John G. Neihardt
JOHN G. NEIHARDT, the prairie-born Nebraska poet,
found his direction early and never abandoned it. The
rugged spirit of the West invigorates
all his work, for Neihardt believed in the ultimate validity
of the western myth, the possibility in a land of vast resources
of achieving a wiser society willing to scrap old corruptions
and start fresh. He wrote about the West not because regional
literature was in fashion, but because he saw in the western
fur trappers, Indians, soldiers, and settlers the essence of
the human experience. He believed firmly that in the westering
movement America had found its identity through openhearted courage
and faith in the future. Forgoing the advantages of moving to
a literary center in the East for the contact with publishers
and other writers that might have furthered his career, he chose
to live in the West, and all of his work bears its imprint and
authentic flavor.
Born in Illinois (1881) of an Irish mother and a German father,
both of pioneer stock, Neihardt lived his early childhood years
on his grandfather's farm in Kansas, where he heard the reminiscences
of old frontiersmen, settlers, and Indian fighters, and began
to stock his mind with oral western lore. His mother, Alice Culler
Neihardt, a primary influence in his life, engendered in him
a fierce independence of spirit, respect for hard work, and a
deep appreciation of beauty. Although in early years the family
lived on the edge of poverty and never enjoyed great wealth,
her courage and resourcefulness kept Neihardt and his two sisters
from any sense of deprivation and focused their energies on attacking
problems with vigor and confidence. Neihardt's father, Nicholas
Neihardt, left the family when Neihardt was ten, but he had profoundly
affected his son's life by taking him to the top of a bluff in
Kansas City to look down on the Missouri River in flood. Neihardt
never forgot the exhilaration of that moment; it marked the beginning
of his fascination with the river and the men who traveled it.
The exploits of the trappers and explorers inspired his masterwork,
the epic Cycle of the West.
Early in life Neihardt made the decision to live in the West,
and– whenever possible–in the country, "close
to the real things." He never liked cities; during the years
when he was obliged to live in Minneapolis or St. Louis or Chicago,
he grew restive and increasingly depressed; he was happiest when
he could see wide horizons, grow fresh vegetables, and have room
for dogs and horses. He believed also that a writer should not
depend on writing as a means of support; he should earn his living
by the kind of work most people do, or he had nothing of value
to say to the ordinary man. He himself had a solid background
of hoeing and weeding fields, teaching country school, carrying
hod, chopping wood, and digging cellars. His small stature–he
was exactly five feet tall–distressed him, but he compensated
by developing physical strength through a severe regimen of tramping
country roads in all weathers, swimming, wrestling, and camping
in the wild.
In the early 1890s Neihardt's mother moved the family to Wayne,
Nebraska, where Neihardt finished elementary school and attended
the newly founded college in the town. It offered a limited curriculum,
but he was able to study Latin, and his enthusiasm for Homer
and Virgil kindled his ardor for epics. He devoured the Volsung
sagas, Lady Gregory's tales of Finn and Cuchulain, the Niebelungen
Ring stories, and Tennyson's Arthurian cycle. The beginnings
of his literary philosophy were established by his reading of
Taine. His real education, however, came from his voluminous
independent reading and his passion for accuracy of knowledge.
In 1900 Neihardt and his mother settled in Bancroft, Nebraska,
where Neihardt edited the local newspaper for several years and
as assistant to an agent on the Indian reservation nearby came
to know the Omahas. He developed a rapport with them that strongly
influenced his writings; his sympathies were engaged by their
poverty and helplessness against outrageous defrauding. In 1908,
financed by the Outing Publishing Company, he traveled down the
Missouri River from its headwaters in Montana to Sioux City in
a handcrafted boat, for a series of articles later published
in Putnam's Magazine and in book form as The
River and I. In the same year he married Mona Martinsen,
a sculptor, student of Rodin, after a romantic courtship by letter;
they met for the first time when Mona, arriving from New York,
stepped from the train in Omaha. Their happy marriage produced
four children: Enid, Sigurd, Hilda, and Alice. From 1912 to 1920
Neihardt served as literary editor of the Minneapolis Journal,
but after several months in the city, he persuaded the editor
to let him live in Bancroft and mail in his copy. From 1926 to
1938 he edited a literary page for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
with a hiatus in 1932–1935, when he concentrated on
the epic and the lecture-recital tours that augmented his income.
