A Study Guide for Henry Taylor's "Landscape with Tractor"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Henry Taylor's "Landscape with Tractor," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535827089

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Landscape with Tractor

Henry Taylor

1983

Introduction

Originally published in the Summer, 1983 issue of Ploughshares, Landscape with Tractor is the opening poem in Henry Taylor’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems, The Flying Change, published in 1985. Included in a section titled Heartburn, the poem is a meditative narrative framed by rhetorical questions the speaker asks. The you to whom he addresses his questions, however, is as much a part of himself as it is the reader. Like many of the poems in the collection, this one deals with themes of memory, loss, and change, specifically the ways in which human beings are able (or not) to accommodate change, and to integrate traumatic memories into their lives. In twelve quatrains (units of four lines) the poem’s introspective speaker describes a scenario in which he discovers the body of a woman while mowing his field. The speaker is changed forever by the experience and haunted by the image of the woman and the meaning of her life. The speaker’s tone shows indignation at having his peaceful life interrupted as well as frustration at what the event will mean to his life. The landscape is both physical (the speaker’s field) and psychological (the speaker’s consciousness). The physical landscape of the poem is a familiar one in Taylor’s poetry and his life. He was born and