'Nowhere is More Exotic Than the Midwest'

I’m not sure when the word “heartland” turned into a righteous synonym for the Midwest. I’ve never used it, any more than I would refer to that nebulous cluster of states somewhere between Pennsylvania and Wyoming as “flyover country.” That’s condescending, of course, suggesting that the provincials inhabiting the coasts can’t bother to distinguish Indiana from Illinois and either from Iowa.

 

In Parnassus in 1993, Turner Cassity reviewed reissues of volumes by three Midwesterners once taken seriously as poets – James Whitcomb Riley, Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters. The review is titled “Out of the Heartland,” which was likely written by one of the journal’s editors, not Cassity. He begins, winningly:

 

“If you are a Southerner, as I am, nowhere is more exotic than the Midwest, in literature no less than in actuality. The poems of Masters, Riley, and Sandburg are, not to put too fine a point on it, weird. Among them, they comprise a repertory that puts Dixie Gothic to shame and suggest the photographs of Wisconsin Death Trip more than the sitcoms of Booth Tarkington.”

 

Cassity quickly dispenses with Riley, the least gifted and most prolific (and forgotten) of the bunch:

 

“Riley was himself a grotesque, an alcoholic Man Who Came To Dinner who deposited himself for many years on well-to-do friends in Indianapolis. The arrangement was horrifyingly productive. His approaches nine hundred pages. I can never keep it straight who is a Hoosier and who is a Buckeye [I’m a Buckeye, but please don’t call me that] but it doesn't really matter, because, as I said, we are in the world of the Addams Family.”

 

To discerning young readers, the former popularity of this trio and the critical treatment they garnered from people who should have known better will be baffling. In the public schools I attended in the sixties, the one most often touted by teachers and textbooks (and LBJ) was Sandburg, whose libels against Chicago and fog were repeated mantra-style. Everyone I knew, even non-readers, could quote a line or two. I won’t linger on his six-volume biography of our greatest president (another Midwesterner). Cassity is more fair-minded than I would have expected:

 

“Carl Sandburg had quite a good ear and never received credit for it, aesthetics being of secondary interest to his populist followers. The weird thing about Sandburg is that he was a miniaturist who went off into megalomania. Do not be deceived by his skyscrapers and his foundries and his stockyards and his union halls. He was a miniaturist.”

 

My brother and I borrowed a recording of Sandburg reading his poems from the library. All I remember is the way he pronounced “Peoria,” stretching it like taffy to eleven syllables. We imitated him for years. Cassity is just getting warmed up (I’ll quote at length because the review is not available online, and I can’t get enough of Cassity):

 

“If Sandburg had not existed Progressivism would have had to invent him. The poems of Whitman are simply too long and too self-centered to serve. Organizers cannot form a trade union of one person and that one an egomaniac. At this distance Song of Myself sounds like an endlessly repeated TV commercial for flannel shirts. Sandburg's method is more often that of the vignette; it is only his typography that imitates Whitman. Graffiti, sound bites, and bumper stickers are more effective devices of propaganda, but in its time that Left was fortunate to have a publicist as talented and as concise as Sandburg, even if that talent was basically closer to Imagism than to Brecht. St. Joan of the Stockyards would have sent a romantic like Sandburg straight up the wall on little cat feet.”

 

About Masters and his Spoon River Anthology, Cassity has little to say: “It is not really very good poetry, and surely it told people nothing they did not know already. I grew up in a small town myself, and when I read it the first time--I must have been about seventeen--my only reaction was ‘So what else is new?’ What explains its enormous success?”

 

I first read it when a bit younger, and thought of it as a free-verse Winesburg, Ohio, which is unfair to Sherwood Anderson. Now I couldn't read it on a bet. Cassity quotes “Mrs. Kessler” and observes:   

 

“One wishes first to praise [the title character’s husband’s] good taste in reading matter, if not his indolence. The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant are wonderful prose, as Edmund Wilson has pointed out. The poem is a sly reminder that dirty linen is washed in private as well as in public. ‘The laundress, Life, knows all about it’ is as unsubtle as you can get, but the ending is possibly Masters’s most effective; very nearly a stroke of genius.” 

 

Cassity treats us to a lengthy and amusing digression on one of his bêtes noires, vers libre (French makes it sound even more high-falutingly silly):

 

“Although I do not write free verse, I am genuinely disappointed in its failure. Like twelve-tone music, its great success has been to reduce the audience. Without getting into ideology, I should say that the failure is probably built into the strongly iambic nature of English as a language. It took me less than four minutes to put the Masters and the Sandburg into meter. Like most other free verse, the passages were almost metric to begin with. Only Dr. Williams and a few other lapidaries have been able to achieve the tyranny of true freedom. Avoiding the mechanical ground rhythm is clearly very hard work, as any metrist who has tried to write syllabic verse will tell you. But let us be optimistic, and hope that the problem is not vers libre (free verse is not European?) itself, but the incompetence, or lack of imagination, of its practitioners. No, I am not a neo-formalist. At sixty-four I am not a neo anything.”

 

Cassity concludes magnanimously:

 

“I hope I have made it clear that Masters and Sandburg, if not Riley, are still capable of giving real pleasure. No poet should ask for more. And, of course, the first two will always be of great documentary interest.”