SOURCE: Engel, Bernard F. “Sherwood Anderson's Chants of the Mississippi Valley.” Midamerica 25 (1998): 50-60.

In the following essay, Engel examines Anderson's themes in Mid-American Chants.

Sherwood Anderson once wrote that “the best way to kill the growth of a distinctive middle western literature is to talk about it” (“Chicago Culture”). But Anderson got it partially wrong. His prose survives the endless talk about it; the verse almost no one talks about has nearly disappeared. Aware of this, he defiantly continued to write poetry. In the representative collection MidAmerican Chants (1918), the speaker in his poem “Song of the Singer” declares that he will “dare to sing” no matter what, that he will not be crushed by “the machine.”¹ Anderson's readers know that for him the machine stood for industrial civilization, the social pattern that he believed had often broken his fellow Americans. The singer, gifted with spiritual vision, will trust...