THEORIES EXPLAINING THE OBSCURITY which has cloaked many early poets of the West are numerous, yet none provides an explanation for the anonymity which has shrouded the efforts by western poets of the Victorian Age and the contributions of twentieth-century western poets like Sharlot Hall, Alice Corbin, Norman Macleod, Peggy Pond Church, and their counterparts. Perhaps eastern publishers have favored their own region's poets, but it is not clear that they have done so at the expense of poets in the West. In fact, powerful eastern publishing houses have issued works by the great majority of noteworthy western poets, often establishing or insuring what reputations they had in their day. ¹ It is also true that these eastern firms have published flocks of forgettable western thrushes.

The California poet and essayist, Hildegarde Flanner, has observed that no westerner has ever been forced to leave the region in order to write poetry. Nor has it been necessary to make pilgrimages east to publish. The westerner seeking to publish a book of poems during the century from 1850 to 1950 had a variety of outlets close at hand. ² Commercial firms, like Anton Roman's in San Francisco, Binford and Mort in Portland, or Caxton Printers in Caldwell, Idaho were ready to serve, as were the "small," private, or "literary" presses, like those of the Grabhorns in San Francisco, Vaida and Whitney Montgomery's Kaleidograph Press in Dallas, the Ward Ritchie Press in Los Angeles, or Alan Swallow's firm in Denver. Western university presses also provided crucial outlets for regional poets. ³ Some poets in the West even banded together to publish, as a cooperative venture, their own works. ⁴ Yet it must be admitted that few western publishers commanded national attention as powerful and prestigious eastern firms did, conspiracies of commerce, geography, and population being what they were. ⁵

Another explanation of the early western poets' obscurity holds that prerequisites for good poets are good readers and good critics, that the West has provided neither requisite and, therefore, has had few–if any–poets of immortal note. There may be some merit in this syllogism, although immortal poets may be a rare commodity, regardless of time or place. Many westerners in the nineteenth century were preoccupied with manifesting their destinies, destinies which involved trapping, panning, ranching, and plowing–not necessarily poetry readings. ⁶ Because he was virtually ignored at home, Cincinnatus Hiner Miller, the splendid poseur known to San Franciscans as Joaquin Miller, had to sail to England in 1870 to earn his popular and critical sobriquet, "Byron of the Sierras." Yet most students of western poetry agree today that our English cousins–presumably good readers and critics–erred in their approbation of Miller. These same students would point out, paradoxically, that Robinson Jeffers's great poems were produced in the glamorous isolation of Big Sur, and that critical bulls issued by Yvor Winters at Stanford still provoke discussion. ⁷

Some early western poets seem to have chosen or been fated for ob-scurity. Mary Barnard published one volume of poetry in the 1930s, but then directed her energies to translating Greek poetry and writing a highly regarded study of myth. Peggy Pond Church (Mrs. Margaret Church) and Hildegarde Flanner (Mrs. Hildegarde Monhoff) decided to meet the demands both of family and of Muses. Other poets, like Thomas Hornsby Ferril, have had families and, simultaneously, multiple business careers. Still other western poets, like Hazel Hall and Norman Macleod, have battled personal health problems while striving to maintain literary activities. ⁸

The nature of the genre suggests yet another reason why many early western poets are not better known. Those writing in the second half of the nineteenth century were perhaps unduly burdened with excess Old World baggage: classical mythologies, "poetic" vocabularies, and traditional poetic forms unsuited to the American, specifically trans-Mississippi, experience. In time, however, twentieth-century poets like Sharlot Hall, Alice Corbin, Peggy Pond Church, Hildegarde Flanner, and H. L. Davis wrote poems in language appropriate to the new land and its ancient and emerging cultures. At the same time, poets like Hall, Corbin, Mary Austin, Genevieve Taggard, Norman Macleod, and Thomas Hornsby Ferril were successfully interpreting the West in light of New World and modern mythologies.

Finally, it is possible the reputations of western poets are, in truth, no more wrapped in winding sheets than are those of their contemporaries from other regions. Or are they wrapped at all? After all, untold numbers of readers around the globe have had their social consciences stirred by Edwin Markham's "Man with a Hoe," while generations of Americans have memorized Joaquin Miller's "Columbus." Seattle's young Audrey Wurdemann won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for poetry amidst a scandal as fine as any ever concocted by Tammany. ⁹ Thomas Hornsby Ferril of Colorado and Ted Olson of Wyoming were selected as winners of the Yale Younger Poets Award (in 1926 and 1928, respectively). Ferril and Montana's Gwendolen Haste had poems selected as Nation poetry award winners in the twenties, the same period Braithwaite selected work by Oregon's Hazel Hall for inclusion in his annual anthology of best poems, And Oregon's H. L. Davis was awarded Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize in 1919. Too, these poets have been honored within the region as well as without. California named Ina Coolbrith its poet laureate in 1915, the nation's first state laureate. ¹⁰ Nebraska's John Neihardt became that state's laureate in 1921, while Colorado, the nation's second state to establish the position, crowned Nellie Burget Miller laureate in 1923, the same title recently bestowed upon Denverite Ferril.

The history of early western poetry–which is, then, no more a record of failure and obscurity than is the history of any other region's early poetic efforts–has its origins in the closing years of the eighteenth century, though its substantial development did not begin until after 1850. The earliest poems by whites in the West were international in flavor. William Shiels reprints in Seward's Icebox the Russian original and a translation of the 1799 "Song" which was composed and chanted by A. A. Baranov at the dedication of the first European settlement, Fort St. Michael (Old Sitka), in Alaska. While the Russian poem was apparently first published in Moscow, a Spanish poem, "Al Bello Sesco," printed in 1836 on the Zamorano press, the first in California, is the first poem composed and published in the West by a white. ¹¹ T. M. Pearce has drawn attention to Albert Pike's ode, "The Fall of Poland," written in Santa Fe February 1, 1832, and printed in Pike's Prose Sketches and Poems Written in the Western Country (Boston, 1834). In the 1840s Samuel Lucas (The Sandwich Islands, 1841) and Robert Grant (Kapiolani, with other Poems, 1848) sent their volumes of verse to England for printing,"as did John Lyon (The Harp of Zion, 1853) and one of Brigham Young's wives, Eliza Roxy Snow, ¹³ from Utah.

