“Keen Senses Do Not Make a Poet”: Cather’s Respectful Rebellion against Whitman in O Pioneers!

“We Take Up the Task Eternal”: Whitman as Cather’s Literary Ancestor

The poem that lends O Pioneers! its title has a deep history in itself. First published in Drum-Taps, Whitman’s 1865 collection of poetry of the American Civil War, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” later appeared in Leaves of Grass (1871) under the heading “Marches Now the War Is Over.”[2] Whitman never understated the influence of the Civil War on his poetry, famously declaring “my book and the war are one” (6). This bare assertion downplays Whitman’s initial detachment from the war and his subsequent personal transformation during its later years, when he served as a nurse in front-line hospitals. Drum-Taps and the surrounding war poems document a parallel poetic transformation, from belligerent recruitment poetry to more subdued, reflective battlefield poetry, concluding with hopeful reconciliation poetry. “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” occupies a unique space in this saga, pairing the martial tone and rhythm of the earlier recruitment marches with Whitman’s rekindled hope for the future of his country after the war. The most marchlike of his “Marches Now the War Is Over,” it is also the most overtly political. Whitman underpins the poem with his hope for postbellum reconciliation efforts: “All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern, / Pioneers! O pioneers!” (lines 35–36). The militant language and martial rhythm seem to be designed to rouse the ranks of war-weary soldiers to this “newer, mightier” cause (line 19). In one respect, Sharon O’Brien correctly describes the poem as a “jingoistic hymn to progress, manifest destiny, and the Westward Movement,” but on the other hand, the past Whitman hopes to leave behind has been stained by the blood of the Civil War: the pioneers’ goal is a type of peace (440). From his view, it would have been more jingoistic not to hope for progress.

Hardworking youths, finally leaving the battlefield, still hold on to their weapons and tools in the first stanza of Whitman’s pioneer portrait. The un-Whitmanesque regularity and heavy trochees give the piece a constant martial motion; the pioneers are always moving forward. Their militant tirelessness is the first of several traits Whitman’s pioneers possess that we will see countered in Cather. Whitman’s fifth stanza introduces another: his youths are urged to leave behind “all the past” and to detach themselves from the old world “beyond the seas” (lines 14, 16). Nothing good is left in dying Europe; all promise of a better life lies to the west and must be created anew. Unlike the poem’s structure, this message is stock-in-trade Whitman. In one stanza, he reflects on the new task of the distinctly American poet or artist:

Minstrels latent on the prairies! (Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,) Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us, Pioneers! O pioneers! (lines 85–88)

The termination of the non-American poet’s task parallels the pioneer’s duty to forget the “old world,” which, for Whitman, signifies not only European ancestry but also much of antebellum America. To this sentiment, Cather proves “rebellious as well as respectful” once again. Her choice of epigraph, a line from Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, regarded by some as Europe’s last great epic, handily rejects Whitman’s attempt to silence the “bards of other lands.” Yet Mickiewicz’s description of “[t]hose fields, colored by various grain,” conjures up for Cather images of the Nebraska prairie rather than the Lithuanian countryside. Thus, her pioneers must hold sacred some memories from the old world, though not without the ability to adapt them to their new surroundings.

Whitman next urges his pioneers to conquer the new world for its rich resources:

We primeval forests felling, We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within, We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving, Pioneers! O pioneers! (lines 25–27)

These westward advancers resemble an army without a (human) enemy; rather than the nation’s divided forces of the Civil War, the ranks are made up of reconciled Americans all. And unlike a Civil War battalion, the pioneers make no exclusions based on gender: daughters, wives, and mothers are invited to join as well (lines 81– 84; see chapter epigraph above). In their mission of progress, these men and women show no care for their homeland in Europe nor for the gendered, sexualized land they traverse. America becomes their prisoner of war; their weapons are raised against the land itself. These more violent traits fuel the fire of Cather’s rebellion against her poetic forebear, as is evident in her own portrait of the westward advancers of the American prairie.

