Volume 10 187
ulty from 1968-1971. The line between fact and fic-
tion is often blurred in poetry, and poets often take
“poetic license,” “borrowing” events from other
people’s lives or inhabiting other voices. In an es-
say about his own life in the Contemporary Au-
thors Autobiography SeriesTaylor wrote: “When
I was in my twenties and early thirties, I felt no
obligation to be faithful to autobiographical fact,
and wrote several far-fetched poetical fictions in
which the speaker was not readily distinguishable
from that person who, as I see it, is me.” In an email
to the critic, Taylor notes, “The voice and manner
of the poem are, I think, influenced by my reading
of Robert Penn Warren’s poems, which I came to
love in the 1970s, having previously felt no more
for them than respectful admiration. For a little
while there in the 70s, I read his poems more avidly
than I read any others.” Warren, perhaps best
known for his novelAll the Kings Men,was also a
southern writer. He died in 1989.
Critical Overview.
“Landscape with Tractor,” which was initially pub-
lished in a 1983 issue of Ploughshares,has been
reprinted a number of times, appearing in The Mor-
row Anthology of Younger American Poets(1985)
andThe Ploughshares Reader (1987). Watershed
Tapes of Washington, D.C., released an audio-
casette “Landscape with Tractor,”which features
the poet reading 22 other poems as well as the ti-
tle piece. Reviewing Taylor’s Pulitzer-prize win-
ning collection, The Flying Change, in which
“Landscape with Tractor” appears, David Shapiro
claimed in Poetrythat Taylor crafts his poems, “as
house, as space, as dwelling.” Citing the first stanza
of the poem, Shapiro noted that “Taylor’s poems
concern boundaries and the pride of boundaries.”
Though he had been writing and publishing poetry
for twenty years before he won the prize, Taylor
was not well known to the public, but then few po-
ets are. In the introduction to his bibliographic
chronicle of Taylor’s published work from 1961-
1987, Stuart Wright stated that most “poets and
critics alike, felt that this recognition had been far
too long in coming.” Writing for the Dictionary of
Literary Biography,Taylor’s mentor and friend
George Garret, seconded that sentiment, claiming
that Taylor’s formalism has often worked against
his poetry becoming better known: “If Taylor’s
work has received some recognition from poets of
an older generation and some serious and favorable
attention from some of the poets of his own age,
his work is not nearly so well known, yet, as it
might be. In forms and content, style and substance,
he is not so much out of fashion as deliberately,
determinedly unfashionable. His love of forms is
(for the present) unfashionable.”Criticism.
Chris Semansky
Chris Semansky’s essays and poems regularly
appear in literary journals and magazines. He is
currently working on an anthology of poems and
stories about Eve, titled “The Lady and Her
Snake.” In this essay, Semansky examines how Tay-
lor’s poem is both a description of a traumatic
event and a psychological portrait of the speaker.Henry Taylor draws on the landscape tradition
associated with painting in his poem, “Landscape
with Tractor.” Historically, landscape paintings
have often been considered meditations on a place.
An artist’s use of color, light, texture, and per-
spective is intended to show the place in a new way,
or perhaps in a manner that is thoroughly familiar.
In Taylor’s poem, however, placeis as much a psy-
chological landscape as it is a physical one. In re-
counting an event that changed his life, the speaker
of the poem creates an emotional terrain that tells
readers about his fears and desires and, in the
process, asks readers to reflect on their own.
The poem’s first stanza describes a place and
asks readers how it would be if they took off to that
place, “a house set well back from a dirt road, /
With ... three acres of grass bounded / By road,
driveway, and vegetable garden.” This image of
well-ordered isolation dominates the poem. It is not
only a physical isolation (readers are not told of
any other people at the house) but an isolation of
the speaker’s psyche. The borders of the speaker’s
land are also, symbolically, the borders of his mind.
He tends both, cultivating familiarity and routine
in his actions and thinking. His work structured ac-
cording to the seasons, the speaker appears content
in the first few stanzas to mow his field just enough
to keep it maintained.
The tractor is the other term in the poem’s ti-
tle and appears in the second stanza as a symbol of
seemingly benign technology. However, the trac-
tor is also the means by which the speaker orders
his land. While he sits on the tractor, the speaker’s
mind can wander; he doesn’t have to pay close at-
tention to his work. The tractor, then, as symbol ofLandscape with Tractor