The first volume of serious poetry written by westerners and printed in the West is generally held to be the 1865 Bret Harte–edited Outcroppings; being a Collection of California Verse; aside from being the first western poetry anthology, it is a totally undistinguished collection of nineteen versifiers, mainly San Franciscans. ¹⁴ In response to the outcry from overlooked bards, May Wentworth was selected to edit a more inclusive anthology and, in 1866, the West's first multi-state anthology, The Poetry of the Pacific, was published. Containing work of a quality dismayingly similar to that found in Harte's collection, Wentworth's had the supposed virtue of including almost three times as many poets. Together, these two volumes represent the first of a type of publication which became a fixture in western literary history: the poetry anthology. By the 1930s, when the country, deep in the Depression, hearkened back to its regional roots for solace and strength, a torrent of western anthologies was published. ¹⁵ State and regional anthologies, regardless of their uneven literary merit, are valuable in that they often contain poems by poets whose volumes have disappeared (John Knox's, for example), or poems that only appear in hard-to-locate periodicals (Norman Macleod's early poems, for example). Furthermore, these anthologies not only provide a record of the development of individual writers, but they also illustrate changing attitudes towards landscape, cultures, and poetry itself. After Harte's and Wentworth's anthologies, and into the first decade of the twentieth century, the best poets in the West–with one exception–are largely unremarkable poets. (The exception–Joaquin Miller–is merely notorious.) Technically, thematically, and stylistically their verse illustrates an ability to rise sometimes to the literary conventions of the Victorian Age. Bret Harte, Ina Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, John Rollin Ridge, Frances Fuller Victor, Edwin Rowland Sill, Ella Higginson, and George Sterling are such poets. Today, Harte is admired chiefly for his prose; Coolbrith, for her early, slender, personal lyrics–and for surviving not only San Francisco's 1906 earthquake and fire but also her contemporaries (born in 1841, named laureate in 1915, she died in 1928). Victor is esteemed for her historical research and writings. Ridge, known as "Yellowbird," was one-quarter Cherokee, although his posthumous Poems (1868) "passes" perfectly as white. ^l6 Born in the Midwest and raised in Oregon, Joaquin Miller published first Specimens (1868) and then Joaquin et al (1869). They are now collector's items only because of Miller's flamboyant later career in England and California. Miller's performances at Byron's grave, in London literary salons, and on Oakland's "Hights" (as the poet spelled it) have been well documented; ^l7 his contribution to western ars is that he drew the first serious national and international attention to poets of the region. ¹⁸

Most attempts to translate the Old West into memorable verse failed because the early poets ignored their unique locale and experiences, writing ethereal, abstract, universal poems, and because they dressed and/or addressed their locale and experiences inappropriately, using language and literary conventions suitable for Greeks given to epithets at sunrise or Britishers given to elegies in a Stoke Poges churchyard. On the other hand, the versifiers in the West who did strive to use the region's poetic possibilities and did express themselves in the "American" tongue also failed. ¹⁹

Arizona's Sharlot Hall is one of the first poets to somewhat successfully use the physical and cultural environments of the West. Westering with her family to Arizona from Kansas in the early 1880s, Sharlot Mabridth Hall was thrown from her horse and suffered a serious, lingering spine injury which, in the '90s, confined her to bed. During this period she began writing. Throughout the next twenty years, at the urging and with the advice of her mother, Hall wrote her best poems. In addition, she managed two ranches (hers and her parents'), wrote for and edited Charles F. Lummis's magazine Land of Sunshine (later retitled Out West), served as Arizona's Territorial Historian, and undertook various historical society projects and expeditions (see her published diary, Sharlot Hall on the Arizona Strip). She later founded what is now the Sharlot Hall Historical Society and Museum in Prescott, Arizona. In 1910, when her first volume of poems, Cactus and Pine, was published in Boston, it received enthusiastic reviews and sold out.

Hall was apparently intent on establishing regional verisimilitude, for she wrote poetic headnotes which set the scene or stated the theme in evocative language, thereby providing not only a historic context for the poem, but also a literary one. ²⁰ Two poems typical of Hall's most interesting efforts are "Sheep Herding" and "The Occultation of Venus."

Sheep Herding

Many years ago a herd of sheep was feeding its way down from the region around the San Francisco peaks by way of the Verde valley to the desert for the winter. The shepherd sickened and died alone with his sheep.

For some weeks thereafter a shepherd dog very wild and thin, came once in a while to a ranch house on Clear Creek and snatched a little food set out by the woman of the ranch and hurried away. At last he was found to be herding the sheep and guarding the dead body of his master. He had taken the sheep in a small circle to feed and water but had always returned to bed them where he could watch his master's body.

In the early and more lonely days of sheep herding it was not uncommon to find the solitary herder insane from loneliness and one poor man in the state asylum long ago would throw himself on the ground and try to eat grass like a sheep. Another counted incessantly, over and over, keeping tally on imaginary sheep.

A gray, slow-moving, dust-bepowdered wave,
That on the edges breaks to scattering spray,
Round which the faithful collies wheel and bark
To scurry in the laggard feet that stray.
A babel of complaining tongues that make
The dull air weary with their ceaseless fret;
Brown hills akin to those of Gallilee
On which the shepherds tend their charges yet.

The long, hot days; the stark, wind-beaten nights;
No human presence, human sight or sound;
Grim, silent land of wasted hopes, where they
Who came for gold have oft times madness found;
A bleating horror that foregathers speech;
Freezing the word that from the lip would pass;
And sends the herdsman grovelling with his sheep,
Face down and beast-like on the trampled grass.

. . . . .

The collies halt; the slow herd sways and reels,
Huddled in fright above a low ravine,
Where wild with thirst a herd unshepherded
Beats up and down–with something dark between;
A narrow circle that they will not cross;
A thing to stop the maddest in their run–
A guarding dog too weak to lift his head
Who licks a still hand shriveled in the sun.

In 1953 a third, posthumous collection of Hall's work, Poems of a Ranch Woman, appeared. These poems, many apparently composed after the death of Sharlot's mother ²¹ and when Sharlot was distracted by other professional concerns and demands, are primarily lesser lyrics and cowboy-dialect poems.

During Hall's lifetime (1870–1943) many other western poets made diverse attempts to capture the West in literature. Charles Erskine Scott Wood, best remembered today–if at all–as the young military aide who recorded Nez Perce Chief Joseph's surrender speech, published his longwinded Psalm- and Socratic-styled philosophical dialogue, Poet in the Desert (1915), which makes diffident use of southeastern Oregon scenery. ²² In the teens and early twenties, Robinson Jeffers began publishing his poetry, which employed Greek, Biblical, and Freudian myth set against the land and seascape of the Monterey peninsula. Other poets, however, tried less and less to convey regional truths in foreign vessels and limited themselves, as Hall often did, to writing about western scenes and cultures. Many of the poets in this group studied and emulated the region's indigenous poetic traditions.