“Westward the course of empire takes its way” was the poetic text of the first telegraph message sent across the Missouri River into Nebraska, as Willa Cather reports in her 1923 essay “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle.”[3] Writing a decade after publishing O Pioneers!, Cather takes the opportunity to praise the pioneering immigrants who had once inhabited her home state. She describes a realistic lifestyle quite different from Whitman’s imagined ideal. First, she highlights the diverse European backgrounds of many early Nebraskans: “On Sunday we could drive to a Norwegian church and listen to a sermon in that language, or to a Danish or a Swedish church. We could go to the French Catholic settlement in the next county and hear a sermon in French, or into the Bohemian township and hear one in Czech, or we could go to church with the German Lutherans” (“Nebraska” 237). Unlike Whitman, who paints the “elder races” of Europe as a single category—drooping, jaded, and near extinction—Cather recognizes, both here and in O Pioneers!, the importance of varied backgrounds to the early Americans of the Midwest and West. In one reading of her epigraph from Mickiewicz, the fields “colored by various grain” represent the various heritages of the people who inhabit them (O Pioneers! title page). This distinction from Whitman deepens when she writes of European immigrants who inhabited Nebraska: “They brought with them something that this neutral new world needed even more than the immigrants needed land” (“Nebraska” 237). Cather’s description of the land as “neutral” and her admission that immigrants brought something with them from the old world, especially something good and vital, pits her firmly against Whitman on the right role of an American pioneer. He would have every inhabitant of the United States be American and leave behind remnants of another identity, whereas Cather castigates American lawmakers for their “Americanization” of immigrants, including their conviction that “a boy can be a better American if he speaks only one language than if he speaks two” (237).

Cather also admits, as Whitman does not, that the days of the pioneer are numbered. In fact, she claims the pioneer’s story is over until a “new story worthy to take its place” has begun: “The generation that subdued the wild land and broke up the virgin prairie is passing. ... They can look out over these broad stretches of fertility and say: ‘We made this, with our backs and hands’” (“Nebraska” 238). Here, stronger parallels with Whitman’s poem emerge as Cather describes the gendered land being controlled by human power and prosperity; Cather’s virgin prairie is broken up, while Whitman’s virgin soil is upheaved. Indeed, the most evident similarity between the two writers is their blatant disregard of the Indigenous inhabitants of the land, for whom the “virgin prairie” was an established home. Nevertheless, Cather’s description of the passing of the pioneer generation leaves her in a fundamentally different position from Whitman, who imagined American westering and pioneerism to be interminable. The differences between them stretch from the pioneers’ relationship with the past in Europe to their relationship with the future in the American West. In the face of these differences, what merit did Cather see in her poetic American forebear?

This question only increases in complexity against Cather’s stated opinion of Whitman. One of her numerous critical statements on literature from her college era, published in the Nebraska State Journal in 1896, devotes three snarky paragraphs to a discussion of the people’s “good, gray poet,” about whom she reflects, “Just why the adjective good is always applied to Whitman is difficult to discover, probably because people who could not understand him at all took it for granted that he meant well” (Kingdom of Art 351). Cather goes on to critique Whitman’s work as essentially unpoetic, lacking “the finer discriminations” of good poetry and filled with “the unreasoning enthusiasm of a boy,” or—hilariously—a “joyous elephant” (352). “The poet’s task is usually to select the poetic,” she writes; “Whitman never bothers to do that” (352). Only begrudgingly does she admit that he possesses a “primitive elemental force” and an “undeniable charm” (352). His charm is simplistic, and the modern world is far too complex for it, in her eyes. Cather’s final 1896 word on Whitman claims Leaves of Grass as the prime evidence that “keen senses do not make a poet” (353). Nor, she would argue, do they make a pioneer. Whitman’s pioneers resemble him, according to Cather’s portrait: they have keen senses that allow them to survive in the wilderness and are full of enthusiasm and elemental force throughout their journey. For Whitman, as for Cather, the pioneer and the artist of the American Midwest do not have dissimilar tasks. Cather’s critique of Whitman’s unpoetic senses thus reflects back on her own work: for both the characters in her novel and herself, even a strong and careful attentiveness to nature is not enough. In addition, she calls for a sense of moderation, discernment, and a positively poetic discrimination to govern the actions of the true pioneer, whether debouching upon the wide prairies of the Midwest or the wide horizons of American literature.

