Starting on Raintree County, Part 2 1-16-2021

Then there is what I can call now the mock heroic pieces. Mock heroic I learned from my reading in prison. 

By a single bound, riding the white horse of Eros, he had achieved the summit of Platonic forms, the shrine of Justice on the Courthouse Square.

Raintree County (Houghton, Mifflin, 1948), p. 832 

Yes, that makes more sense in context I say mock heroic because John W. Shawnessy isa a poet whose epic of America is always in unwritten progress. His imagery is the poetically heroic about small deeds Other than winning a footrace, he achieves no greater status than corporal in the Union Army and county school teacher. He seems to be most admired for the achievement not yet achieved than for any accomplishments of a worldly nature. The heft as well aa Lockridge's treatment of his hero has me thinking of a more sedate Thomas Pynchon. The pace fits the time of the novel's setting - the day of July 4, 1892. Another example:

Americans, the eternal children of humanity! Rootless wanderers, creators of new cities, conquerors of deserts and forests, voyagers on rivers, migrants to westward, they kept eternally in their hearts in fact or fiction of the childhood home.

p. 577 

To be continued

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