The radio age will rescue poetry and prose from decadent continental influence. A premium will be placed upon Truth and Beauty in the spoken word in poetry and literature. New values will be placed upon the poetry of feeling, emotion and romance. There will be a greater demand for the lyrical form that must be tender, melodious and romantic, poetry that bears the soul away upon the wings of the creative and the imaginative and transports the hearer into the world of feeling and sentiment. 

When Cot. Hofer used the term “Beauty,” nothing but traditional poetic form was implied. He relentlessly attacked the proponents of “the New Poetry,” the imagists (especially Amy Lowell), as well as verse libre. “Ourselves, we condemn free verse as a form. To us it is anathema. ... And it is our belief that no genius of power, however eccentric it might elect to be, will ever select so crass and crude a form.” Almost every issue of The Lariat contained some ridicule of the various aspects of modernism in poetry, its practioners and its subject matters. In one issue of the magazine, for example, there were statements like: “Late Chicago Poetry has a masterpiece of ‘New Poetry’ on The Steam Turbine Generator,” (which was to be understood as an ultimate sarcasm, of course), and “It is probable that free verse in a vast majority of instances represents the refuge of mediocrity or worse,” (quoted by Col. Hofer from the Morning Oregonian, Portland, Oregon). And even though later Northwest poets soon started writing seriously with other aims than beauty and truth defined in Col. Hofer’s terms, very few approached free verse. The Lariat, with its impressively large circulation and appeal, probably reinforced a general preference for traditional forms of poetry, which then lingered for several decades in the Northwest and played a part in shaping the verse of the regionalists.

So even though Col. Hofer regularly devoted pages of The Lariat to a section called “Western Verse,” nothing that fell outside his definition of the term was ever allowed to come through. But The Lariat, before it ceased publication in June 1929, still served the function of being an important catalyst for the aspiring authors of the region. Even if it was biased in its opinions about what constituted good literature, it opened a window to some of the powerful and influential literary currents of its time.

Col. E. Hofer was also instrumental in helping to organize several poetry societies in the Northwest, which then became the major suppliers of verse for the newspapers. In that respect he certainly helped to stimulate poetic activity in the region, but it was a poetic activity which was violently rebelled against later.

But new voices were heard even before The Lariat ceased publication, calling out for a western literature with different qualities from those promoted by Col. E. Hofer. The first serious challenge to the prevailing taste was leveled by two Northwest writers, the poet H. L. Davis and the novelist James Stevens, in a piece titled Status Rerum: A Manifesto, upon the Present Condition of Northwestern Literature: Containing Several Near-Libelous Utterances, upon Persons in the Public Eye. Their manifesto basically attacked two aspects of contemporary Northwest literature: the poetry and the short story. It opened in the following way:

The present condition of literature in the Northwest has been mentioned apologetically too long. Something is wrong with Northwestern literature. It is time people were bestirring themselves to find out what it is.
Other sections of the United States can mention their literature, as a body, with respect. New England, the Middle West, New Mexico. and the Southwest, California—each of these has produced a body of writing of which it can be proud. The Northwest—Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana— has produced a vast quantity of bilge, so vast, indeed, that the few books which are entitled to respect are totally lost in the general and seemingly interminable avalanche of tripe.

It is time people were seeking the cause of this. Is there something about the climate, or the soil, which inspires people to write tripe? Is there some occult influence, which catches them young, and shapes them to be instruments out of which tripe, and nothing but tripe, may issue? 

