Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry

In the first expansive study of American pastoral since Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden , Mikkelsen reinvigorates discussion of this literary mode as a form of cultural commentary whose subjects extend beyond the simple or rustic life to encompass the major social, economic, and political transformations of the past century.

"Inspired by the idea of reading the work of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, John Ashbery, and Gertrude Stein through a lens borrowed from their philosophic contemporaries, the founders of pragmatism William James and John Dewey, Mikkelsen greatly heightens our appreciation of the intellectual power and significance of America's esteemed twentieth-century pastoral poetry." - Leo Marx, Professor Emeritus of American Cultural History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Finding the pastoral in the 'frontier rhetoric' of American social science and literature and interpreting pragmatism as a 'pioneering philosophy,' Mikkelsen traces crucial and heretofore unexplored intersections between pastoral and pragmatist aesthetic and ethical ideas . . . Combining deft intellectual-historical overviews with rich analysis of important texts, Mikkelsen grounds, defines, and suggests the significance of a pragmatic pastoral poetics and offers some of the most absorbing discussions of Frost, Williams, and Stevens I have recently read." - Michael Thurston, Professor of English and Director of American Studies Program, Smith College

"Mikkelsen has put the politics back in American pastoral, and has extended the purview of the pastoral project to critical twentieth-century themes . . . Mikkelsen reminds us that American pastoral's core function is not escape or nostalgia but interrogation of cultural norms and modeling of new modes of being in the world and in community. Reading a diverse group of poets from Frost to Susan Howe, Mikkelsen provides, through her analysis of pastoral, a new understanding of the continuity of American poetry." - Bonnie Costello, author of Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry and Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World

ANN MARIE MIKKELSEN Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University, USA.