190 Poetry for Students
man who drives a “bushhog” to cut the grass of his
three acre field. Still, his meditation on the grass
ends up being as much about the social world of
the city as any classical eclogue. Another departure
from the conventional form is the fact that Taylor’s
farmer, instead of speaking to another farmer,
speaks directly to the reader. At first, one thinks
the speaker is merely discussing the merits of a par-
ticular method of cutting grass. In fact, however,
he is asking how the reader would have reacted had
the reader discovered the body he has found. By
introducing a plot about the discovery of a dead
African-American woman on a white farmer’s
land, Taylor summons the poem’s second dominant
literary genre, the themes and conventions of south-
ern literature.
Specifically, southern literature is said to con-
sist of the “tragic sensibility.” Ever since the Civil
War, southern literature has developed its own the-
matic concerns both in poetry and in fiction. To
summarize, southern writers depict their mostly
rural, agrarian region as a place lost, defeated, iso-
lated, and forgotten by the ongoing history of 20th
century industrial life. Linked to this tragic sensi-
bility, however, is a focus on tradition, family, her-
itage, and place. The sensibility is “tragic” in the
classical sense because it claims for the south the
moral, ethical truth of American society. Southern
literature, in other words, laments the tragic fact
that the real moral center of place, heritage, fam-
ily has been lost and will not soon, if ever, return
to dominate American life. Southern writers usu-
ally insist that these qualities make the south
stronger, morally better than the United States’more industrialized regions. Southern literature,
then, is tragic because it accepts as final the loss of
faith in tradition, family, and the importance of
place to one’s sense of self.
By the 1940s, just when Taylor was born, this
tragic sensibility came to dominate southern fiction.
Eventually, southern writers in the 1940s developed
a particular subset of southern literature, the South-
ern Gothic. Like southern literature generally, it in-
corporated a great deal of symbolism and myth into
its fictions, but it also emphasized the grotesque,
strange, and bizarre events and characters that pop-
ulate what is a predominantly rural region. In turn,
the emphasis on the grotesque and the bizarre went
hand in hand with a focus on the problem of evil in
human affairs.
In this same decade, another event that was not
necessarily literary but did help to shape and an-
nounce what would be the dominant concern of
post World War II America occurred. In 1944, one
of the more important sociological studies to effect
American life was published: Gunner Myrdal’s An
American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Mod-
ern Democracy.That book made the problem of
race in America, specifically legalized discrimina-
tion in the south, a new and urgent political issue.
Ultimately, this book would be a major source of
evidence for the Supreme Court’s ruling on deseg-
regation in 1954. An American Dilemma,however,
merely told in scientific prose what the southern
novelists had long been depicting. For the most
part, in other words, the southern novel was an anti-
racist, anti-segregationist affair. Whatever the
stance of the particular writer, though, southern lit-
erature made it quite clear that to write about the
south was to write about race relations: their de-
piction was as fundamental to southern literature as
were the new focus on the gothic and the grotesque
that came to such prominence in the 1940s.
Therefore, when Taylor, already in his forties,
published his third book in 1985, The Flying
Change,the book from which “Landscape with
Tractor” is taken, he was already participating both
in the continuation of the ancient pastoral form, and
in the revival of poetry as a major form for south-
ern literature. As a poet in the south, Taylor could
not help but know that southern literature had dis-
tinguished itself not through its poetry but through
its prose: fiction writers like William Faulkner,
Flannery O’Conner, and Eudrora Welty had far sur-
passed in literary influence their poetic peers. He
knew this in part because he was born and educated
in Virginia where he was initiated through his fam-Landscape with TractorRather than claim
that race is an essential
determining characteristic
of people, the poem instead
reveals the problematic
thoughts and guilty
associations that arise by
the mere presence of a black
woman’s corpse on a white
man’s farm.”