In the Status Rerum attack against NW poetry, charges were leveled against three proponents of poetry: The Lariat, The Northwest Poetry Society and its magazine, the Seattle Muse and Mirror, and the poetry classes of Prof. Glenn Hughes at the University of Washington. (Even though one gets the impression that the attack was aimed at the prevailing taste at the universities in general, and that Prof. Hughes was singled out as an example.) These three targets more or less summed up the range of established poetry activities in the Pacific Northwest in 1926. The Lariat was referred to, among other things, as “an agglomeration of doggerel which comprises the most colossal imbecility, the most preposterous bathos, the most superb sublimity of metrical ineptitude.” The NW Poetry Society was referred to as “the panorama of emotional indigestion, the incredible conglomeration of unleavened insipidity,” and what came out of Prof. Hughes’ classes was called “versicles” and “a banquet of breath-tablets persistently and impotently violet!” Expressing the same views as Col. E. Hofer in his advice to young writers, it was the college and university professors “who trained young writers to produce pulp material that was designed only to sell.” Keeping in mind also that these three outlets for poetry were intimately connected in body as well as in spirit—the same people promoting the same type of poetry—they were fundamentally three expressions of one common aesthetic.
The authors referred to Status Rerum as a manifesto, but there were no explicitly stated principles about what NW poetry ought to be like. Their pamphlet at first appeared to be only an attack on an existing situation, not a clearly outlined proposal on true NW literary principles. However, looked at closely, their criticism revealed that three aspects of the poetry were under direct assault, and that an alternative aesthetic was implied in the attack itself. There was a charge against the lack of interesting subject matter and concrete substance; a charge against superficial beauty expressed in worn terms, against “breath-tablets, persistently and impotently violet.” Secondly, the authors objected to the “doggerel,” the “metrical ineptitude,” the lack of true poetic skill and craft exhibited in this kind of verse, and the abundance of old poetic rhetoric. And finally there was a rejection of inflated and exaggerated emotions, of a poetry reduced to sentiment, of insincerity in the poetic expression, what they called “the most preposterous bathos.”

If one turns these three negatives into positives, a desired NW poetics depicting real life and real experience is suggested, that is, experience derived from human encounters with a concrete and specific landscape and culture. It also implies a poetry in which the poetic form equals its content in skill and aptness, and not just slavishly adheres to received forms and tastes. The poetry, furthermore, ought to be true to these experiences, and not emotionally dishonest or pathetically exaggerated. Suggested here is a belief that art should come out of experience, reflect life, change as life changes, and not be determined by either an alien aesthetic or by the Eastern literary market. It could be said to be the seed of the literary creed the regionalists worked out in the l930s, and which dominated the more serious poetic efforts of this first literary awakening.

The attack created quite a stir in the literary world since two relatively unknown, young authors challenged the entire literary establishment in a vocabulary rarely encountered before. For the most part the controversy stayed in the Pacific Northwest, but it even got as far as H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury and received some national attention. The purpose behind Status Rerum had been twofold: both to speak out frankly about a situation where a highly insipid kind of poetry was totally dominating, and to ignite a well needed discussion about what an honest and substantial Northwest literature really could be like if these barriers were removed. But the key issues were, as Warren L. Clare points out, ignored by the newspapers and the whole debate degenerated into a series of feuds. “Stevens wanted the debate to ascend to an examination of Northwest literature. Instead, he found himself the center of a personal attack.” Because of the superficiality of the discussion in these newspapers, with its confusion of personal attacks with the real issues, Stevens soon withdrew from the whole affair. The Northwest did not seem unanimously ready for a nuanced literary dialogue, and here everything could have ended. But Davis and Stevens had formulated something which others also had felt, and which was part of a larger movement within the United States, so Status Rerum proved to be the beginning of the Northwest regionalist movement.