Before the turn of the century, ethnologists had been transcribing and translating Native American oral poetry. And so, too, poets in the West became interested in Native American verse. In Nebraska, Jeffers's contemporary, John Neihardt, began production of his epic poems which chronicle Indian and white history in the West. More accomplished than Neihardt, who is the subject of a separate chapter in this volume and whose verse is usually and justifiably damned with the faint praise "some passages are poetic," are the works of those New Mexico writers who were frequently associated with or from the artist colonies at Taos and Santa Fe. These writers were among the first to "win the West" for poetry. ²³

Alice Corbin arrived in Santa Fe in 1916. Her poetic talents, until that time, were fragile and undeveloped, despite her being a seasoned editor and anthologizer (see notes 8 and 15). Corbin's poetry, like her health, improved greatly in New Mexico. In 1920 she published a seminal work, Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico. In this volume Corbin not only draws on Native American myths and poetic techniques (as in the Tesuque Pueblo "Corn Grinding Song"), but she also makes use of Hispanic culture (as in "Cundiyo ," "Una Anciana Mexicana," "Old Juan Quintana," and "El Coyotito" which is based on a Spanish song). Corbin's The Sun Turns West (1933) is less dependent on region than Red Earth but is, nevertheless, also a valuable collection.

Other New Mexico poets of note during the twenties and thirties include S. Omar Barker, Mary Austin, Witter Bynner, Peggy Pond Church, Haniel Long, Willard "Spud" Johnson, and Fray Angélico Chávez. Barker's Vientos de las Sierras (1924) is a pleasing yet idiosyncratic book from an author who shortly abandoned "literary" poetry for "cowboy" verse. ²⁴ The peripatetic Austin, who came to New Mexico in 1924 to stay, wrote a valuable study of Native American poetics, The American Rhythm (1923), and published some Native American translations in Children Sing in the Far West (1928). Bynner's Indian Earth (1929) is his only volume of regional import, while Long is best known for lyric poems and prose writings. Of the poets in this group, Peggy Pond Church is the most significant. Margaret ("Peggy") Pond Church was born in 1903 near what is now known as Valmora, New Mexico. Amongst the group of unheralded western poets deserving of scrutiny–a group that includes Sharlot Hall, Alice Corbin, Genevieve Taggard, Norman Macleod, and Hidegarde Flanner– Church is perhaps the least recognized. Unlike the other serious poets discussed in this chapter, Church has never had her books issued by an eastern or midwestrern press. ²⁵ Until the recent reprinting of The Ripened Fields (1954; 1978) and the publication of her New & Selected Poems (1976), Church's poetry was for many years unavailable. Thus, it was ignored. Upon examination, however, we see in Church a writer of great range and profundity. Like Hall, Corbin, and Austin, she draws on Native American and Hispanic culture to inform her writing, as poems like "Even the Mountains Are Ripe," "Sheep Country" and the following poem, which depicts the flagellant southwestern religious cult, the Penitentes, make clear.

Abiquiu–Thursday in Holy Week

Is there any way I can be sure to remember Abiquiu?
How the sun went down suddenly
Behind the hills, and the river darkened. Everything
Became sound only laid upon silence
   where had been lately
Bright houses and people moving past them,
   and dogs and children.

The moon was a long time coming up.
It came up so slowly.
The hills grew tall and terrible before it. The long mesa
Behind Abiquiu was a huge blackness, growing blacker
On the slow silver sky.
The fields had been ploughed a little and we stumbled
   through them
Guiding our steps by grasping the budding willows
Beside the acequia. We didn't belong here.
This wasn't our world. We should never have come
   here at all.
We shivered and laid our lengths along the border
Of the field, a wall of low stone. The trail from
   the morada
Went past that wall. We heard something wailing
High in the hills. We waited.
A little beyond midnight they came out of the morada
And went past the wall, three of them, one singing;
One with the pito, the Penitente flute that is    more sorrowful
Than any sorrowful sound that was ever uttered
In music. The third man marched
With body bent a little forward. At the end
   of each line of singing
He brought the woven whip across his shoulders
With a lashing sound, rhythmical, like an accent;
A sound that was dull and harsh, as though already
Blood softened the lean back. A lantern flickered
In the hand of the singer. Its swinging shadow
Was swallowed soon in darkness.
I, under the cold stars, there in the cold night, watching
This greatest of remembered tragedies enacted
By men who as soon as Easter was over
Would go back to their ordinary way of living–
To the fields they must finish plowing and sowing;
To the sheep that would be lambing soon in the canyons;
To the ditches that must be cleared to flood
   the orchards,
Each man when his turn came, from the mother
   acequia–
Men whose brown, wind-lined faces I had often
   seen passing,
In wagons loaded with wood brought down
   from the mesas
Behind Abiquiu, or driving burros
Slowly, as if in some other country, along the highway.

I crouched there against the cold stone, prone
   on the cold earth, listening,
Thought: There is something they know, these men,
   that we have forgotten;
They remember, here in these mountains, here
   at Abiquiu on this spring night,
On this unforgettable Thursday before Easter,
That to imitate simply, unaware even of any
   special meaning,
A great and tragic action, is to be lifted by it
For a moment out of commonplace living
   toward greatness.

Proof that the poetical West had been won in the twenties and thirties is also seen in the work of poets outside New Mexico. Before his move to that state, Witter Bynner taught briefly at Berkeley where two of his students were Genevieve Taggard and Hildegarde Flanner. Taggard's and Flanner's careers provide an instructive contrast. Taggard's best work was published before 1930 (For Eager Lovers, 1922; Hawaiian Hilltop, 1923; Words for the Chisel, 1926; Travelling Standing Still, 1928). She is to be highly regarded because she is able to resist the cliches of Hawaii, its lotus blossoms, dusky-skinned natives, and technicolor sunsets–still of grave danger to the unwary poet. However, Taggard's poetry became increasingly political, she devoted more attention to writing critical studies (The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson, 1930), moved east, and began teaching. As a result, her poems became more diffuse. Unlike Taggard's, Hildegarde Flanner's earlier collections of poetry (in 1920, 1921, 1924, and 1929) are conventional, delicate, what critics used to term "feminine." They were often beautifully printed and bound; otherwise, they are not unique. Flanner did not publish a volume in the 1930s, although she stayed in the West, married, and continued writing. Taggard, by contrast, published three volumes during this decade, four in the next. However, Flanner's remarkable collection, If There Is Time, was published in 1942 by New Directions, followed by In Native Light (1970) and a selection of old and new western poems, The Hearkening Eye ( 1979). These three volumes reveal a maturation of the poet's philosophies, interests, and techniques. Flanner is not distressed at being labeled a conservationist and some of her poems are concerned with ecological issues, as this 1932 sonnet reveals.

