The Men I Have Chosen for Fathers

Selected pieces from essays published over the past twenty-five years. In general, the first essays move from a concern with the literature of the Southern Renaissance to a consideration of that New England "regionalist" Robert Frost. The center piece considers Ezra Pound, who was (one might say) haunted by the influence of the regional on art. From what is said of Pound we may perhaps better appreciate a regionalist like Richard Weaver. From Weaver, we tum to Solzhenitsyn and Voegelin. And though they may be at first thought rather widely removed from Donald Davidson and Allen Tate and William Faulkner, what we discover in them is an affinity: a common concern about Western civilization. What is thus emphasized is the importance of a central theme running throughout this selection: the difference between the provincial mind and the regional mind.