The Midwest is central to any understanding of the American story, yet it has been dismissed for over a century as dull, stultifying, and soul-killing.
Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) was a wildly prolific author, pouring out biographies, memoirs, and fiction. Several of his books are especially important for the foundation of what in recent years is called “Midwestern Studies” — a strangely late-coming addition to literary and historical interest in regional studies, especially the South and the West. What’s strange about this recent interest is how central the Midwest is to any understanding of the American story and yet how easily it has been dismissed for over a century as dull, stultifying, and soul-killing. It’s just flyover country, in current coastal parlance.
In an earlier introduction to a Poem of the Day, the Sun nominated Indiana’s James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) as the creator of Midwestern literature. The claim was exaggerated, of course, but something in the late 19th century seems to have set off new ideas in writers whose interests were Midwestern, rather than focused on the literary centers of Boston and New York. And the Wisconsin-born and Chicago-associated Hamlin Garland was a key figure in the movement, especially for “Main-Travelled Roads,” his 1891 collection of local-colorist short stories, and a pair of autobiographical works, “A Son of the Middle Border” (1917) and the Pulitzer-prize winning “A Daughter of the Middle Border” (1921).
He also wrote an 1893 collection of poetry: “Prairie Songs,” with the revealing subtitle “Being Chants Rhymed and Unrhymed of the Level Lands of the Great West.” And he was also something of a nutball, or, at least, an enthusiast for slightly nutty ideas: a cheerleader for several years for the single-tax theories of the homegrown American economist Henry George (1839–1897) before supporting claims of paranormal phenomena.
In honor of his September 14 birthday, The New York Sun presents one of Garlin’s Prairie Songs — his 1893 “On the Mississippi.” Mostly in tetrameter, with an irregular rhyme scheme of abcbcdeefc, the poem tells of a steamboat pushing along the Mississippi River at night, drawing the fireflies and startling with its steam whistle a heron into flight.
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