Tin Cans at Keeler

Here in the desert is a pallid lake
That once was murmurous upon its bed
With sparkle lapping on the inland shore.
Only dust remains and it is dead And not
a single water rears its head
And no blue brook with shiver of great drops
Comes this far boiling keenly on the land.
Man stole the water and the stricken lake
Lies like a trance and staring in the sand
No flash nor spread of wave, no wet shimmer. Just
one thing shines here under the bare skies–
A heap of cans, new-dumped. The enormous glitter
Beats in the air and quivers where it lies.
And the brood of dirty brightness multiplies.

In Colorado, Nellie Burget Miller's second book, her first collection of regional poetry, In Earthen Bowls (1924), was published and received good reviews, as did her 1936 volume, Pictures from the Plains. Alan Swallow, who was to publish Miller's poems (The Sun Drops Red, 1947), called Miller the only state laureate deserving of the title. ²⁷ Miller's fellow Coloradoan and, later, state laureate, Thomas Hornsby Ferril, began his distinguished career by winning the Yale Younger Poets Award for High Passage (1926). Ferril's 1934 Westering was considered by Swallow to be the most impressive collection of western poetry. On the basis of these two volumes, most critics rank Ferril second only to Jeffers among early poets of the West; both are considered major western writers and each is discussed at length in separate chapters in this volume.

In Oregon, Howard McKinley Coming published two valuable collections (These People, 1926; The Mountains in the Sky, 1930). In Wyoming, Ted Olson was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1928 for A Stranger and Afraid. Olson later moved to New York and there published Hawk's Way (1940), vaguely indebted to western terrain. In 1930, Gwendolen Haste's series, "Montana Wives" appeared in a strong collection, Young Land. ²⁸ The same year, John Knox published his sonnet sequence about Texas and the Southwest, Through a Glass Darkly. In 1931, Montana's Grace Stone Coates's Mead and Mangel Wurzel was issued; unfortunately, her next volume, Portulacas in the Wheat (1932), was not as impressive. In California, the now-adult child prodigy, Julia Cooley Altrocchi, published her poetic epic, Snow-Covered Wagons: A Pioneer Epic: The Donner Party Expeditions, 1846–1847 (1936). Three years later, New Directions issued Cool Country by Oregon's Mary Barnard, her sole collection until her recent Elliston Prizewinning Collected Poems (1979). ²⁹

With the advent of World War II, regional and national concerns in the 1940s gave way to global concerns, and wartime exigencies affected poetry in not unexpected ways. Poets went literally and metaphorically off to war. They often ceased writing poetry, or they focused their attention on themes and subjects non-regional, or strove–generally unsuccessfully (witness Ferril's 1944 Trial by Time)–to unite matters regional with those global. With paper supplies limited, book production was curtailed. Interest in regional poetry dropped.

The few notable collections of western poetry published during the 1940s are, not surprisingly, usually compilations of writings completed decades before publication: Yvor Winters, Poems (1940); Lincoln Fitzell, In Plato's Garden: Poems 1929–1939 (1940); H. L. Davis, Proud Riders (1942); Nellie Burget Miller, The Sun Drops Red: Collected Poems of Nellie Burget Miller, 1930–1947 (1947); Janet Lewis (Mrs. Yvor Winters), Poems, 1924– 1944 (1950). Notable collections of newer verse include Hildegarde Flanner, If There Is Time (1942) ; Wilson O. Clough, Forward to Wyoming (1944) and We, Borne Along (1949); Peggy Pond Church, Ultimatum for Man (1946). However, two important poets began to establish themselves in this decade: Kenneth Rexroth in San Francisco and Theodore Roethke in Seattle. ³⁰

Norman Macleod, whose fifth collection of poetry, Pure as Nowhere, was published in 1952, is a fitting figure with which to conclude this centurylong survey of western poets, for Macleod has devoted his life to literature and has produced a number of memorable volumes of western poetry; yet he is neither well known nor are his contributions fully recognized. ³¹

Born in Salem, Oregon, in 1906, Macleod was raised and educated primarily in the West and the West informs his best work. In the twenties and thirties he was a frequent contributor to western, national, and international literary periodicals and anthologies. Macleod is important, also, because of his role as founder and editor of "Little Magazines." In the thirties, like Genevieve Taggard, Macleod made the East his base of literary operations. He published volumes of poetry (Horizons of Death, 1934; Thanksgiving Before November, 1936) and prose. In 1939 he founded the New York City Poetry Center, the nation's first and foremost community poetry center, and he served as its director for three years. But during this decade he suffered breakdowns, disease, marriages-and-divorces; his earlier political involvement plagued him during the McCarthy era. ³² In the forties he published two more volumes of poetry (We Thank You All the Time, 1941, and A Man in Mid-Passage, 1947) and edited influential literary reviews. Yet, despite his numerous publications and significant contributions to regional, national, and international letters, Macleod's name is known to few, even among students of western literature. ³³

Macleod's obscurity is due, in part, to the nature of his publications: although published by eastern presses, Macleod was never adopted by a major publisher. His work has always been difficult to obtain. His personal problems also adversely affected his career. The poet expresses his misgivings about that career in "Like Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce," from his 1952 collection.

Like Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce

Since I can no longer remember
the poems of my youth (nor even

the five fingers which brought
them to birth) I recognize that

I am issue of a lean length of
men whose serial inheritance is

taxed by time, deep distortion
or anger until the man I now am

is less memory than shadow; so
like Chief Joseph the Nez Perce

I see the receding saw of rock
roaring in a cataract to sunset

breathe the bitterroot valleys
and touch with despair a tender

ness that is not anywhere, and
tasting the larkspur of retreat

hear the black drums reminding
tomorrow the son I then will be

will renounce not only the men
who were his anchor in the past

but also his race, name, those
poems he will never know; there

fore he will die as I will die
grey as the ultimatum motorized

transport move upon, atomizing
our tablet in this world's mind.

Macleod clearly intends the poignant and brutal comparison on which his poem is based to describe how he believes the world views his life and achievements. In a larger sense, and after scrutinizing the first century of western poetry, we might presume that the poem's speaker is not only Norman Macleod, but also the voice of Hall, Corbin, Taggard, Austin, Flanner and Church, who have, in essence, provided us with a record of the literary homesteading of the West, a record that threatens to be both forgotten and atomized.