The place where these ideas found an outlet, was in a developing literary periodical called The Frontier: A Magazine of the Northwest. The Frontier, edited by Harold G. Merriam, had actually existed since May 1920 as a college magazine at the State University of Montana, in Missoula, but was in the process of seriously expanding beyond the campus. The motto of the magazine was taken from one of the most universal regionalists in the United States, Henry David Thoreau: “The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.” And the motto was appropriate, for The Frontier was ravenous for facts collected in the Northwest. The magazine had started as an outlet for local writing, mainly around the campus, and definitely belonged to the group of little magazines which made up the regional movement. Much of its inspiration obviously came from The Midland, which had started publishing in 1915 in Iowa City, edited by John T. Frederick, and had rapidly become the leading regional periodical. Soon there was a whole group of regional magazines publishing in the United States which all became a part of the western regionalist movement. For example, The Southwest Review commenced in 1924, The Prairie Schooner in 1927, and The New Mexico Quarterly Review in 1931. One of the main reasons for this wave of literary periodicals supporting regionalism was, according to Frederick J. Hoffman and Charles Allen, opposition to the Eastern publishing standards, because they were “the moral standards of gentility and refinement. They required a mechanical formula: obvious rising action, wherein virtue and refinement struggled on fairly even terms, with crudity and immorality, obvious climax and denouement, wherein virtue and refinement victoriously subdued all evil. The happy ending with good triumphant was a necessity.” Obviously, any writer who did not want to conform to these standards, to mold life as they knew it in their region into this pattern of optimistic vision, found themselves without an outlet for their work.

So in many ways The Frontier must be understood as part of a movement of cultural decentralization, of finding a literary freedom from Eastern formulaic standards which allowed for “true” interpretation of rugged “frontier life.” From this perspective the literature of the region was to be a vehicle for the discovery of place, uncovering both its past and present, and describing that as it was, realistically, honestly, and independently. Poetry became one of the expressions in the quest for regional identity. But The Frontier itself, because of the youth of the region and its lack of a substantial cultural history, also became a conscious pioneer endeavor directed towards the creation of a regional culture. In that respect the magazine was certainly related to other important literary endeavors as well, such as the other local, small regional magazines and the publishing activities of presses like the Metropolitan Press in Portland, Oregon and the Caxton Printers in Caldwell, Idaho, all of which served as outlets for regional literature.

In The Frontier November issue of 1927, an editorial called “Queries and Answers,” rhetorically asked “What can the Rocky mountain and Pacific coast region do for itself in literary expression? What is the condition of its literature now?” And left as an answer “The Opinion of Mr. James Stevens and Mr. H. L. Davis,” which was nothing but a version of the two opening paragraphs of Status Rerum. The statement even included the price of, and address to, the manifesto, which indicates The Frontier’s support of this literary rebellion. In the same issue the editor explicitly stated the aim of The Frontier in a piece called “Endlessly the Covered Wagon:”

The Northwest is industrially alive and agriculturally alive; it needs to show itself spiritually alive. Culturally it has too long either turned for nourishment toward the East or accepted uncourageous, unindigenous “literary” expression of writers too spiritually imitative and too uninspired. We in this territory need to realize that literature, and all art, is, if it is worth anything at all, sincere expression of real life. And the roots for literature among us should be in our own rocky ground, not in Greenwich Village dirt or Mid-west loam or European mold or, least of all, in the hothouse sifted, fertilized soil of anywhere. Out of our soil we grow, and out of our soil should come expression of ourselves, living, hating, struggling, failing, succeeding, desponding, aspiring, playing, working—being alive.

THE FRONTIER is pioneer endeavor to gather indigenous Northwest material ...

Truly, materials for true expression lie at hand lavishly strewn. The early day, the present day; the ranch, the mine; the lumber camp, the range; the city, the village, these have not yielded their treasure of the comedy and tragedy of human life. 

This was, in many respects, a regional declaration of independence for the Pacific Northwest. It was a claim for realism in that it included both the high and low aspects of life. It was regional in that it affirmed that there was an abundance of local material available to the artist, and that even though there really was a unique “Northwest” out there, sincere, indigenous expression of it was still lacking. The role of the author was to go out and document all this, because it had not been done properly. The spirit of the region had not yet been found. Furthermore, the editor implied that it could not be described with any existing literary form, borrowed from somewhere else; instead the Northwest had to find its own voice, and The Frontier would try to make this search possible.