Cather’s critique of Whitman was penned almost two decades before the publication of O Pioneers!, and her opinion may have shifted in that time. James Woodress goes so far as to “charge these wrong-headed comments on Whitman to the author’s own youth and immaturity” (326). Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that Whitman did not, contrary to the claim of Maire Mullins, “early on serve as Cather’s implicit muse and model” (123). While Mullins’s argument is comprehensive and thoughtful as a whole, other critical work often assumes the truth of this part of her thesis implicitly, without further exploration. Such an assumption can lead to a reading of O Pioneers! as an encomium to Whitman, with her pioneers constituting an “epic response being reinforced by the Whitman title of the book with its rhetorical challenge to conquer the wild country” (Stouck, “Epic Imagination” 31). Any reading that subordinates Cather’s work to Whitman’s misses her clear indication that she understood the dangers of his pioneerism too well to merely perpetuate his beliefs. Unlike the average reader she indicts, Cather did not take it for granted that Whitman “meant well”; she subjects his words and intentions to her own more discriminating poetic judgment.

“Raise the Mighty Mother Mistress”: Alexandra’s Pioneer Vision

The moments of elevated style in O Pioneers!, found, among other places, in the introductory poem, were probably influenced by Whitman’s style and syntax. That this early novel is the only one Cather prefaced with original poetry suggests a direct response to Whitman within her writing style.[4] The O Pioneers! proem, “Prairie Spring,” mimics his work in its irregular line lengths and its catalog of elements within the scene it describes. Woodress avers that this work is Cather’s “only really first-rate poem,” contrasting it with her more formal, metrical verse in April Twilights, and he credits Whitman as her inspiration (329). Certainly both writers “sound the epic theme” in their works and “celebrate the dynamic growth of the American democracy as experienced by the immigrant settlers of the pioneer west,” as David Stouck writes (Historical essay 294). Despite the stylistic and formulaic similarities between these celebrations, however, Cather’s rebellion against Whitman is as clear in “Prairie Spring” as anywhere in the novel. Although she uses a recognizably similar syntax, she undermines the driving unity of much of Whitman’s poetry, especially “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” Halfway through her poem, after a description of the silent landscape, she cuts in with a dichotomous second perspective: “Against all this, Youth.” This shift juxtaposes youth’s “insupportable sweetness [...] fierce necessity [...] sharp desire” with the stolid character of the ancient land. Whitman would have the land pliantly surrender to pioneers armed with pistols, axes, and plows, but here Cather’s land is “full of strength and harshness,” indeed no virgin soil to be upheaved by young, fierce intruders.

There is in Whitman’s poem a tacit assent to the work of mastering nature in order to force it to bend to the human will. The roots of this project are often said to lie in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, spearheaded by men like Francis Bacon and René Descartes, although its origins could really be traced as far back as Genesis, when the inhabitants of Shinar said to one another, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves” (English Standard Version Bible, Gen. 11.4). For Descartes, global renown was not the goal but rather the practical aim of making human beings the “masters and possessors of nature” in order to “enjoy, without any pain, the fruits of the earth and all the goods to be found there” (Descartes 49). This is not to say that the process of conquering nature will not be painful; to bear the brunt of the difficulty is the task of pioneers, whether they are breaking ground in seventeenth-century European science or nineteenth-century American expansion. Whitman’s pioneers are made aware of their sacrifice by the speaker. Their lot is “not the cushion and the slipper [...] / Not the riches safe and palling” but rather the “diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,” with the hope that their followers will someday be able to enjoy the pleasures they must forgo (lines 90–91, 95). This objective raises many questions—technological, political, and moral—but the one to which Cather attends in her novel is discerning which way of life is more choice-worthy: the painful but noble sacrifice of the pioneers, the pleasant leisure of the next generations, or another way, which shuns the role of conqueror of nature’s forces and that of enjoyer of nature’s goods and seeks a more reciprocal relationship with the natural world.