TOM TRUSKY, Boise State University

Notes

1. For the apparently different situation faced by western prose writers seeking publication by eastern firms see Vardis Fisher, "The Western Writer and the Eastern Establishment," Western American Literature 1, no. 4. (Winter 1967): 244–259; Alvin Josephy, Jr., "Publishers' Interests in Western Writing," Western American Literature 1, no. 4 (Winter 1967): 260–266; and Wallace Stegner, "Born a Square–The Westerner's Dilemma," Atlantic (January 1964), pp. 46–50.

2. The first presses in the West began operating in 1834 in California and New Mexico, according to Roby Wentz, Eleven Western Presses: An Account of How the First Printing Press Came to Each of the Eleven Western States (Los Angeles: International Association of Printing House Craftsmen, 1956).

3. Notable among early university presses publishing regional poetry were those at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. University interest in regional poets and poetry was widespread in the West. H. G. Merriam at the University of Montana, B. A. Botkin at the University of Oklahoma, Glenn Hughes at the University of Washington, Wilson O. Clough at the University of Wyoming, Bernice Slote at the University of Nebraska, Mabel Major at Texas Christian University, T. M. Pearce at the University of New Mexico, and Yvor Winters at Stanford not only wrote poetry and edited distinguished poetry publications, but also dedicated themselves to inculcating an understanding and appreciation in their students of works by the region's poets.

4. In a series of remarkable volumes issued by Writers' Editions of Santa Fe in the 1930s poets Alice Corbin, Peggy Pond Church, Haniel Long, Willard "Spud" Johnson, Fray Angélico Chávez and others joined together to underwrite their own publications. An incomplete accounting of the group may be found in Jack D. Rittenhouse, "Southwest Imprints–Writers' Editions," Booktalk 4 (December 1975): 3–4.

5. Interestingly, however, in the United States the craft of printing as a fine art is generally said to have begun on the West Coast.

6. San Franciscans, as described by Franklin Walker in San Francisco's Literary Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1939), were atypical westerners in their dedication to and cultivation of the arts, especially literature.

7. Although it is true that Winters's critical writings are not primarily concerned with regional poetry, he greatly influenced future poets and professors of poetry in the West (see, for example, his anthologies, Twelve Poets of the Pacific and Poets of the Pacific); too, his attitudes had a not inconsiderable effect on western essayist, poet, and publisher Alan Swallow (see Swallow's essays, "The Sage of Palo Alto" and "An Examination of Modern Critics: 6: Yvor Winters," reprinted in Swallow's An Editor's Essays of Two Decades).

8. The reputation of an Edenic, regenerative, health-restoring West undeniably has attracted talented ailing "foreigners" who, staying on, have contributed greatly to literature of the region, as the career of Chicago Poetry magazine cofounder and coeditor Alice Corbin, who moved to Santa Fe for reasons of health in 1916, attests. Indirectly, the reputation of a health-giving West was responsible for the arrival of other poets in the West: Norman Macleod's father, who had problems with his drinking, was sent to Zion to recuperate; while in the West he met his future wife, Norman's mother.

9. Twenty-four-year-old Wurdemann, according to her obituary in the New York Times (20 May 1960, p. 30), was the youngest poet ever to win the award. The lovely young poet had married professor and poet Joseph Auslander in 1932, shortly after Auslander's first wife died. Auslander taught at Columbia University which administers the Pulitzers; in any event, Wurdemann's poetic talents were questioned. Kunitz and Haycraft, in Twentieth Century Authors, quote a review in the Boston Transcript of a 1938 Wurdemann volume: "The tone she tries for is bigger than the throat that utters it," and the Times obituary notes, "Her verse, like herself, was young and pretty, shy, quiet, graceful, artless." In any case, Wurdemann does not draw on the West for whatever informs her poetry.

10. Ann Hafen, "Laurels for the Ladies–the Poets Laureate of Colorado," Colorado Magazine 30, no. 3 (July 1953): 215–223, claims that Colorado was the first state to have an official Poet Laureate ( 1919). Hafen appears to be splitting legal hairs over the definition of the term "official."

11. California Imprints, 1833–1862: A Bibliography (Los Gatos, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1961), pp. 40–41.

12. Why the volumes were sent to England for publication is not clear. Wentz reports that Christian missionaries had a press in Hawaii in 1822.

13. Best known to later generations of Mormons for her hymns and Relief Society work, Snow's Poems Religious, Historical, and Political, I (Liverpool, 1856) and II (Salt Lake City, 1877) are, according to Latter-day Saints scholar Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, "superficial, maudlin, trite and unimaginative." Beecher is quoted in Cindy Lesser Larsen, "Whoever Heard of a Utah Poet?: An Overview of Poetry in the Early Church," Century 2 (Fall 1979), p. 41. Most verse by early Mormons, as Larsen also concludes, is more zealous dogma (or platitudinous doggerel) than competent poetry, as evidenced by John Sylvanus Davis, The Bee Hive Songster (1868); Augusta Joyce Cocheran, Wind Flowers of Deseret (1881); Hannah King, Epic Poem, a Synopsis of the Rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (1884); Reba Beebe Pratt, The Sheaf of a Gleaner (1886); J. H. Ward, Ballads of Life (1886); Alfred Osmund, Poetical Works (1891); and The Daughters of the Utah Pioneers' anthology, Pioneer Poets and Poems (1942). Only Sara E. Carmichael (Poems, 1866) possessed some poetic talent, and she, castigated by her Utah peers for being of dubious faith, married a non-Mormon, left Utah, and spent the last years of her life in an institution for the insane.

Robert Buchanan, Saint Abe and His Seven Wives: A Tale of Salt Lake City (1872), is a high-spirited bit of verse satire which purports to be authentic tales of travels in Zion undertaken by a Gentile. In "Cissy Inclines to Piety," Buchanan tells of a cowpoke who loses his gal to a sixty-year-old Mormon who already has–the cowpoke notes disgruntledly–four wives. Buchanan's collection may be one of the earliest poetic portraits of Deseret by a non-Mormon.

That Mormons even attempted to publish poetry in the third quarter of the nineteenth century in Salt Lake is, however, remarkable testimony to not only their religious dedication, but also their dedication to the art of poetry. Wentz (Eleven Western Presses, p. 33) notes that the cost of ink and paper in Salt Lake at this time was five to six times the price for these items in the East.

