hero and the Fool in Willa Cather's Early Short Fiction
September 22, 2001... THE FACT THAT Willa Cather had a great interest in mythologies has been well documented by both her literary and biographical critics. Even if one does not accept mythology as a means to either metaphysical or psychological truth, one can assume...

Cultural Hybridity and Social Transformation in Petals of Blood and Burger's Daughter
September 22, 2001... ACCORDING TO Michael Geyer, global integration has "mix[ed] together races, colors, regional and civilizational identities" and "[e]ven if people stay put... they are confronted with and apprehend no longer just their own heritage, their own...

Learning to read.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Learning to read The lake is steeped in meditation, gray silk furrowed by sun-shot clouds, the drowned firs holding their breath. We walk over pine needles and dried leaves as we have always...

Conversation.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Conversation Do you love much? I love papery bark peeling itself from trees, brown leaves with red veins, stacked stones, deer scrapes, those moist wounds smelling of the earth, to walk at night, black sky, black...

The aspen.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... The Aspen A crown of stubborn leaves appears to burn Above its bare and ashen lower limbs. Once green and silver quaking to each breath Of wind, this poplar's flown to rose and gold. Suddenly across the clearing...

Dead snag.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Dead snag A tree fell in the forest and no one was there to hear it, and the sound it made it is still making, in the humped backs of the ants and beetles and termites crawling...

The winning entry.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... The winning entry will above all costs take Nature as its subject, invoking its sanctity and mystery. It will arrive at a conclusion suitable for the contemplation of roses, gardens, stars, you name it. It won't stop...

Solitude at the beginning of the third millennium.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Solitude at the beginning of the third millennium. People exhaust me. Myself especially. Surely behind the fiddle-faddle, the exhaust blown from our high octane conversations circling the millennium, the micro chip, the...

Ohio suicide: a riddle.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Ohio suicide: a riddle. When are we gonna get it on? she kept asking late nights at the bar awkwardly rubbing against him. They were both foreigners in town for the Program. Some day, he'd say, smiling, ...

The nuns.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... The nuns. line up along the seacoast in their black-and-white habits, a row of birches, stiff, scorched, a cobblestone walk for the salt wind, checkered flags unstreaming for some hidden festival. They count ...

Pomander.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Pomander The hurricane is garrulous with news from the leeward seas. What is an ear but a funnel cupped to the wind, for snatches of advice and wicked plans to howl down through? When the lights go out, you...

October glory maple.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... --Of all our sufferings Those hurt the most that we ourselves inflict. --Sophocles October glory maple. I close the book on Oedipus to rest my eyes by looking across the porch to the October glory maple at...

A different insistence.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... A different insistence The red-shafted flicker pokes into the ground or into tree bark repeatedly. I think of a jackhammer without sound. Something comes up into the mouth, and there is hesitation. The bird...

Proof.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Proof The piles of paper on her desk rolled with the seasons, following the sun. Each year his fields grew smaller. Haystacks of invoices, blue lines and matchprints were proof enough to her of harvest. He...

Heat.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Heat At night, cows leaned against the outhouse walls, my mother told me; darkness made their heavy bodies big as cars. The summers she spent at her grandparents' farmhouse, she lay awake trembling, afraid to...

Midsummer's day.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Midsummer's day. In the black blackberry tart Of the mouth watering day Find them, purpling sweet With a blue berry sky And thunder taste. Pick hand berry handfuls of dimpled Summer sweet black heaven ...

Quatrains.(Poem)
September 22, 2001... Quatrains Most light fractures through the slats of a half-closed window, shadowed only by Spanish-moss ridden canopied oaks, old men, straining to listen to wind's laughter, harsh words caught up in chimes,...

Vachel Lindsay's Populism in the Silent Film Era
September 22, 2001... MANY OF HIS contemporaries regarded Vachel Lindsay as a major poet, essayist, and film theorist, yet his reputation has declined greatly since his death in 1931. Among recent critics, reaction to his work has generally been indifferent or even...

Bobbi Ann Mason's (Open-Ended) Marriages
September 22, 2001... WOMEN IN Bobbie Ann Mason's Shiloh and Other Stories struggle with dilemmas that reflect feminist concerns with struggles for identity and personal independence. While engaged in these personal struggles, many of the women reassess their...

Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, by Philip C. Kolin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, xix + 229 pp. $54.95. Philip Kolin's book is the seventh in Cambridge University Press's Plays in Production series. The goal of the...

Too Far Afield.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Too Far Afield, by Gunter Grass. Translated by Krishna Winston. New York: Harcourt Inc., 2000, 658 pp. $30.00. It might be useful to examine the itinerary of Trafalgar's "Highlights of New Europe" tour, in order to understand Grass's...