Cather explores these alternatives within her wider inquiry into the proper place of humans on the prairie and the proper status for the prairie in the minds of its inhabitants. Since it is presented with an agency of its own, the land in O Pioneers! resists categorization as a passive substance to be molded and manipulated to the purposes of active human intellect. Cather’s opening scene, a flashback to Hanover “thirty years ago,” captures the land’s unfriendliness to the products of human artifice, for “the dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod. [...] None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them” (11). Reactions to this apparent malevolence of nature vary: for Whitman’s brand of pioneer, it might be viewed as a challenge—an environment where the conquest of nature must of necessity advance in order to quell the natural threats to human life. This reaction is responsible for the change in the landscape at the start of “Part II: Neighboring Fields,” where the technological advancements of “telephone wires,” “gilded weather-vanes,” and “light steel windmills” have helped the human population of the prairie to thrive. Others, like the young Carl, may instead look for a chance to escape the land’s harshness, whether that be a city, where the conquest of nature has been more thoroughly achieved, or a place more generously endowed with natural resources, like a gold mine. Against both responses, the correct perspective, Cather makes clear, is Alexandra’s understanding of the prairie’s natural harshness as a sign of its strength and resilience, which allows her to set her “human face [...] toward it with love and yearning”; in return, the “Genius of the Divide [...] must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before” (64). Far from a conquest, this reciprocity between land and human (we are, after all, another part of “nature”) pervades O Pioneers!, while it is utterly lacking in Whitman’s pioneer poem.

Whitman’s gendering of the land as female and virginal points to another tension between Cather and her literary ancestry. Since Cather’s primary pioneer figure is a woman, how does Alexandra’s relationship with the land reinvent the sexualized conquering that Whitman so enthusiastically promotes? Stouck writes that borrowing a title from Whitman implicitly entails borrowing “its rhetorical challenge to conquer the wild country,” putting Alexandra in the role of conqueror (“Epic Imagination” 31). But this is exactly what Alexandra knows not to do; she “defines herself in relation to—instead of against—the natural world” (O’Brien 434). This relationship, which may simply be defined as a mutually beneficial friendship, is realized in Cather’s elevated prose at the end of “Part I: The Great Divide”: “It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. [...] She had never known before how much the country meant to her” (68–69). Alexandra’s familial revelation precedes the most erotic agricultural imagery in O Pioneers!, appearing in the first three paragraphs of “Part II: Neighboring Fields.” For the established farmers of the Divide, the land “yields itself eagerly to the plow [...] with a soft, deep sigh of happiness,” marking a consensual palliation of the traditional rape of the virgin soil (74). With these lines, Cather acknowledges the presence of the vital young pioneer men Whitman invokes, but their mastery pales alongside Alexandra’s understanding of the true nature of the land as revealed in the next paragraph, where it is made clear that the land’s erotic allure was not meant for humankind after all. Rather, the land “gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back” (74). Into this complex, cyclical love affair between land and atmosphere the pioneer’s agricultural practices intruded, while Alexandra instead stands back and encourages the rightful lovers with her platonic friendship.

Whitman’s own infamous complexity regarding gender has generated as much speculation as Cather’s and is a prominent theme in his published works. For this reason, I find it insufficient to say, as Hermione Lee does in her introduction to Willa Cather: Double Lives, that Cather’s only or primary motivation in crafting Alexandra’s story is to recast Whitman’s male-dominated pioneer narrative with a female lead. Lee is largely correct that “the western frontier was a man’s world,” although there were many single woman homesteaders like Alexandra, but nevertheless Whitman’s poem does not “erotically apotheosize” the “penetration of the West ... as an all-male Olympiad” (Lee 5). I concede that “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” is one of Whitman’s more conventional portraits of masculinity, but it is by no means exclusive. In the second stanza, the speaker calls to the “Western youths” who are “full of manly pride and friendship,” but this description could apply to a woman with unconventional qualities, such as Alexandra (lines 9–10). A later stanza calls to “you daughters of the West!” and bids the women to join the “united” ranks of pioneers (lines 81–82), not to follow “along behind with the pack-horses,” as Lee suggests (5). Whitman would, we sense, be as exuberant about a woman upheaving the virgin soil as he would a man. Thus, I propose recasting Cather’s primary subversion of the poem not as one of gender but as one of discerning the right relationship to the land. Alexandra’s success depends on the “spiritual perceptions” Cather claims Whitman lacks, which enable an artist to “select the beautiful from the gross” (Kingdom of Art 352). The gross, for Alexandra, are those people around her who view the land as spoils of conquest. The beautiful are those sympathetic characters, including men such as Carl and Ivar, who treat it as a resolute old friend.

