Thomas McGrath On The West Essay, Research Paper
Thomas McGrath
What is at that place, out here on the border, that makes our experience different from that of
the metropolis poet? First there is the land itself. It has been disciplined by machines, but it
is still non dominated. The plough that broke the fields is long gone and the elephantine tractor
and the combine are here, but the procedure of doing a life is still a battle and a
gamble & # 8211 ; it is non a affair of seting natural stuffs in one terminal of a mill and taking
finished merchandises out of the other. Weather, which is merely a nuisance in the metropolis, takes
on the power of the Gods here, and huge rhythms of clime, which will one twenty-four hours do all the
country a dust bowl once more and eventually return it to grass, do all adult male & # 8217 ; s successes momentary
and equivocal. Here adult male can ne’er believe of himself, as he can in the metropolis, as the maestro
of nature. Like it or non he is capable to the ancient power of seasonal alteration: he can non
avoid being in nature ; he has an heroic antagonist that is no abstraction. At a
degree below immediate consciousness we respond to this, are less foreign to our organic structures, to
homo and natural clip.
The East is much older than these farther provinces, has more history. But I believe that
that history no longer maps, has been forgotten, has been “ paved over. ” In
the East adult male begins every twenty-four hours for himself. Here, the yesteryear is still alive and close at
manus & # 8211 ; the arrowheads we turn up may hold been shot at our grampss. I am non believing
of any romantic frontier. The past out here was bloody, and full of unfairness, though
hopeful and heroic. It is really near here & # 8211 ; my male parent took shelter with his household at Fort
Ransom during an Indian panic when he was a male child. Subsequently he heard of the slaughter at Wounded
Knee. Most of us are haunted by the intimacy of that past, and by the fact that we are
merely a measure from the Indian, whose sense of
life so many of the younger people are seeking
to larn.
* * * * * *
Not long ago, if one wanted to be an creative person of any male monarch, it was necessary to go forth
these parts. Lenin spoke of “ the amentia of the small towns, ” and in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, if one wanted to see his ain clip he had to
travel to the metropoliss. The metropolis was, in fact, being refashion & # 8211 ; out of mill production, category
battle, the growing of the metropolis working category, the rise of radical political relations. And of
class, even if the creative person was incognizant of these huge and extremist societal alterations, the metropolis
was the depository of art and civilization. So the creative person had to travel to the metropolis, where
he/she was successful, or failed and disappeared, or returned defeated.
That old form has changed. The immature manque creative person may still travel to the metropolis ; but
more and more often now he returns & # 8211 ; to Nebraska or Arizona or wherever. Part of this
is the consequence of our “ richness ” and “ mobility. ” If he wants to do
another tally to San Francisco or Seattle ( manque poets from West of Chicago ne’er
seem to travel to New York any more ) he can ever make so, The consequence of this
“ return ” ( a portion of all induction rites ) is merely now being felt. God knows what
will come of it, but the waste topographic points are being populated by longhaired poets, and small
magazines turn up like toadstools after a rain.
Why do they return? In portion, I think, because they find the unknown lands in which
they were born dramatic for the grounds I have tried to chalk out out above. Besides, I think,
they are responding against the displacement they feel in the metropolis creative person who, unless he is
a radical or 3rd universe individual, must happen his stuffs in that really displacement
( a field good worked for a century ) or in the frayed leftovers of a widely distributed tradition.
From The North Dakota Quarterly ( Fall 1982 ) .