I do recommend finding a complete version. The first public domain version that I found was missing this critical info too! You can find the missing introductions on the Willa Cather archive.
The first epigraph is a quote on the title page by the Polish poet, Mickiewicz, which says "Those fields, colored by various grains!". Mickiewicz is known for his nationalistic poems praising his homeland, which at the time was part of the Russian empire, and he spent much time away from home in political exile. Perhaps she chose it due to a similar nostalgia that she felt towards her childhood homeland while living her adulthood in Eastern cities.
The poem Prairie Spring was written after the novel. It is in two parts: the first half is about the land and the second half is about youth. Cather said that she intended the land to be a hero of the novel. If we think of the land as another living character in the novel, I think some of the adjectives in the poem help to define its personality. The poem also foreshadows themes in the book about youth and loneliness and about the struggles of the immigrants and pioneers to tame this wild land.
Her choice of words for the dedication is interesting because Willa Cather wrote the following about Sarah Orne Jewett. Cather herself was a perfectionist and seemed to worry about how her own legacy would endure after her death so I find some irony in these words.
Quote:
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If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once, "The Scarlet Letter," "Huckleberry Finn," and "The Country of the Pointed Firs." I can think of no others that confront time and change so serenely. The latter book seems to me fairly to shine with the reflection of its long, joyous future. It is so tightly yet so lightly built, so little encumbered with heavy materialism that deteriorates and grows old-fashioned. I like to think with what pleasure, with what a sense of rich discovery, the young student of American literature in far distant years to come will take up this book and say, "A masterpiece!" as proudly as if he himself had made it. It will be a message to the future, a message in a universal language, like the tuft of meadow flowers in Robert Frost's fine poem, which the mower abroad in the early morning left standing, just skirted by the scythe, for the mower of the afternoon to gaze upon and wonder at -- the one message that even the scythe of Time spares.
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