In 1943 he shifted to Chicago and held several jobs before affiliating
with the Office of Indian Affairs, where he served for two years
( 1944–1946) as Director of the Division of Information,
and remained on call for two years for special duties. Several
field trips to Indian reservations in the course of duty gave
him materials for later works. From 1948 until his death in 1973
he lived in Columbia, Missouri, gave lecture-recitals, for several
years taught courses at the University of Missouri, appeared
on television and recorded programs in both Missouri and Nebraska.
He was working on the second volume of his autobiography when
he died.
Neihardt's writing follows discernible
patterns. He seemed to concentrate his major energies on one
primary genre at a time and write concurrently in a secondary
genre that helped to support him financially. The primary genre
was always poetry, the secondary, prose, for poetry was always
his major concern. Each genre served a purpose in his master
plan and wove itself into his central theme. In the first period,
1892–1912, he wrote a long mystic poem and three volumes
of lyrics, also two verse plays in the primary genre; in the
secondary he composed short stories, two novels, and the account
of his Missouri River trip.
Neihardt's dedication to poetry began with a mystic experience
during an illness when he was eleven; he awoke from a fever dream
of flying, impelled by a mysterious force, with a sense of obligation
to write poetry that never entirely left him. He crystallized
the experience in the lyric "The Ghostly Brother" as a spirit
force like Socrates' daemon, prodding him to write. Later he
called this force the "Otherness" or "It," and set
his work habits to make himself receptive to it. He saw some
similarity to the induced vision dreams of young Sioux boys who
at the age of ten performed the rite of fasting alone on a hill,
awaiting a vision to guide their lives. After the dream Neihardt
accepted the obligation to serve his muse creditably. The "Otherness" worked only for poetry, not for prose.
The first long poem, The Divine
Enchantment (1900), an ambitious work based on Hindu mysticism,
described the vision of Devanaguy, the mother of Krishna, in
an elaborated myth. Neihardt's interest in Hindu scriptures had
been stimulated by discussions with a sculptor in whose monument
shop he worked, and was developed further by his reading of the
Upanishads and the Vedantas, Max Müller's Three
Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy, and Jacolliot's The
Bible in India. Despite obvious imperfections, the poem is
a respectable first entry in Neihardt's canon; it develops a
cosmology and a creation myth, and forecasts many of the poet's
later themes. The verse is not so deplorable as might have been
expected from a seventeen-year-old. Only a few copies survived
Neihardt's determined destruction of work he considered outgrown;
he burned all the copies he could locate.
The lyric poems, all composed in this period except for a few
written for special occasions, were gathered in three collections:
A Bundle of Myrrh (1907), Man-Song (1909), and The
Stranger at the Gate (1912). A later collection, The Quest
(1928), included a few lyrics not in the former books but
written before 1912. Neihardt's poetry, as he himself said, was
outside of the time-mood; in fact, he was ahead of his time.
Under the temporary spell of Whitman he had written free verse
well before the movement struck around 1912, and his unrhymed
love poems, with their irregular rhythm and their mention of
"fevered fingertips" and "strange mad fever in the
veins," were quite daring for their day, although they seem sedate
against the explicit phrases of current literature. They drew
lavish praise from critics for sounding fresh notes counter to
the mannered Edwardian poetry of the time. The love lyrics in
the first volume follow an original pattern in tracing the poet's
search for enduring love through adolescent groping, sexual delights,
and the disillusionment of a confining relationship to the discovery
of a spiritinfused love. In the second volume the lyrics dwell
on the delights of love and the fulfillment of marriage; in the
third the pattern comes full circle with the birth of a child.
The lyrics are strongly masculine; a prominent theme is the sacrifice
of the maiden on the altar of love. Themes of other lyrics reveal
Neihardt's mystic sense of the unity of man, nature, and spirit,
his optimistic reaching for faith, and his delight in the "ineffable
privilege of being." The lyrics now and then have hints of Baudelaire,
and the nature
imagery is frequently Virgilian.
Poems that touch on social issues
such as poverty, injustice, and the undue power of the mighty,
as in "Cry of the People" and "The Red Wind Comes"
are interesting, but not among Neihardt's best; they were composed
for possible use in a poetic drama about the French Revolution.
Some few lyrics convey Neihardt's loneliness and alienation from
his neighbors; seeking his identity in a world often unsympathetic
tinges a number of poems with self-pity or sentimentality, but
they reflect moods of a moment, not a settled gloom. Most of
them rally, as in "A Prayer for Pain" and "Battle Cry,"
where the poet summons his courage in the final lines. Several
lyrics voicing his need to break out of a suffocating time clearly
forecast the epic, particularly "Across the Sea of Centuries,"
where he laments his imprisonment in the effete present and yearns
for the "smoke-tang of vanished
campfires" and the "feasts of bigger men."
In the lyrics Neihardt worked out
his prosody and established his techniques for sound and rhythm
to augment the sense. He derived his theories from F. W. H. Myers's
discussion of vowel and consonant sound patterns in combination
with rhythm, pause, and stress to control the tone and reinforce
the moods of poetry. He developed what he called a "sound
mosaic" that enabled him to suggest sharp, rapid action with
combinations of highpitched vowels and unvoiced consonants, plosives,
and adjusted pauses. He could also blend low-pitched vowels with
heavy, voiced plosives to sober or dignify the mood, and he had
learned from Poe and Swinburne the hazards of overdoing sound
effects. For some of the lyrics he invented a "braid" rhythm
achieved by repeated rhyme and pauses adjusted from stanza to
stanza; in one lyric he used this rhythm with repeated consonants
to create an effect of humming. In another he invented a circular
rhythm in dactyls, doubling back with internal rhyme to suggest
a sphere and thus emphasize the interrelation of all nature.
In some of the early poems he experimented with a chant form
learned from the Omahas.
In the secondary prose genres of
this early period Neihardt wrote more than thirty short stories
and two novels. The short stories allowed him to test narrative
techniques, and like the lyrics they carry seeds of his future
work. He learned the value of using a narrator to comment on
the action, emphasize points, or answer questions raised by a
listener and thus inform the reader without tedium. He experimented
to good effect with conversation to suggest events and meanings
without having to spell them out, and he became adept with frame
structures. Despite their having clear marks of the amateur,
the stories make a valid contribution to literature of the West;
they also anticipate Neihardt's later themes. The Indian Messiah
figure that Neihardt used in his epic appears in several stories,
as does the FinkCarpenter feud, and the prairie fire that makes
a ghastly setting for the end of The Song of Three Friends.
All the stories but one are set in the West and concern fur
trappers, prospectors, soldiers, or Omaha Indians. The Omaha
stories create realistic, often charming scenes of Indian life–the
daily work of squaws cooking, softening hides for garments, making
their braves comfortable; and the activities of the men–hunting
buffalo, riding to battle, telling stories around the fire, deciding
in council when to hunt or move the village or take the war path.
The affectionate tone of the stories, often gently ironic, reveals
Neihardt's sympathy for the Longhairs in times of vanished glory.
Some of the best stories, for example "The Last Thunder
Song" and "The Heart of a Woman," deal with the impossibility
of real understanding between two different cultures. The trapper
and miner stories present a rough picture of brutal wilderness
life in a heavily masculine atmosphere; women appear briefly,
usually as motives for lust, greed, or revenge.
Themes in the Indian stories include power struggles between
rival medicine men, heroism in battle, the bumpy course of true
love, and recurrently the problems of the misfit in a society
that demanded physical prowess. The trapper-prospector stories
recreate the tough life of mountain men out to make a fortune,
no holds barred. Dominant themes include the savagery of the
fur-trade competition, betrayal and revenge, the endless, agonizing
struggle against the elements and other enemies, the folly and
destructiveness of greed. A few of the stories treat of psychic
or mystic experiences that always interested Neihardt. The best
story is "The Alien," about the impossibility of transferring
the values of civilization to the savage
world; it has been compared to Balzac's "A Passion in the
Desert."
The two novels written at this
time, The Dawn Builder and Life's Lure,
are not among Neihardt's outstanding works, possibly because
each is a compilation of two or more of the short stories, and
the combinations did not prove entirely satisfactory. The best
prose of these years is The River and I, the joyous account
of his journey down the Missouri River to see the country his
heroes had traveled. Like Thoreau's account of his river journey, Neihardt's records his meditations on scenery, history,
and literature, but in a more rollicking spirit than Thoreau's.
The later epic is clearly forecast in this work; the stories
of Carpenter and Fink, Hugh Glass, and Jed Smith are all sketched
out and their epic quality exuberantly noted. But to Neihardt
the important genre of this period was the lyric poetry; short
stories and other prose were secondary, if more remunerative.
At the age of thirty Neihardt ceased to write lyrics; he considered
them too subjective for a mature poet's attention. At thirty
he should begin to widen his horizons and view the world more
objectively. Casting about for a new genre, Neihardt wrote two
verse plays, 800 Rubles, based on a Russian folk tale,
and The Death of Agrippina, derived from Suetonius and
Cassius Dio. Both plays were good poetry but not great theatre,
and he recognized that drama was not his metier. Between 1912
and 1941, his period of major accomplishment, he wrote his most
massive work in the primary genre, A Cycle of the West, and
his most widely known prose work, Black Elk Speaks, the
story of a Sioux holy man. In the same period he wrote a prose
biography, The Splendid Wayfaring, about the trapper Jedediah
Smith, two books of literary theory, and a steady output of critical
articles for his literary pages, interspersed with book reviews.
But his main concern was the epic Cycle. He considered it his
masterwork, and wrote it with an almost mystic sense of mission,
as he said, to remind men that they were finer than they thought
themselves. He believed that all people carry the potential for
heroism, and he saw in the adventurous fur traders who explored
and opened the West the courage and capacity for accomplishment
worthy of Homeric and Virgilian heroes. The West itself, with
its spacious grandeur, he considered a symbol of the unending
promise for man to gather his powers and make a better world.
When he began the Cycle, epic had long been considered
an extinct genre by literary pundits, but a poet who had written
frankly sensuous free verse in a period of pink and gray poetry
was not likely to be deflected from an epic purpose.
In preparation for the writing Neihardt had done exhausting research
in western documents, biographies, and histories. He hunted out
records and diaries–Jed Smith's, for example, and the Harrison
Rogers journals, among others. He worked in state historical
society collections in several western states and in university
libraries. He had visited most of the locales of the epic and
studied both the contour of the settings and the details of vegetation.
He interviewed Indians, old Indian fighters and survivors of
the Indian wars, including General Godfrey and Major Lemly, who
had witnessed the death of Crazy Horse. Among his major sources
were H.M. Chittenden's The American Fur Trade of the Far West,
Harrison Clifford Dale's The Ashley-Henry Explorations,
Jacob P. Dunn's Massacres of the Mountains: History of the Indian
Wars of the Far West: 1815–1875, and The Life and
Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, edited by T. D. Bonner.
He also read accounts of western travels by Rufus Sage and George
Frederick Ruxton, and later historians Edward Hyde, Grace Hebard,
and others.
The writing of the Cycle occupied Neihardt for twenty-eight
years, with interruptions for periods of literary editing and
lecturing, or for prose works importuned by his publisher. He
dated his manuscripts, noting interruptions, sometimes with astringent
comments. He worked only in the morning, and began by rereading
finished lines in deep concentration to work himself into the
mood, then waited for his "Otherness" to operate. Three
lines were a respectable day's work, but sometimes if the power
persisted he could produce eight or ten; his record was seventeen.
For his meter he developed a basic iambic pentameter line varied
with dactyls, anapests, and spondees, and manipulated the caesura
to avoid monotony, speed or retard the pace, and build special
effects in the rhythm. He called this meter rhymed blank verse
and protested its being labeled heroic couplet, for although
he used two-line rhyme, the meaning ran over the ends of lines,
sometimes from one section to another. He chose pentameter instead
of the standard epic hexameter because pentameter was sonorous
and dignified enough for epic and fitted more gracefully into
English cadences.
Neihardt's epic theory derived from Jane Harrison and H. M. Chadwick,
who defined an epic period as a time when a civilization, cut
from its roots, had to strike out anew. Neihardt's democratic
heroes, although unorthodox by classical standards, suited his
purpose to demonstrate that all people carry the seeds of heroism
and can create a finer world by their own vision and labor, without
gods and goddesses to interfere. The Cycle, set entirely
in the West and based on real men and events, followed a timespace
progression from the departure of the first hundred Ashley-Henry
men up the Missouri River in 1822 to engage in the fur trade,
through the exploration of the country to and beyond Salt Lake,
over the South Pass to the Pacific, and through the Indian wars
fought to advance the white man's control of the West. The Cycle
ends with the Battle of Wounded Knee in
1890, which marked the end of organized Indian resistance.
Neihardt also was building a value
scale beginning at the lowest level of physical courage in The
Song of Three Friends, the opening Song about the
murder of Bill Carpenter by Mike Fink over an Indian girl. The
Song develops the theme that physical courage, however
indispensable, cannot solve problems that demand moral courage.
The Song of Hugh Glass, the second in the cycle, recounts
Glass's heroic hundred-mile crawl across desert country after
being wounded by a grizzly and deserted by two companions detailed
to await his death and bury him. Hugh's overcoming of his rage
at betrayal raises the value level to magnanimity as he discovers
the "miracle of being loved at all" and the privilege of
"loving to the end" that enables him to forgive. The
Song of Jed Smith lifts the level to the power of spirit
operating in the individual life. Neihardt used a frame structure
in The Song of Jed Smith to recreate the character and
exploits of Smith through the reminiscences of three of his former
comrades as they sit around a campfire some years after Jed's
death. Two of the characters are based on real men; the third,
the young Squire, is fictitious, to add a point of view. The
story that emerges follows Smith's actual path across unknown
country, the discovery of Salt Lake, the crossing of South Pass,
the Indian attacks en route–the memorable events that Neihardt
had meticulously researched. The theme grows through the portrayal
of Bible-reading Jed, Neihardt's Cosmic Man, secure in the universe
because he recognizes the integration of man, nature, and spirit.
Through him and his faith the others have moments of the same
sense of mystic affinity, and they see Jed bring the power of
faith to the problems of the fur trader's gruelling life. The
three men suggest the impact of such a man on his fellows. In
a sense, he is like the artist, whose obligation is to illuminate
major truths.
The last two Songs, set in the period between the Civil
War and the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, concern the final
struggle of Indians and white men for the western country and
the inevitable defeat of the Indians. The Song of the Indian
Wars paints colorful pictures of the major battles, Indians
in council over policy, white men and Indians suffering or exulting
over the turn of events, the color, sound, and fury of war. The
reader is led to empathize with men on both sides, fighting heroically
for the same ends–glory, security, and one's own space.
The essential value Neihardt stresses is self-sacrifice for the
good of all–the Virgilian social ideal. In this work it
is given full respect, tinged with rueful irony that such great
sacrifices on both sides should seem necessary. The vigor of
the conflict inherent in western history flashes and booms in
the action, with undertone stress on the labor and suffering
inescapable on frontiers.
The Song of the Messiah, final section of the Cycle,
was originally intended to be the last section of the Wars,
but as Neihardt researched the story, he saw that it was
important enough for a separate Song. It concerns the
Messiah movement of the 1880s, when the Piute Wovoka was believed
by the Indians to be Christ, rejected by white men and returning
to restore the Indians to their former state. Again Neihardt
used three voices to give credibility to the Wovoka figure. The
three men are based on actual Indians sent by the Sioux to investigate
the rumors of a Savior for Indians. The reports of all three
agreed about the vision of Wovoka, who described a world where
all living things were illuminated from within and a many
colored herb healed and united
all creatures. Deceived by their need for some kind of hope,
the Indians allowed the vision to lead them into war, and they
met their final defeat at Wounded Knee. Neihardt described this
epic as picturing the whole human race on the cross; its theme
is the Christian ethic at the highest value level of universal
love and understanding. He dramatized it in the last scene when
Sitanka (Big Foot) struggles to say "Brother" to the white
soldier clubbing him with a gun butt.
Neihardt intended his epic to revive a hopeful vigor in Americans
by reminding them of who they were and what limitless possibilities
lay open to descendants of men and women who had set up a new
kind of freedom across a nation and civilized a wilderness by
their own hard labor. As a preenvironmentalist he had harsh words
for the stupidity of white men who did not try to learn from
Indians how to develop the land without ruining it. His descriptions
do justice to the spectacular scenery–its shining mountains,
lordly forests, life-giving streams, and tumbling rivers. Much
of the metaphor infuses nature with mystic forces in the procreative
cycles of nature, the continuous miracle, and the wonder of moments
of expanded awareness like his own "Otherness." He recreates
the outdoors not just as backdrop but as participant in the action
for a nation of city dwellers who need to rethink their place
in nature.
Although the Cycle absorbed Neihardt's most devoted attention,
he interrupted it for secondary prose genres–two biographies,
two books of literary criticism, and an impressive body of critical
writing in his literary pages. The first biography, The Splendid
Wayfaring (1920), a life of Jed Smith, he wrote for the school
trade at his publisher's request; he needed money, and realized
also that the research would enhance his preparation for the
Song about Smith, who was at the time an undiscovered
hero. Reviewers acclaimed the book as a prose epic, and Dale
Morgan, author of the definitive biography of Jed Smith, praised
it for alerting historians to a forgotten hero. The second biography,
Black Elk Speaks (1932) about a Sioux holy man, is Neihardt's
most widely acclaimed book. He met Black Elk in 1930 on his first
visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation to gather material for The
Song of the Messiah. Black Elk surprised him at their first
meeting by seeming to expect him; he said Neihardt had been "sent"
to hear sacred matters of the Sioux and give them to the world.
He adopted Neihardt as his "spiritual son" and to him described
the power vision he had been given to help his people. For a
holy man to disclose his power vision to a white man was unusual
if not unique, and Neihardt accepted the obligation to give it
to the world. He considered Black Elk the strongest single influence
on his life. The book received little critical attention when
it first appeared, but Jung thought it an important contribution,
and by the sixties it had been published in more than twelve
languages. In the preface to the 1979 edition, Vine Deloria pronounced
it a religious classic that may become the central core of a
new theological canon.
All of Neihardt's critical writing was produced in this period.
His critical theories had been influenced, aside from Taine,
by F. W. H. Myers and Irving Babbitt, particularly the latter's
theory of the "ethical integrating imagination." To an extent
he was affected by Whitman and Shelley, and markedly by George
Edward Woodberry's Dionysian concept of poetic madness that expressed
deep truths of the "race mind," or collective consciousness.
Neihardt's views ran counter to the fashionable New Criticism;
he thought it wrongheaded and self-serving, and the literature
he considered largely ugly and dispiriting. In his philosophy
the function of literature was to show people how to "live
together decently on this planet," and it should not present
life as worthless or inconsequential. His first statement of
literary theory was the Laureate Address, delivered at
his formal notification of appointment as Poet Laureate of Nebraska.
He described poetry as the highest form of human expression,
detailed his poetic techniques, and defended his use of rhyme
in the epic. The second volume of theory, Poetic Values: Their
Reality and Our Need of Them, was composed of the two lectures
delivered at the University of Nebraska in 1925 after he was
appointed to a Chair of Poetry. They are rhetorical lectures,
Neihardt's defense of poetry in a period preoccupied with science
and materialism. He had read Boodin, Korzybsky, Eddington, and
Planck on the need for evidence beyond that of the physical senses
to arrive at truth, and his argument also rested on theories
of F. W. H. Myers, Ouspensky, and Coomaraswamy that the states
of mind to trust were the states of expanded consciousness–theories
today respected by scientists and psychologists.
His major theme
was that poetry, by widening vision and touching the deep strains
of universal human experience, draws mankind together in understanding
and kindness. He urged the value not of poetry itself, but of
the poetic experience, the state of heightened perception in
which poetry is composed by the poet and appreciated by the reader.
His literary pages reveal his respect for sincere work intended
to deepen the reader's understanding, but he could be caustic
about irresponsibility in literature, as well as "showoffmanship"
in criticism. His columns were commended by his editors, and one grateful reader praised them for "luminous
sanity."
In his last period, 1942–1973,
Neihardt wrote no poetry, and devoted his main efforts to teaching,
lecture-recitals, and television appearances. His last novel,
When the Tree Flowered, was written in this period, as
were the two volumes of autobiography: All Is But a Beginning,
and the incomplete Patterns and Coincidences. The
novel, Neihardt's best prose work, was drawn from materials gathered at
Pine Ridge in the forties from Eagle Elk and other Indians. It
draws delightful pictures of Sioux life, weaves in charming Indian
folk tales and legends, and describes an enlightened society
wherein generosity was the way to status, young men chosen to
hunt for the poor were honored, and lying after smoking the peace
pipe was unthinkable. The gently humorous wisdom that pervades
the old culture comes warmly to life. The two volumes of autobiography
that marked the end of Neihardt's writing cover only his childhood
and youth, but they convey the unquenchable spirit and appreciation
of life that enliven all his work.
Except for the early burst of enthusiasm over Neihardt's lyrics,
his writings have received little attention from major critics,
partly because of his remoteness from literary centers. Western
writers who stay in the West have much the same experience, and
Neihardt's unfortunate quarrel with Harriet Monroe in 1913 alienated
the Chicago group, the strongest critical force west of New York.
In 1927 William Rose Benét in the New York Times called
Neihardt a "Homer of the West," and Frank Luther Mott in
The Midland championed him for shedding much of the traditional
epic machinery to use real men in ordinary experience. But epic
in our time has not been a popular genre; it fares badly in an
era when all poetry is judged by standards appropriate to the
short lyric, and literature is dominated by the disaffected man,
the nonhero, and the sickness of society. Western writing in
general suffers when most literature is urban and centered on
men trapped in technology.
Still, Neihardt always had an audience, even when his books were
out of print, and scholarly articles appeared now and then. Among
them were Nelson Adkins's assessment of The Song of Three
Friends as a genuine epic with a commendable fusion of facts
and interpretation. Roger Sergel predicted that Hugh Glass
would find a place in world literature, and Mott praised
Neihardt's innovation in writing an epic about ordinary men and
producing a workable modern epic prosody. In recent years when
serious attention has been given to western writing, Neihardt's
books have reappeared in print, and articles and dissertations
are multiplying.
Three biographies of Neihardt have been published, the first
in 1920 by Neihardt's close friend Julius T. House, a professor
of classics. The book is valuable for the details it presents
of Neihardt's life, thoughts, and working methods; many of the
documents and letters House used were later destroyed in a moving-van
accident. Unfortunately the sources are not documented and the
critical view is more rhapsodic than judicious, but the wealth
of detail and House's perceptions are extremely valuable, drawn
as they were from hours of companionable discussion. A second
biography by Blair Whitney, published in the Twayne series, fulfills
the writer's intention to offer a first step in reappraisal of
Neihardt's work. The book contains a few factual errors, but
the appraisal of Neihardt's writings is competent and discerning.
The third biography, by Lucile Aly, based on discussions and
interviews with Neihardt and his family, as well as documents
and letters, is a rhetorical study of his writings, his intentions,
and his methods.
Doctoral dissertations on Neihardt began to appear in the late
fifties, with George Paul Grant's study of the development of
Neihardt's prosody; the appendix includes the text of The
Divine Enchantment and the unpublished "Preface to Hugh
Glass."Dian de Pisa makes a contribution to the understanding
of language and symbol in Black Elk Speaks, and Linda
DeLowry's analysis of themes and structures in Neihardt's works
is specially astute on the short stories. The best of the dissertations
completed is Billie
Wahlstrom's study of the history and poetry in A Cycle of
the West.
Many of the recent scholarly articles
center on Black Elk Speaks. Outstanding among them are
Sally McCluskey's, based on interviews with Neihardt, that deals
with the confusion of some critics about the actual authorship,
and Paul Olson's discussion of the work as epic and ritual aimed
at revising history. Robert F. Sayre explains the vision as social
and tribal; Lynne O'Brien sees Black Elk as a tragic hero unable
to fulfill the mission assigned to him in his vision because
of the deteriorated circumstances.
Articles about the Cycle take several directions in questioning
whether it qualifies as an or the American epic.
John T. Flanagan thought it a worthy effort that presents heroes
of not quite classical stature, but describes impressively the
grandeur of the western setting. Edgeley Todd, measuring by Frank
Norris's definition of a western epic, thought it a worthy attempt
but not a complete success. Kenneth Rothwell called it an Astoriad,
uneven in style and insufficiently unified in plot with its multiple
heroes, but a step on the way to an American epic. David C. Young
traced classical parallels to Homer in the treatment of Indians.
The most arbitrary criticism came from Lucy Lockwood Hazard for
Neihardt's refusal to take sides in his description of battles
in the Indian wars, which Young commended as notable frankness
and fairness to his subject. Hazard objected further to Neihardt's
style, in particular to the use of Homeric metaphor, and astonishingly
to the use of frontier material "merely to furnish a problem
of the individual soul." Paul Olsen summarized the Cycle as
an attempt at epic that does not quite come off. Two articles
by Lucile Aly considered first Neihardt's preparation for and
qualifications as an epic poet, as well as his degree of success,
and second, the adjustment of facts for the epic purpose; she
also argued that whether or not the Cycle endures as an
American epic will be decided by time, not by contemporary critics.
Articles on the Hugh Glass Song frequently compare Neihardt's
handling of the story with Frederick Manfred's in Lord Grizzly. Anthony
Arthur, clearly preferring Manfred's version, criticized Neihardt
for putting the story into poetic form and presenting the environment
as Hugh's enemy, not as a means of attainment. Actually, such
criticism may arise from confusion of the intent and method of
epic and of novel.
The unity of all Neihardt's writing was noted in W. E. Black's
analysis of The Divine Enchantment, where the themes of
the lyrics, Black Elk's vision, and the story of the Messiah
are all forecast. The state of expanded awareness of Devanaguy's
vision when the "meek souls" see that "all is one"
recur in Black Elk's vision and in The Song of the Messiah.
Helen Stauffer's article on The River and I notes
the same sense of unity and the forecasting of later works.
In his lifetime Neihardt received numerous honors, including
three honorary doctoral degrees, an American Poetry Society award,
and membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Some evidence suggests that he should have received the Pulitzer
Prize in 1927. If he had received it he might have been more
widely known, but he was not distressed at the relative neglect
of his work; he thought time might be on his side.
LUCILE ALY, University of Oregon
Selected Bibliography Primary Sources (in chronological order)
The Divine Enchantment. New York: James T. White, 1900.
A Bundle of Myrrh. New York: The Outing Publishing Company, 1907.
The Lonesome Trail. New York: John Lane, 1907.
Man-Song. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1909.
The River and I. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1910.
The Stranger at the Gate. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912.
The Song of Hugh Glass. New York: Macmillan, 1915.
The Song of Three Friends. New York: Macmillan, 1919.
The Splendid Wayfaring. New York: Macmillan, 1920.
Laureate Address of John G. Neihardt. Chicago: The Bookfellows, 1921.
The Song of the Indian Wars. New York: Macmillan, 1925.
Poetic Values: Their Reality and Our Need of Them. New York: Macmillan, 1925.
lndian Tales and Others. New York: Macmillan, 1926.
The Quest. New York: Macmillan, 1928.
Black Elk Speaks. New York: William Morrow, 1932.
The Song of the Messiah. New York: Macmillan, 1935.
The Song of Jed Smith. New York: Macmillan, 1941.
A Cycle of the West. New York: Macmillan, 1949.
When the Tree Flowered. New York: Macmillan, 1952.
All Is But a Beginning. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972.
Patterns and Coincidences. Columbia & London: University of Missouri Press, 1978.Secondary Sources
Adkins, Nelson F. "A Study of John G. Neihardt's A Song of Three Friends." American Speech 4 (April 1928): 276–290.
Aly, Lucile F. "John G. Neihardt as Speaker and Reader." Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1959.
. John G. Neihardt: A Critical Biography. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1959.
Arthur, Anthony. "Manfred, Neihardt, and Hugh Glass." In Where the West Begins, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe and William Geyer, pp. 99–109. Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Center for Western Studies Press, 1978.
Black, William E. [William Patterson-Black] "Ethic and Metaphysic: A Study of John G. Neihardt." