ABSTRACT
Vernon Louis Parrington initial responses to his native environment were framed in poetry. The nineteenth-century poetry course became a study of the origins, development, and philosophy underlying the romantic movement. The Emporia Gazette reported that Parrington’s address was “full of beautiful and poetical thoughts and was an appeal to the students to see the beautiful in life and the concealed poetry in it". In 1895 when the opponent of Kansas Populism, William Allen White, bought the Emporia Gazette, a Populist leader in Lyon County bought the rival Emporia Times, although the Times became identified with Democratic politics as Populist strength declined. Parrington’s primary confrontation upon his return to Emporia was not with Populism or with economic or democratic theory but with the classroom. During his Emporia faculty years Parrington dared to publish his efforts to understand the world and its culture only in the college’s newspaper.