Lifelong friends, even nonhuman ones, are not given up easily, and Whitman’s chant of “moving yet and never stopping” (the poem contains no fewer than thirty-six gerunds) marks a final significant distinction between his prototype of the pioneer and Cather’s. Whitman’s poem ends at daybreak with a reveille calling the pioneers to their places in the ranks. In his imagination, colored as it was by the broken realities of the eastern states, American westering was a ceaseless process. The task of the pioneer was never finished; it was the “elder races” who had “halted” and the pioneers who must press on in youthful vigor (line 13). An attachment to the land in any place would be impossible to form, as would a relationship with any settled person. By contrast, Cather’s novel ends at sunset with Alexandra inside her home. This pioneer heroine forms a deep attachment to the land and a stable relationship with her partner by the novel’s end. The “great peace” she feels at home and her concern that Carl might ask her to “go away for good” seem to preclude any remnants of traditional pioneerism in middle-aged Alexandra (271–72). She and Carl, two old friends with little left of passion, finally concede to staying “safe” (273), a concept scorned by Whitman’s pioneers: “Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious, / Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment” (lines 90–91). The final image of Alexandra signals a natural completion of the pioneer task in Cather’s conception that simply cannot exist for Whitman. Even this last distinction is blurred in the final, Whitmanesque sentence of the novel: “Fortunate country, that is one day to receive hearts like Alexandra’s into its bosom, to give them out again in the yellow wheat, in the rustling corn, in the shining eyes of youth!” (274). Although Alexandra decides that it is not “fittest” for her to die “upon the march,” as Whitman’s pioneers claim for themselves (line 55), her eventual death will enter into a natural cycle that flourishes with youthfulness. The final word of the novel recalls the poetic message of “Prairie Spring,” so Whitman ought not be far from the reader’s mind in either passage. The primacy of youth is a constant refrain in “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” even from the first line, where the speaker calls to his “tan-faced children” to ready their weapons and march. His pioneers continue their passionate “advancing on” until the very hour of their imminent death. This prominent trait of youthful abandon informs my understanding of Emil as Cather’s subversive depiction of a classic Whitman pioneer.

“All the Hapless Silent Lovers”: Emil’s Pioneer Tragedy

The seventeenth stanza of “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” is often cited as the clearest parallel to Cather’s plot and cast of characters.[5] It reads,

All the hapless silent lovers, All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked, All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying, Pioneers! O pioneers! (lines 65–69)

This stanza shifts its focus away from the pioneer, leading Bernice Slote to suggest that the novel’s Whitman connection “is less with the pioneer movement as such than with the concept of the great and varied scope of ongoing life in America” (12). It is true that the secondary characters of O Pioneers! whom this stanza evokes are removed from the pioneer movement, but the narrative arc of the poem clarifies that every aspect of the “great and varied scope” of life is of import to the true pioneer. This stanza appears as Whitman’s speaker attempts to persuade pioneers to take up or continue their task. Think of all those people, he says in effect, who are relying on us to succeed; “all the pulses of the world [...] beat for us” (line 57). In other words, those listed in this stanza are not pioneers, including the silent lovers Emil and Marie, the prisoner Frank, the righteous Ivar, and the ordinary person working to thrive on the Nebraska prairie. Part of each pioneer’s task is to care and provide for these people. Without a doubt, Alexandra manages to do this more tenderly than Whitman’s militant ranks of young men might have. But Emil, Alexandra’s particular favorite, reacts uncomfortably to her attempts at care. He proves not to be the “hapless silent lover” he appears. Rather, at the decisive points in his life, he acts with all the heedless, ceaseless passion of the Whitman pioneer.

