Voices from the field: Pastoral, pragmatism and twentieth-century American poetry (John Crowe Ransom, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost)

Pastoral poetry remained a vital mode in twentieth-century American literature despite exaggerated reports of its demise. In the wake of the frontier's closing, just as the pioneer became an obsolete model for the “representative” self, a new kind of pastoral sprang up to redefine and reform the national subject, citizen and community. Drawing upon the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey, poets such as John Crowe Ransom, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost explored connections between aesthetics, ethics and the “melioration” of modern democracy. In the midst of a newly urbanized and industrialized consumerist society, these poets sought to create poetic subjects and voices that were representative of the changing nation while acknowledging the complexities of their task. They attempted to balance their need for cultural authority with a desire to address the emergence of the working class, marginalized ethnic and racial groups, and women as forces in the public sphere. In so doing, Ransom, Williams, and Frost constructed textual universes in which various forms of waste and surplus are thematized and their function in society—as both the by-products of industrialization and the laborers associated with their generation—are re-evaluated. Drawing upon the work of Julia Kristeva and Mary Douglas as well as Emmanuel Levinas, I argue that these poets' interest in what they term “excrescences,” the “excremental,” and “extravagance,” respectively, indicate potent anxieties concerning the parameters of the modern nation and the definition of the ethical citizen. These “pragmatic pastorals” resist readings that emphasize a predictably despairing perspective upon the modern experience and instead adopt an ironic mode that is “transideological” in its ambivalent engagement with the rapidly altering civic body. The chapter on John Crowe Ransom focuses upon revising the ways in which his definition of irony, interest in the pastoral mode, and frequent engagements with Dewey's work should be received, while the chapters on Williams and Frost discuss how their pastoral poetics transcend traditional assessments of their ironic valences to reveal social visions directly influenced by and anticipatory of Dewey's understanding of the self, discourse, and “creative democracy.”...