In The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy, David Middleton celebrates the artist Jean-Francois Millet's sympathetic realism depicting the harsh life of French peasants in the nineteenth century. Here, Middleton follows Millet, picture by picture, in taking a lowly pastoral theme and elevating it to epic and tragedy. Middleton seeks to describe Gruchy - the small Norman village where Millet grew up - and explore that rural world in relation to the American South and his own career as a Louisiana poet. A deep affirmation of the agrarian way of life, Middleton's poems are an implicit critique of the postagrarian world entering its final stages of decay.