In the next three issues, The Frontier confirmed its regional emphasis by opening up its editorial page to voices in favor of a literature tied to the land. In the March issue of 1928 H. L. Davis, in a piece called “Status Rerum—Allegro Ma Non Troppo,” argued that the only indigenous literature the Northwest had came from the “men who made songs.” (The reason they were so little known, he claimed, was due to the fact that “some of the songs are obscene, beastly, and possibly morally upsetting.”) This attempt to broaden the concept of literature in order to include folksongs, stories, or dialects (or at least their influence on literature) became a very common aspect of the regionalist movement. In the following issue Floyd Dell talked about “The Writer’s Robust Virtues,” which, of course, were derived from the land. It was an argument for the belief that one was so powerfully molded by one’s experience in a particular environment that one had not only a special allegiance to that place, but a responsibility to be true to it: “First is the land, and out of it comes the literature. It springs from the soil, humbly at first, then beautifully.” And with the next issue in November 1928, The Frontier had changed its format, expanded, and taken the leap from a university magazine to a national periodical with a regional focus. In a very optimistic editorial, called “Northwest Harvest,” H. G. Merriam described what he could see coming up the road:

Three issues of The Frontier as a regional magazine have appeared; this is the fourth. Writers of active imagination and sincere purpose who are endeavoring to interpret Northwest life have come forward in numbers with their writings. Others will come. As they seize upon that life as individuals, forgetting what, according to literary exploiters, it ‘ought to be,’ they will be bringing a crop of literary creativeness to the harvesting stage. Some matured fruit has already been harvested. The crop is fast ripening. And workers are at hand. 

Within a few years The Frontier developed into a full-fledged regionalist periodical. A permanent historical section was established, which published material relating to the pioneer period of the region. Later in the 1930s several interviews with old-timers were also published as a form of personal, oral history. There was an increasing interest in Northwest folklore as well, especially towards the later years, when a great deal of local material was published by writers in the Federal Writers’ Project. There was also an “Open Range Section” introduced in order to stimulate first hand encounters with the land: “Each issue will carry accounts of personal outdoor experiences. Only accounts of actual experiences are solicited.” And there was a book review section, where both regional and national literature was dealt with. From the early 1930s there was also a pronounced interest in the American Indian, especially with a historical folklore perspective. The “land” was to speak through as many channels as possible.

As far as poetry was concerned, one finds groups of poems by different poets published under such headings as “Mountains, Beasts, and Men,” or under sections referred to as “Work” and “Country.” The content of the poetry published in The Frontier was decidedly regional in its aims. It usually shared the magazine’s vision of intimate links to the reality of the region.

But even though The Frontier was the literary periodical of the Pacific Northwest at this time, there were several more or less serious and short-lived attempts to create an alternative Northwest literary magazine. Judging from the editorials of these little magazines, there were a few authors who did not share the type of regionalism encouraged by H.G. Merriam. The first attempt came in the winter of 1933, and was called The Outlander: A Quarterly Literary Review. In an unpaginated editorial it stated its purpose:

The Outlander has no axe to grind. It represents no school, favors no cliques. Its sole purpose is to publish and to encourage the production of literary matter of creative importance ... It is not concerned with regionalism or with any other movement that judges literature by its geographical location. It is concerned solely with ideas and their finest presentation. 

In many ways this statement is representative of several of the little magazines started in opposition, or as a complement, to The Frontier, because, in spite of its editorial, it rapidly became involved in the discussion of literary regionalist issues. And apparently this originally hostile attitude changed, for in the last issue readers were even urged to subscribe to The Frontier. The editorial of the same issue is revealing as well, because while discussing “the death rate among the Little Magazines” the editors felt that “of all the deaths perhaps that of The Midland is the most to be regretted,” indicating their sympathy for the regionalists. The Outlander also, ironically, during its short life-span, served as a literary magazine by Northwesterners primarily for Northwesterners. When The Outlander ceased publication in the fall of 1933, it was transformed into the explicitly regional The Literary Monthly, also published in Portland. The new board of editors, including the old ones, claimed that they had “the aim of presenting, to readers in the Northwest, a literary periodical whose character will be not only acceptable, but peculiar and sympathetic to these readers. We believe that a satisfaction is to be derived from local or regional literary production which no nationally circulated monthly can supply, regardless of merit.” With the May/June issue 1934 The Literary Monthly changed name to The Literary Magazine, but ceased publication immediately hereafter. Another attempt came with The Dilettante: A Bi-Monthly Literary Review, also out of Portland, but which only lasted for one issue. The last try at a parallel literary magazine came with the Northwest Literary Review, edited by Courtland W. Matthews in Portland. The first issue came sometime early in 1935, but the magazine was as short-lived as the others and survived only until December the same year, four issues later. Northwest Literary Review was extremely regional in range; it contained almost exclusively material by and about Northwest authors, and gives the impression of almost being an appendix to The Frontier.

