The poems of George Oppen continue to occupy a marginal place in most literary histories, even though his work encapsulates some of the major shifts in American writing between high modernism and contemporary Language poetry. In part this marginalization is due to the habit of tying Oppen to Louis Zukofsky's shortlived “Objectivist” tendency of the thirties. Oppen did indeed publish his first collection, Discrete Series, in 1934, and with a strong endorsement from Ezra Pound (“I salute a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's books”). Yet after this propitious start Oppen fell silent for twenty-five years, jettisoning poetry for politics. He and his wife Mary were members of the Communist Party between 1936 and 1941, their activities eventually attracting close scrutiny from the FBI. In 1949, Oppen and his family opted for political exile in Mexico to avoid harrassment. They would not return until 1958; only then did Oppen begin writing poetry again, initiating a sequence of major volumes, from The Materials (1962) to Primitive (1978).

L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an instant success when it was published in 1900. Baum's quirky and imaginative tale of the girl from Kansas and her friends was complemented by W. W. Denslow's accomplished illustrations to produce the best-selling children's story of the 1900 Christmas season. After years of failed endeavors, the book brought Frank Baum personal prosperity. It also launched a long-lived and highly successful series of children's books based on the Oz theme. There were theatrical and cinematic productions as well, the most famous of which was MGM's 1939 film The Wizard of Oz starring Judy Garland. Indeed, the film eventually came to displace the original Oz tale as the work to which imitators referred. But the books, and especially the first book, continue to have a popular presence among lovers of Oz.

What is the effect of placing speech in a poem? What is the effect of placing a poem in a collection of poems by other poets? These ordinary cultural acts of displacement are taken for granted by most writers and readers, but for the Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker they represented highly conscious acts alien to her everyday world. Although her fellow Objectivists were marginalized by the literary world for much of their careers, they mostly lived and worked within the metropolitan cultures where their avant-garde poetry was read. She spent almost all her life in rural Wisconsin in relative poverty, keeping her writing life quite separate from her various working-class jobs and the local community. By reading her relations with the poetic avant-garde in terms of these acts of displacement, it is possible to appreciate the complexity of a poetic style that can appear to dissolve meaning into a limpid clarity that leaves nothing to interpret, and to recognize that the poetic avant-garde makes rarely questioned assumptions about the universal transmissibility of poetry.

A century ago, Woodrow Wilson rejected as unnatural the idea of a static political system tethered by a mechanical set of checks and balances. He said “Government is not a machine but a living thing. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of living.” In a similar vein, Dodd argued that, by its very nature, the historical process creates dynamic change. He recommended thinking in terms of the “transformational analysis” of the circumstances in which the office of the presidency is fundamentally altered. To speak of such transformation is not to deny the continuities between presidents, but merely to emphasize the significance of differences. The theory of the modern presidency, starting under FDR in the 1930s is, Dodd said, a significant example of an inherently time bound concept. This paper picks up Rose's gauntlet that suggests that internal changes within America and changes in the world in which it has become an increasingly important actor in the last half century, together raise the possibility of a further transformation in terms of which we should now think of a post-modern presidency.

Toni Morrison's fiction, we have been repeatedly told, embodies features taken from jazz. Her books have a “jazzy prose style,” express a “jazz aesthetic,” or are “literary jazz.” Critics propose that jazz riffs can be found in her writing, and that she improvises in prose in a manner comparable to an improvising jazz musician. None of this seems to me to be true. To establish a relationship between music and prose fiction would be difficult under any circumstances. It is all the more difficult when the critics concerned show themselves to be unaware of the basic formal structures of jazz. The riff is foregrounded because it is the only feature of jazz that can be compared to prose (because both may include repetitions). It is a more serious objection that Rice, Small-McCarthy, Berrett, and others, including James A. Snead and Henry Louis Gates Jr., consistently ignore structure, harmony, and melody in favour of rhythm. The reason for this is that jazz rhythm can be traced back to its African origins, whereas structure, harmony, and melody require an engagement with European sources. Clearly, an ideology of authenticity is at work here. Yet a parallel argument is willing to relate Morrison's fiction to its European origins. For, if her novel Jazz is, as Rinaldo Walcott indicates, a rewriting of Scott Fitzgerald's version of the “Jazz Age,” then that rewriting or radical revision must occur by reference to a form – the novel – that originated in Europe and is (in the cited instance) a product of white America.

Nearly a decade ago, historian Alan Dawley proclaimed the idea of American exceptionalism to be dead and buried. Dawley's pronouncement proved premature given the subsequent publication of books by Byron Shafer and Seymour Martin Lipset reaffirming the concept, as well as studies by Ian Tyrell, George Fredrickson, and others addressing the issue. However, the motion of American uniqueness so widely accepted a generation ago has come under serious challenge, and new conceptions of American “distinctiveness” or “variability” have emerged in recent scholarship.

“I have,” confided Washington Irving to his friend and effective literary agent Henry Brevoort, “by patient & persevering labour of my most uncertain pen, & by catching the gleams of sunshine in my cloudy mind, managed to open to myself an avenue to 〈a〉 some degree of profit & reputation.” The “avenue” in question was The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. – America's first internationally acclaimed work of literature – which, by March 1821, had become a direct route to respectability and the British establishment, opening to Irving the world of stately homes and their real-life avenues, previously only glimpsed from afar. Pieced together after the collapse of his family business, the collection of sketches may have been a carefully engineered career move, but Irving avoided any suggestion of personal cost in catching only those “gleams of sunshine,” and apparently censoring his cloudier, less amenable self. He continued: “I value it the more highly because it is entirely independent and self created; and I must use my best endeavours to turn it to account” (LI.614). In the context, “independent” – a charged word for his generation – is striking, given that The Sketch Book was anything but.

When, in September 1971, I published The Distant Magnet, I planned a personal synthesis, supplemented by small pieces of my own research. I was not taking up a position in any controversy, nor was I engaging in polemic with any other scholar. Yet I did intend some change of emphasis, and in particular I wanted to stress Europe more than anyone had done since Marcus Hansen. I sought realism in the description of travel conditions, rather than dwelling on the wholly exceptional horrors of 1847. I demonstrated how foreign was America's working class. I stressed the American conditions common to all immigrants, rather than the differences between ethnic groups. I showed how British capitalism, supplemented by that of France, Belgium, and, later, Germany, opened up overseas areas and at the same time undermined, further and further eastwards, Europe's peasant economies. I had in mind the impact of factory competition and railway construction in eroding the secondary occupations on which so many peasants depended. In other words, I asserted that the modernization of a small corner of Europe was responsible, to use old-fashioned language, for both “push” and “pull.” To restrict length, and to acknowledge my own shortcomings, I omitted the Colonial period, and also all Hispanic and Oriental migrations – and, of course, before World War II these latter were not very big.

Laurence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, £27.95). Pp. 586. ISBN 0 674 25861 4.

In an MLA survey conducted in 1991 American professors proclaimed Walden the single most important work to teach in the country's nineteenth-century literature. Walden got 45% of the vote, as against 34% for The Scarlet Letter and 29% for Moby Dick. And, as Professor Buell reminds the readers of this wide-ranging, scholarly, and beautifully written book, Walden has always had a popular readership to match its early incorporation into the canon of American classics as studied in schools and universities. And there is hardly an American special-interest group – from nudists and whole-earthers, through civil-rights marchers, John-Birchers and survivalist cults – that has not claimed Thoreau at one time or another as its patron saint. The Unabomber is said to have been a particularly avid reader. Above all, it has been an inspiration to ecologists and environmentalists, starting with the pioneer of conservation legislation, John Muir.