Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918)

Why, for all of us, out of all we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction, where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we cannot peer.

T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)

John Steuart Curry, Tornado Over Kansas (1929)

John Steuart Curry, The Line Storm (1934)

Thomas Hart Benton, Threshing Wheat (1939)

Thomas Hart Benton, The Race (1942)

Thomas Hart Benton, The Hailstorm (1940)

Grant Wood, Fall Plowing (1931)

Grant Wood, Young Corn (1931)

First wagon ride to grandfather’s farm: There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.... I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it... I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there.... I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night; here, I felt, what would be would be. p. 7-8