These were some of the centers of literary activity of the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s, and, as I have shown, they were predominantly regionalistic. Later, after The Frontier had ceased publication in 1939, there were a few more scattered attempts to start a literary periodical in the Northwest. There was The Tramp: A Magazine of Poetry, published in Anacortes, Washington, which ran from the summer of 1939 to the winter 1941, and Interim, published in Seattle from 1944 to 1954. Interim continued the regional tradition, and published “principally the literature of the Northwestern United States.” There was also the somewhat exceptional The Illiterati, published irregularly during World War II in Waldport, Oregon, beginning in 1943 in a conscientious objectors’ camp. The highly varied background of these authors and the special circumstances under which they had come together, made the periodical anything but regional even though it was published in the Northwest. Nevertheless it contained contributions from William Stafford as well as William Everson.

But just what was the definition of the regional aesthetic in the poetry, and did the poetry of the period live up to its theory? And in what way was regionalism related to “local color,” a concept which appears to be used synonymously by so many who were critical of the regional movement?

A great deal has been written on the subject, and there have been several suggestions about what actually constituted regionalism in the poetry. Looked at as a theory, one has to keep in mind that regionalism was considered quite different from local color. One of the better concise definitions of local color was the one by Frederick J. Hoffman and Charles Allen, who pointed out that local color basically consisted of two trends: either the “sentimental romanticism” which presented “an idealized or romanticized view of reality,” often placed in the past, or the “humorous exaggerations” of dialect, character, or situation. Or, of course, a combination of the two. That is, local color was a kind of literary exploitation of surface peculiarities which always emphasized the particular in favor of the general. Local color thus lacked the seriousness of purpose of regionalism. In practice, however, much of the criticism of the regionalist poetry, which called it local color, was justified: it was mere exploitation of surface peculiarity, of obsession with local fact to the extent that it never reached the universals which made for the wider significance.

H. G. Merriam, probably the most articulate spokesman of the theory of Northwest regionalism, made several interesting statements about the nature of the movement. Early on he was quite optimistic about the potential of Northwest expression in poetry. In a prefatory note to an anthology called Northwest Verse, edited by himself and published in 1931, he wrote: “I believe that the Northwest is preparing for a literary movement which for the first time will give to the life of the region honest and rich expression.” Still there was the reservation that this would come to happen sometime in the future, that it had not yet developed to its full degree. Merriam saw literature as having to go through a phase of description before it could mature into a literature of interpretation, and said that “on the whole, the verse seems to me still in the descriptive stage, where writers are observing life accurately and eagerly and in most instances, lovingly, and recording it with sincerity.” But apart from this urge to describe the environment, “there is a tendency among these poets to write of people and events rather than of states of emotion, a strongly narrative inclination,” which he considered “a healthy sign.” (We have to keep in mind here that the popular appreciation of poetry, basically the poetry of the newspapers, still favored a sentimental, emotionally inflated kind of verse, very similar to that of The Lariat.) Something less healthy was the way in which these poets wrote. “In verse forms and in rhythms these Northwest poets are still too imitative. I should myself welcome bold, untrammeled handling of material.” Perhaps Merriam’s prefatory note could be called one of cautious optimism.

