With the clearest eyes imaginable, he looks into it. Turner's
_The Frontier in American History_ (1920) has been a fertile
begetter of interpretations of history.
Instead of being the usual kind of jokesmith book or
concatenation of tall tales, _Folk Laughter on the American
Frontier_ by Mody C. Boatright (Macmillan, New York,
1949) goes into the human and social significances of humor.
Of boastings, anecdotal exaggerations, hide-and-hair metaphors,
stump and pulpit parables, tenderfoot baitings, and
the like there is plenty, but thought plays upon them and
arranges them into patterns of social history.
Mary Austin (1868-1934) is an interpreter of nature,
which for her includes naturally placed human beings as
much as naturally placed antelopes and cacti. She wrote _The
American Rhythm_ on the theory that authentic poetry expresses
the rhythms of that patch of earth to which the poet
is rooted. Rhythm is experience passed into the subconscious
and is "distinct from our intellectual perception of it."
Before they can make true poetry, English-speaking Americans
will be in accord with "the run of wind in tall grass" as
were the Pueblo Indians when Europeans discovered them.
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