14. William Gallagher, ed., Selections from the Poetical Literature of the West (1841) and William T. Coggeshall, ed., Poets and Poetry of the West (1864), despite their titles, anthologize no poets from west of the Mississippi.

15. The better anthologizers took their cue from Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin's famed collection of Poetry contributors, The New Poetry, which was first published in 1917, went through three editions and twenty printings by 1950, and included many of the West's better poets. Superior western anthologies are: B. A. Botkin's annual Folk-Say collections (1929–1932); Mabel Major and Rebecca W. Smith, The Southwest in Literature: An Anthology for High Schools (1929); D. Maitland Bushby, The Golden Stallion: An Anthology of Poems Concerning the Southwest and Written by Southwestern Poets (1930); B. A. Botkin, The Southwest Scene (1931); H. G. Merriam, Northwest Verse: An Anthology (1931); Rufus Coleman, Western Prose and Poetry, retitled The Golden West in Story and Verse (both 1932); Hilton Ross Greer and Florence Elberta Barns, New Voices of the Southwest (1934); Yvor Winters, Twelve Poets of the Pacific (1937); Ray B. West, Rocky Mountain Reader (1946) and Writing in the Rocky Mountains (1947). (The last two volumes contain poems by Ellis Foote, a Utah poet; if a Mormon, Foote is the first interesting and experimental poet from Zion. )

Anthologies of limited interest include: Ann Winslow, Trial Balances (1935), which contains a number of western poets who rise to prominence in the 1950s; Cantando: Border Poets (1939), interesting for a few fine poems on ethnic groups in the West; Elizabeth M. Stover, Son-of-a-Gun-Stew: A Sampling of the Southwest (1945), notable for its inclusion of black poet Kate McAlpin Crady; Charles Lee, North East South West: A Regional Anthology of American Writing (1945), which collects good regional poets seldom anthologized; Alfred Powers, Poems of the Covered Wagons (1947); Earl Clifton Peck, Lore of the Lumber Camps (1948); Yvor Winters, Poets of the Pacific, Second Series (1949); and Mabel Major and T. M. Pearce, Signature of the Sun: Southwestern Verse, 1900–1950, especially valuable for the editors' informative essays and extensive bibliography.

Representative of western state poetry anthologies is Kinder and Spencer, Evenings with Colorado Poets, a popular, mediocre volume which went through three editions. The most famous contributor to the first edition (1894) was Helen Hunt Jackson, who appears in a photograph on the frontispiece as a stolid, aged matron. By the 1926 third edition (which includes poems by Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Nellie Burget Miller), Jackson has magically shed both avoirdupois and years; she's now engraved as a coy, dimpled dumpling. Such is the deceptive nature of most state anthologies–few are of consistent high quality, few can be recommended wholeheartedly. Those which may be are: George Sterling, Genevieve Taggard, and James Rorty, Continent's End: An Anthology of Contemporary California Poets (1925); Alice Corbin, The Turquoise Trail: An Anthology of New Mexico Poetry (1928); and Joseph Henry Jackson, Continent's End–A Collection of California Writing (1944). Of lesser interest are state anthologies published by Henry Harrison during the 1930s: California and Washington (both 1932), and Colorado and Oregon (both 1935).

16. These poets are studied in Franklin Walker, San Francisco's Literary Frontier, cited above, and Alfred Powers, History of Oregon Literature (Portland: Metropolitan Press, 1935).

17. See M. M. Marberry, Splendid Poseur: Joaquin Miller–American Poet (New York: Crowell, 1953); O. W. Frost, Joquin Miller (New York: Twayne, 1967); Benjamin S. Lawson, Joaquin Miller, Western Writers Series, No. 43 (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1980).

18. Miller also drew disciples, notably two Japanese, Takeshi Kanno and Yone Noguchi. Noguchi lived on the Hights and wrote oddly moving prose poems in unmastered English (Seen & Unseen, or Monologues of a Homeless Snail, 1897; reprint 1920). The interest western poets have had in the Orient–Gary Snyder comes to mind–is first evidenced by Miller's travels in the Orient as a correspondent and in his friendship with Noguchi.

19. Two such poets are Nevada's W. N. Weare and Oregon's Valentine Brown. During the 1870s while an officer at California's state prison, San Quentin, Weare utilized that institution's setting for a number of poems that appeared in his 1879 volume Songs of the Western Shore. Weare's prison poems, as well as his poems like "Carrie: The Tragedy of Lake Tahoe," are often relatively free of clanking classical allusions and "poetic" language, but they are, unfortunately, sentimental, melodramatic, and technically pedestrian.

Valentine Brown's work is more distressing. Between 1900 and 1925, Brown published six volumes of verse, some of it written before the turn of the century. A Portland real estate developer who typeset, printed, and bound his own books, Brown admits in the querulous preface to his fourth book, Tales and Other Verse (1904), that no publisher–eastern or western–would accept his work. And with reason.

20. Hall's headnotes should not necessarily be presumed to have been composed for an eastern "dude" audience. Many headnotes were not included in the 1910 eastern edition of Cactus and Pine, but were added (or expanded) in the 1924 western edition, as if Hall wished to educate and entertain most of all her Arizona readers. Poems in the text reprint headnotes from the second edition, bodies from the first edition.

21. Sharlot's mother was no small influence. The first edition of Cactus and Pine has a dedicatory poem to the young poet's mother. The second edition adds a frontispiece photograph of the poet and Mrs. Hall. Sharlot's father apparently thought little of his daughter's careers and literary achievements. For speculations on her parents' influence and attitudes, see James J. Weston, "Sharlot Hall: Arizona's Pioneer Lady of Literature," Journal of the West 4, no. 4 (October 1965): 539–552.

22. See Edwin R. Bingham, "Shaping a Region's Culture: Charles Erskine Scott Wood in Oregon," Oregon Rainbow I, no. 4 (Winter 1976). Bingham discusses Wood's prose writings and marriage to Sara Bard Field and reprints a few of Wood's successful western poems first printed in Poems from the Ranges (1929) and included in Wood's posthumous Collected Poems ( 1949).

23. Two literary colonies have been important in the development of early poetry of the West: Carmel and Taos/Santa Fe. For the history of Carmel, see Franklin Walker, The Seacoast of Bohemia (Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1973), and Michael Orth, "Ideality to Reality: The Founding of Carmel," California Historical Quarterly 48 (1969): 195–210. Less has been written about the literary contributions of Taos/Santa Fe. For a general overview of activities at these Southwest centers, see Kay Aiken Reeve's unpublished dissertation, "The Making of an American Place: The Development of Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, as an American Cultural Center, 1898–1942," Texas A&M University, 1977.

