Introduction and Life

Abstract

The myth of the Old South is a pastoral romance, the myth of its fall a pastoral elegy. Both the romance and the elegy are manifestations of the American agrarian myth: the underlying notion in the national literature of an earthly paradise in the unspoiled landscape of the New World. In turn, the agrarian myth is only one among many statements of the universal human longing for an ideal order-of-being denied by the harsh realities of life and time, among which are the legends of Camelot, Eden and the Golden Age.

Time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition. (‘On a Streetcar Named Success’)