"
* * * * *
There were signs of failure at the Farmers' Restaurant. The curious
farmer-family that ran it were giving it up and moving back into the
country again. I was soon to have no place to board, where I could
obtain credit.
But it was summer by now, and I didn't care. I meditated working in the
wheat harvest.
* * * * *
The editors of the _National Magazine_ had given a new impulsion to my
song--and a damned bad one. Already they had accepted and printed
several of my effusions.
I was to sing for them the life of present-day America, the dignity of
labour, the worth of the daily, obscure endeavour of the world around
me.....
In other words, instead of flattering one man of influence and power
with a dedication, as was done by the poets of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, I was to install Demos as my patron, must warp the
very tissue of my thought to inform the ordinary man that the very fact
that he wore overalls, acquired callouses on his hands, and was ignorant
and contemptuous of culture--somehow made him a demigod! I was
continually to glorify the stupidity of the people, and always append a
moral.
For a time I even succeeded in working myself up into a lathering
frenzy of belief in what I was doing.
* * * * *
The bedrock of life in the Middle West is the wheat harvest.
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