SOURCE: Hovis, George. “‘When You Got True Dirt You Got Everything You Need’: Forging an Appalachian Arcadia in Fred Chappell's Midquest.” Mississippi Quarterly 53, no. 3 (summer 2000): 389-414.

In the following essay, Hovis examines the themes of farming and Chappell's Appalachian past in Midquest.

In his essay “The Poet and the Plowman,” Fred Chappell ponders what he considers to be one of the fundamental issues facing poets ever since the classical age: the fact that it is impractical, if not impossible, to pursue both a life of poetry and a life of farming. As the essay begins, Chappell recalls long Sunday afternoons in the mid 1960s when he and his guest Allen Tate (who was then guest lecturing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) would watch TV football and bemoan the disappearance of their Latin skills, along with the diminishing allure of the “traditional attractions of farm life...