24. Barker and other "Cowboy Poets" are amply discussed in Lee Steinmetz, "Immortal Youth Astride a Dream: The Cowboy in Western American Poetry," a paper delivered to the Western Literature Association Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 6 October 1979.

25. As the bibliography of primary sources for this chapter makes clear, the most important western poets were published by eastern presses–with the exception of Alice Corbin, whose Red Earth was issued by a Chicago press, and Peggy Pond Church, all of whose titles were published by western presses.

26. Church, who saw the boy's school owned and operated by her husband confiscated for the Los Alamos Project, has a decidedly different outlook on science than does Thomas Hornsby Ferril.

27.Swallow's evaluation was made long before John Haines, William Stafford, and Thomas Hornsby Ferril were named laureates of, respectively, Alaska, Oregon, and Colorado.

28. A number of the "Montana Wives" poems are included in Haste's Selected Poems (1976), which also contains poems she wrote after having moved, like Olson, to New York.

29. During the first decades of the twentieth century there were also westerners writing poetry which did not depend on region for subject matter, themes, or techniques. Usually these were poetic dilettantes, like Colorado's Alfred Damon Runyon (Tents of Trouble, 1911; Rhymes of the Firing Line, 1912), and Arthur Hugh Chapman (Out Where the West Begins, 1917); "the only American buried in the Kremlin," Oregon's John Reed (Sangar and The Day in Bohemia, 1913; Tamburlain, 1916); Idaho's Vardis Fisher (Sonnets to an Imaginary Madonna, 1927); and Nevada's Walter Van Tilburg Clark (Ten Women in Gale's House, 1932).

Of these poets who transcended region, only Oregon's Hazel Hall (no relation to Sharlot Hall) produced distinguished verse. Hall, whose poetry was recently published in her second posthumous collection (Selected Poems, 1980), led a tragic, invalided life. Her other publications include Curtains (1921), Walkers (1923), and the posthumous Cry of Time (1928).

30. A case may be made for including works by Kenneth Rexroth in this discussion of western poets of the 1940s, for many of his poems did depend on western scenery and events. However, Rexroth's influence was most apparent in the 1950s and 1960s, and a large number of his poems were translations or based on foreign originals. See Donald Hall, "Kenneth Rexroth and His Poetry," The New York Times Book Review (23 November 1980), 9, 43–44, and my bibliography of primary and secondary sources for this chapter. Less of a case may be made for inclusion in this chapter of part-time San Francisco resident Kenneth Patchen.

31. See my "Norman Wicklund Macleod, Poet from the West," Prairie Schooner 50, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 257–268. See also Alan Wald, "Tethered to the Past: The Poetry of Norman Macleod," Minnesota Review II (1978): 107–111.

32. Macleod's concern with social and political issues in the thirties was similar to Genevieve Taggard's and many other artists and intellectuals of the time. Macleod's interest in these issues may be due in part to his upbringing in Missoula and his personal acquaintanceships with mineworkers, loggers, farmers, hoboes, and "Wobblies" (members of the IWW).

The topic of western poetry and politics has not been addressed, to my knowledge, although Louis Filler, "Edwin Markham, Poetry, and What Have You," Antioch Review 23, no. 4 (1963–1964): 447–459, provides a provocative rereading and reevaluation of the poet Markham. Nor has an analysis been made of the political and sociological philosophies of western black poets like William Lightfoot Visscher, Black Mammy: A Song of the Sunny South and Other Poems, 1st ed. (Cheyenne, Wyoming: 1885); 2nd ed. (Cheyenne, Wyoming: Bristol & Knabe, 1886); John Mason Brewer, Negrito (San Antonio, Texas: Naylor, 1933); Benjamin Franklin Gardner, Black (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1933); and Kate McAlpin Crady, Free Steppin' (Dallas, Texas: Mathis, Van Nort, 1938) and Travelin' Shoes (Dallas, Texas: Mathis, Van Nort, 1948).

33. For example, Macleod's poems do not appear in any of the current regional anthologies of the West.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Bibliography of Twenty Western Poets

Austin, Mary. The American Rhythm: Studies and Re-expressions of American Songs. 1923, 1930; rpt. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1970.

. Children Sing in the Far West. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928.

Barnard, Mary. Collected Poems. Portland: Breitenbush Press, 1979.

. Cool Country. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1939.

Church, Peggy Pond. Familiar Journey. Santa Fe: Writers' Editions, 1936.

. Foretaste. Santa Fe: Writers' Editions, 1933.

. New & Selected Poems. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1976.

. The Ripened Fields: Fifteen Sonnets of a Marriage. 1954; rev. ed. Santa Fe:
Lightning Tree Press, 1978.

. A Rustle of Angels. Denver: Peartree Press, 1981.

. Ultimatum for Man. Stanford University, California: James Ladd Delkin,
1946.
Coolbrith, Ina. A Perfect Day. San Francisco: John H. Carmany, 1881.

. Songs from the Golden Gate. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1895.

. Wings of Sunset. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1929.

Corbin, Alice. Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico. Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, <1920.

. The Sun Turns West. Santa Fe: Writers' Editions, 1933. Corning, Howard McKinley. These People. New York: Harold Vinal, 1926.

. This Earth and Another Country: New and Selected Poems. Portland: Tall Pine Imprints, 1969.

. The Mountain in the Sky. Portland: Metropolitan Press, 1930. Davis, H. L. Proud Riders. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942.

. Selected Poems. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1978. Ferril, Thomas Hornsby. (See separate chapter listing in this volume.)

Flanner, Hildegarde. The Hearkening Eye. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1979.

. If There Is Time. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1942.

. In Native Light. Calistoga, California: James E. Beard, 1970.

Hall, Hazel. Cry of Time. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928.

. Curtains. New York: John Lane, 1921.

. Selected Poems. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1980.

. Walkers. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1923.

Hall, Sharlot. Cactus and Pine. 1st ed. Boston: Sherman, French, 1910. 2nd ed.

Phoenix: Arizona Republican Print Shop, 1924.

. Poems of a Ranch Woman. Compiled by Josephine Mackenzie. Prescott, Arizona: Sharlot Hall Historical Society, 1953.

Haste, Gwendolen. Selected Poems. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1976.

. The Young Land. New York: Coward-McCann, 1930.

Jeffers, Robinson. (See separate chapter listing in this volume.)

Long, Haniel. My Seasons. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1977.