Four years later, however, the optimistic tone seemed somewhat subdued, and perhaps even slightly defensive. In an article on Northwest life he said that he “should like to have writers understand regionalism not as an ultimate in literature but as a first step, as the coming to close knowledge about the life of the region in which he lives as a first necessity for sound writing, even as knowledge of oneself—’know thyself’—is also a first necessity. The ‘universal,’ when healthy, alive, pregnant with values, springs inevitably from the specific fact.” Reading between the lines here, one notices how Merriam criticizes the authors for not being able to transcend the elementary aspects of regionalism, of not being able to get to the universals for all the facts. And already in 1935, Merriam appeared to be outright pessimistic about the development of Northwest poetry: “Our artists remain, on the whole, on a somewhat pioneer stage, where their efforts are directed at mere description of country and people ... Even in the matter of topography Northwesterners approve the milder aspects and not the bold, violent shoreland, mountainland, and prairieland. They approve poems of genteel life, but not of our raucous, brawny, hearty outdoor existence.” And the poets were still dressing their poems in borrowed clothes, and they were too “seldom experimental.” His disappointment is obvious; somehow the poetry never developed according to its potential, and the values preferred do not seem to be truly indigenous. One gets the impression that Merriam sensed the ghost of Col. E. Hofer under the surface of much of the poetry. Perhaps it is significant also to notice that Merriam did not attempt to publish another anthology of Northwest poetry before the war, and that in 1939 he even gave up publishing The Frontier.

The question is whether this is the entire reason behind the failure in poetic practice. There was also an inherent problem in the regionalist movement as it was defined in the Northwest. By consciously setting about discovering the region around themselves, what were the poets to write about if they were to be honest? What was there besides the remnants of an American Indian culture, the pioneer tradition, and the landscape itself? Inevitably in such a situation, as B. A. Botkin pointed out while talking about Northwest poetry, “native modes of expression ... have their roots in the unwritten tradition of the folk,” simply because there was nothing else available. Just because of the lack of an indigenous literate culture, stretching back in time, the poets responded with what there was at hand, namely the common, received tradition, and that tradition was rather simple and unpretentious. How was one to reconcile rebelling against the taste of the commercial literary market place in the East, which was paying an increasing amount of attention to the proponents of literary modernism, yet absorbing what one needed from this modern, European-influenced poetic experimentation? The answer was simple, one couldn’t. If one rejected the first, one consequently had to reject the other as well. The forms of modernism appeared too alien to be incorporated into the regional material, and the regional poets stuck to the old poetic forms. Thus a tendency developed towards an almost prescriptive naivité and simplicity.

There was a way out, however, and that was moving towards the spoken language of the region, towards the local vocabulary, pronunciation, and rhythm. By doing so one could move into free verse and yet be true to the regionalist principles. George W. Hibbitt, in an article called “Poetry and Speech,” was an excellent theoretician of this kind of solution. He opened his article by sarcastically rejecting three modernist representatives: “T. S. Eliot with all his poetic power suggests that properly to understand him the reader know French, German, Hindu, Italian, Latin, and Greek, of course. Ezra Pound expects the same requirements of his readers, although he stresses Greek a bit more. E. E. Cummings throws at the reader a series of ‘unknown’ words which must almost be taken into a laboratory to analyse.” The assumption behind the attack was that poetry should be readily available to the audience, and that poetry was closer to speech than to a collage full of “foreign” languages. Against the modernist foreign reliance he argues that “the poet, nurtured in his local environment, should allow his poetic language to represent the voice of his people.” Why listen to Europe, he seems to be saying, when there was such a poetic potential available in the forms of American English. Hibbitt was consequently very much in favor of making recordings of poets reading their own work, so that the subtleties of stress, rhythm, and pronunciation was conveyed. As examples of this tendency towards poetry approaching the spoken language, he pointed to the work of poets like Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, and Edgar Lee Masters.

