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 ) .