Macleod, Norman. The Distance: New and Selected Poems (1928–1977). Pembroke, North Carolina: s.n., 1977.

. Horizons of Death. New York: Parnassus Press, 1934.

. A Man in Mid-Passage: Collected Poems, 1930–1947. Columbus, Ohio: Cronos Editions, 1947.

. Pure as Nowhere. Columbus, Ohio: Golden Goose Press, 1952.

. Selected Poems. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1975.

. Thanksgiving Before November. New York: Parnassus Press, 1936.

. We Thank You All the Time. Prairie City, Illinois: Decker Press, 1941.

Miller, Nellie Burget. In Earthen Bowls. New York: D. Appleton, 1924.

. Pictures from the Plains and Other Poems. New York: The Poets Press, 1936.

. The Sun Drops Red: Collected Poems of Nellie Burget Miller, 1930–1947. Denver: Sage Books, 1947.

Olson, Ted. Hawk's Way. New York: The League to Support Poetry, 1941.

. A Stranger and Afraid. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928.

Rexroth, Kenneth. The Art of Wordly Wisdom. Prairie City, Illinois: Decker Press, 1949.

. In What Hour. New York: Macmillan, 1940.

. The Phoenix and the Tortoise. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1944.

. The Signatures of All Things: Poems, Songs, Elegies, Translations, Epigrams. New York: New Directions, 1950.

Taggard, Genevieve. For Eager Lovers. New York: Boni, 1922.

. Hawaiian Hilltop. San Francisco: Wycoff & Gelber, Lantern Press, 1923.

. Origin: Hawaii; Poems. Honolulu: Donald Angus, 1947.

. To the Natural World. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1980.

. Travelling Standing Still: Poems 1918–1928. New York: Knopf, 1928.

. Words for the Chisel. New York: Knopf, 1926.

Winters, Yvor. Collected Poems. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1960.

. Poems. Los Altos, California: Gyroscope Press, 1940.

Secondary Bibliography of Western Poetry

Bangs, Carol Jane. "Women Poets and the "Northwest School." In L. L. Lee and Merrill Lewis, eds., Women, Women Writers, and the West. New York: Whitston, 1979. Concludes Gwendolyn (sic) Haste is not a member of a school of western women poets who draw primarily on cultures and landscapes beyond the Pacific Northwest.

Bentley, Beth. "Mirror in the Shadows: Hazel Hall, 1886–1924." Concerning Poetry 13, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 7–12. Analysis of Hall's poetry and comparison of her writings with peers Teasdale, Wylie, Millay.

Dalmas, Victor. "The Poetry of Norman Macleod." Department of English, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, 1974. Unpublished Master's thesis.

Ferril, Thomas Hornsby. (See separate chapter listing in this volume.)

Gardner, Geoffrey, ed. For Rexroth: The Ark 14. New York: The Ark, 1980. Essays, poems on, by, and for Rexroth.

Gurian, Jay. "The Possibility of a Western Poetics." Colorado Quarterly 15 (Summer 1966): 69–85. Challenging essay which proclaims the West has had little poetry and no poetics. Gurian, like most critics of western American poetry, overlooks women poets and critics as well as the influence of Native American and Hispanic poetics.

Larsen, Cindy Lesser. "Whoever Heard of a Utah Poet?: An Overview of Poetry in the Early [L.D.S.] Church." Century 2 (Fall 1979), pp. 32–61. Lesser, writing in Brigham Young University's student literary magazine, concludes no one has–and with good reason, considering the poor quality of early Mormon verse.

Major, Mabel, and T. M. Pearce. Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with Bibliographies. 3rd ed. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972. Basic source for the literary Southwest.

Marable, Mary Hays, and Elaine Boylan. A Handbook of Oklahoma Writers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939. Valuable bio-bibliographic data.

Powers, Alfred. The History of Oregon Literature. Portland, Oregon: Metropolitan Press, 1935. 809 pages of fact, unfact, and good gossip. Indispensable, despite inaccuracies and (dis)organization.

Rhodemhamel, Josephine, and Raymond Wood. Ina Coolbrith. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1973. Standard biography, bound in lavender.

Ross, Morton L. "Alan Swallow and Modern, Western American Poetry." Western American Literature 1 (Summer 1966): 97–104. Chronicles Swallow's futile attempts to define western poetics during his thirty-year career as western publisher, critic, and poet.

Saul, George Branson. Quintet: Essays on Five American Women Poets. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1967. Hazel Hall is the topic of one appreciative essay which asserts her contributions to American poetry have been ignored.

Swallow, Alan. "Poetry of the West." South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn 1964): 77–87. Survey of western poets (with special praise for N. Miller, Ferril, and Winters) and attempt to define western poetry. (See Ross, above.)

. "Two Rocky Mountain Poets." Rocky Mountain Review 3 (Fall 1938): 1–3. (Rpt. in West, Rocky Mountain Reader, below.)

Trusky, A. Thomas. "Norman Wicklund Macleod, Poet from the West." Prairie Schooner 50 (Fall 1976): 257–268. Chronicles Macleod's activities and achievements from the 1920s to 1970s; with notes and bibliography.

. ed. Women Poets of the West: An Anthology, 1850–1950. 2nd ed. Boise, Idaho: Ahsahta Press, 1979. Representative selections by fourteen women poets from eleven western states; introduction by Ann Stanford; with biobibliographies.

Wald, Alan. "Tethered to the Past: The Poetry of Norman Macleod." Minnesota Review 11 (1978): 107–111. Careful analysis concludes Macleod's best work was rooted in his experience.

Walker, Franklin D. San Francisco's Literary Frontier. New York: Knopf, 1939. Classic study of San Francisco's golden age, circa 1850–1900. Includes poems by and analysis of Harte, Coolbrith, Stoddard, Ridge, Sill, Sterling, J. Miller, and others.

Walker, Robert H. "The Poets Interpret the Western Frontier." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1961): 619–635. Effects of Manifest Destiny, landscape, and experience on western poetry, 1876–1905.

West, Ray B., Jr., ed. Rocky Mountain Reader. New York: Dutton, 1946. Anthology contains critical essays by Clough, Ferril, Swallow, and West.

. "Three Rocky Mountain Poets." In Writing in the Rocky Mountains, pp. 45–65. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1947. Analysis of Ferril, Olson, and Ghiselin. Volume has useful annotated bibliography.

Standard Sources

See authors listed in Boise State University Western Writers Series, Steck-Vaughn Southwest Writers Series, Twayne Series, and the "Major Reference Sources on the West" at the back of this volume.

[Contents]    [Index]

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