Recalling Cather’s “Prairie Spring” proem, Emil emerges as the personification of “Youth,” with its “insupportable sweetness [...] fierce necessity [...] sharp desire.” Part II of the novel begins with a portrait of Emil armed, like Whitman’s opening image, with a scythe, effectively attacking the earth in an attempt at mastery. Alexandra admits to building her home, and tending her land, in hopes of Emil taking it over. She believes that Emil’s potential as an American pioneer justified her family’s move: “I’m sure it was to have sons like Emil, and to give them a chance, that father left the old country. It’s curious, too; on the outside Emil is just like an American boy” (108). In light of Whitman’s vision of a new American race unhindered by European constraints, Emil first appears to fit perfectly into the poet’s model. But Alexandra finishes by indicating that “underneath he is more Swedish than all of us,” pointing out the reality that emigrants do not leave their past identities behind when they move (108). Although Emil does display conventionally Swedish traits, his nature also expresses the restlessness of a western frontiersman, telling Marie, “‘I must go somewhere, mustn’t I? [...] What do I want to hang around here for? Alexandra can run the farm all right, without me. I don’t want to stand around and look on. I want to be doing something on my own account” (140–41). Emil is shown to have the urge for wandering and surveying that Whitman’s pioneers possess. In this respect, he models a potential for pioneerism, but his plans for ceaseless exploration are soon thwarted.

Cather’s decision to model a character after Whitman’s pioneers necessitates her depiction of the consequences she believes that lifestyle to have, which culminates in Emil’s tragic demise. Emil’s epiphany in church, his last wild ride to Marie, and their death scene all include ironic echoes of Whitman’s poetic style in keeping with Cather’s critique of his work. The nearest equivalent in the novel to Whitman’s ranks of pioneers is the scene after Amédée’s death, when Emil and other young men let “their youth [get] the better of them” by forming a cavalry swept over with “a wave of zeal and fiery enthusiasm” (226). Emil rides an internal wave of similar power at the confirmation service, during which “he felt as if a clear light broke upon his mind, and with it a conviction that good was, after all, stronger than evil, and that good was possible to men. He seemed to discover that there was a kind of rapture in which he could love forever without faltering and without sin” (228). Reminiscent of Whitman’s poetic speaker, who cries, “O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all! / O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all” (lines 38–39), Emil’s epiphany of universal love reminds us that Cather condemned Whitman’s failure to discriminate; in his poetry she finds “the name of everything in creation set down with great reverence but without any particular connection” (352). Emil’s close echo of Whitman in this scene also explains the narrator’s sarcastic judgments upon his thoughts: “And it did not occur to Emil that any one had ever reasoned thus before, that music had ever before given a man this equivocal revelation” (229). Given the importance that music, especially opera, held for both Cather and Whitman, and the thematic parallels in these passages, I would argue that one man on Cather’s mind who had been given “this equivocal revelation” was that good, gray poet.