Hibbitt’s argument provided an elegant solution to an obvious and acknowledged problem; nevertheless it was not seriously heeded by the Northwest regionalist poets. To some extent the poetry of speech approached the “narrative inclination” mentioned above, but it was not synonymous. The regional narrative was still heavy with received poetical rhetoric from an earlier century. The more widespread, contemporary emphasis of oral poetry, paying careful attention to the spoken language did not really come until the l950s, and even then it was not unanimously accepted but delegated primarily to the “Beats.”

Because of the regionalist activity of The Frontier, and the articulate theories of its proponents, it is easy to get the impression that all of the poets of the Northwest at this time belonged to the regionalist ranks, and that everyone who wrote poetry wrote primarily about the things that the regionalists considered important; or that there existed a clear continuity during the 1920s and l930s of even loosely related regional concerns among the Northwest poets. That is certainly not the impression one gets if one compares the content of three separately published anthologies of Northwest poetry in the l930s, namely Northwest Verse, Sunset Trails, and Oregon Poets. 

In order to understand the extent to which regionalism was a movement around The Frontier, one only needs to do two things: First, establish a general definition of “NW themes,” not necessarily in any strict regionalist sense, but in terms that clearly tie the poem to the region by including geography, history, vocations, well-known local people and so forth, then apply this as a criterion to the poems in these anthologies.

In Northwest Verse 95 poets were represented, each poet contributing anything from a short poem to several pages of poems. Of these, approximately 40 dealt explicitly with aspects that can be called specifically Northwestern. As far as the content was concerned, most of the material came from The Frontier.

Sunset Trails, with the subtitle “An Anthology of Recent Verse Written by Residents of Oregon,” was compiled by Dallas Moore, apparently under the auspices of the University of Oregon. In the acknowledgements we find out that “The Oregon Journal, the Morning Oregonian, and The Lariat were the three chief sources of the material. ... To those three periodicals much is owed for their fostering of the writing of verse in Oregon.” Neither in the “Introduction,” the “Preface” nor the “Foreword” is there a word mentioned about The Frontier’s influence on the writing of verse, which reveals something of the polarization at work at the time. The editorial policy was quite different in this book from the other two; only one poem per poet, and the editor preferred short poems, with an average of 11/2 to 2 poems per page. So out of the 296 poets and poems in this anthology, only approximately 20 deal with “NW themes.” Reading this volume one would think that Oregonians wrote primarily about beauty, God, love, the seasons, and their feelings in general terms, and that regionalism was unheard of.

If we look at Oregon Poets, we find that 50 poets were represented, with exactly three pages each. Here, only six poets dealt with explicitly “NW themes,” even though there were quite a few poems which reveal intimate ties to nature. But these nature poems described the land in such general terms, that they could have been placed in any part of the world. There is, in other words, none of that “western flavor” so important to the regionalists.

The conclusion is an interesting one: Even if these differences are merely expressions of editorial preferences, I think it is clear that the spectacular landscape, the brief but intense history, the characteristic vocations, and so on, are not enough to trigger persistent reactions to place; that writing about one’s environment is an attitude which must be fostered when there is a general lack of cultural unity. So in order to understand how this type of regionalism developed, and what it took to make poets write about their native grounds, it is helpful to look at the early Northwest regionalist movement as consisting of three major aspects:

First of all, it was deeply concerned with trying to describe and emphasize the distinguishing geographical, human and historical / cultural traits of the region. It was primarily frontier oriented, often retrospective, with very little experience coming out of the urban environment. Nature, either by itself or in its impact on human beings, played an essential part in the vision of place.
Secondly, its aesthetic was predominantly objective / realistic / factual in tone and description; it tended towards the documentary in its search for truth of place; in style it favored simplicity and directness. Traditional poetic forms were almost always preferred. The mood was often narrative and descriptive. There was hardly any experimentation.

Finally, it was a very self-conscious movement with theoreticians, critics, and practioners, who created their own outlets centered around The Frontier and the other small literary magazines, and a few regional presses in an urge towards cultural independence and decentralization.

Lars Nordström
 

ENDNOTES