January 1975
In This Issue
Explore the January 1975 print edition below. Or to discover more writing from the pages of The Atlantic, browse the full archive.
Articles
The Difficult Grandeur of Robert Lowell
Why should such grim books give such pleasure?
Portugal and Spain
Innocent Bystander: Extreme Mercy
The Language of Politics: Arise, Ye Prisoners of Jargon!
We can manipulate, or be manipulated by, the words we use, argues the British journalist who gave us “the Establishment” in its contemporary form and has devoted several years to observing and writing about Americans. We can command or hide, he says, adjust to new realities or obscure them. “Middle American,” “forgotten man,” “ghetto,” “ethnic,” “polarize,” “option” are examples of a language gone slack, a language in which too often “we simply don’t know what we are talking about.”
The Inscribed Copy of the Kreutzer Sonata
The Helmsmen
A Bean to Feed the World?
The soybean could—if we were a world of vegetarians. It is rich enough in protein to replace meat, but now it is fed mostly to animals.
The Editor's Page
West Point Rendezvous: Notes on the "Vietnam Class"
The men ten years out of West Point— the place where the army’s ideals are kept—have known all of the bad and very little of the good of military life, says an author who has written about their ordeal in combat, and of the career army’s troubles back home. The attrition rate has been high—one way and another—and when class of ‘64 members, in and out of uniform, gathered to mourn their dead classmates, they were drawn by varieties of nostalgia, regret, and wonderment.
The Winds of Passage
The Cable Ship
Harry Martinson, co-laureate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974, is the author of more than twenty volumes of fiction, verse, essays, and drama. He has been described as a “stylistic innovator comparable with Strindberg. ” These two poems are from Friends. You Drank Some Darkness, translated by Robert Bly, to be published in the spring.
Oh Say Can You Sing?
Some off-key thoughts on the need for a new and better national anthem.
The Funeral of Bobò
The Looming War in the Middle East and How to Avert It
Medicine Man
The Power of Helplessness
John, we used the language as if we made it.
"Are You Too Deeply Occupied to Say if My Verse Is Alive?"
Luckless Heroines, Swinish Men
The Distinction of the Life
The Peripatetic Reviewer
The Great American Nude
Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent
The Energy Balloon
The Box Man
Green Silence
Charles M. Russell
The Shadow Knows
Caves
Some Callit Kitsch
Feral
The Secret of Crete
Edvard Munch
The King's Indian