In the unfolding of Emil’s ecstasy and death, Cather shows the unsustainability of life for a pioneer who fails to discern and connect. Emil’s Whitmanesque perceptions continue as he leaves the church, feeling drawn to the beauty of the hole where Amédée would be buried: “The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death. It is the old and the poor and the maimed who shrink from that brown hole; its wooers are found among the young, the passionate, the gallant-hearted” (230). Such heedless wooers of death are found throughout Whitman’s poetry, and they are always sensuously attracted to the natural world, just as Emil is on his ride to Marie. Marilee Lindemann identifies this outlook as the “‘corporeal utopianism’ Michael Moon has described as the heart” of Whitman’s poetic corpus and contrasts it with a “corporeal dystopianism” found in Alexandra, for example, as she harshly scrubs her body after a semierotic dream (qtd. in Lindemann 39). The same dichotomy pervades the hyperphysical description of Emil and Marie’s death scene. In the initial description from Frank’s perspective, the scene is full of motion, with a heavy-handed sprinkling of gerunds (eleven in a single paragraph; 236). In the later description from Ivar’s perspective, the story of the death is told by the traces of blood through the scene. This hematological tragedy emphasizes the “problems in the oft conjoined strategies of reading the world as if it were a body and reading the body as if it were a world,” two acts that make up Whitman’s central legacy in American literature (Lindemann 39). Cather’s continuing critique of Whitman’s physicality points to the transcendent spiritual vision she finds necessary for true pioneers, like true artists, to maintain. The concession that the bloodstains “told only half the story” (241) confirms this vision, since “above Marie and Emil, two white butterflies [...] were fluttering in and out among the interlacing shadows” (241), symbolizing the two lovers’ souls; in Greek, the word psyche refers to the butterfly and to the souls of the dead. This vignette adds a hint of eternity to the scene that is absent from the deaths in Whitman’s poem. While the gaps left by the dead in the ranks of the living pioneers are quickly filled, Whitman makes no mention of the bodies nor the souls of the deceased.

Emil and Marie die at sunset, but events of the section titled “The White Mulberry Tree” end the next day at dawn, just as “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” does. The new day represents both the freshness of youth and the indifference of the natural world to human affairs. If you are one of Whitman’s pioneers, you are up with the sun or you are left behind. The tragedy of “The White Mulberry Tree,” far from undermining the satisfying ending of the section titled “Alexandra,” offers the same message in negation. When Alexandra completes her pioneering task, she settles and finds safety and comfort. Emil finds no fruitful outlet for his restlessness and no lawful one for his passion. The only “hapless silent lover” in Emil is in his corpse; up until his abrupt end he was “conquering, holding, daring, venturing,” or at least attempting to, right along with the foremost pioneers of Whitman’s poem (line 23). Cather’s main critique of Whitman is his lack of discernment, which Maire Mullins counts as Alexandra’s “most important talent” (129). Emil, as Cather’s answer to the Whitman prototype of the pioneer, also lacks this ability to pursue a right relationship with the people and the land around him, one that turns on the virtues of moderation, delayed gratification, and reciprocal fulfillment of the potential of both parties: a relationship of cooperation rather than conquest. This failure is his undoing, and it signals the undoing of the entire vision of American expansion as Whitman would have it.

Ultimately, Alexandra Bergson’s success where others failed relies on the kind of unity with the land and its spirit experienced by Whitman’s ideal poet, as described in “As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario’s Shore,” the poem that precedes “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass: “The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr’d, till his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorb’d it” (line 219). Cather’s success writing the prairie in O Pioneers!, especially after her disenchantment with her 1912 novel Alexander’s Bridge, might well be described in these terms. Despite its borrowed title, O Pioneers! represents Willa Cather’s own pioneering work as an unprecedented novelist of the American Midwest. By 1913 this region had already been irreversibly imprinted by the hands of the “first cycle” of immigrants and transplants from the East. Whitman attempted to document the efforts of those early generations of American midwesterners in the postbellum era, while Cather picked up the work where he left off by documenting the efforts of their biological and metaphorical descendants. As a literary descendant of Whitman, Cather fittingly pays homage to the poetic heritage he established while revealing a bold revision of his pioneer ideal. Cather’s tribute to Whitman is all the more poignant due to her courage in breaking from the canonical mold he had cast of the pioneer experience in the Midwest. Her criticism of his poetic sensibilities makes her resemble all the more the poet who had turned away from the withering canon of his American literary ancestors. Within the novel, Alexandra Bergson mirrors her creator with a bold vision that looks backward with respect for her heritage and forward with rebellion against its vices to establish a flourishing farm through a more positive tradition. Adopting the bold vision of these female pioneers, Alexandra and Willa, may enable today’s readers to find the same fruitful balance of respect and rebellion.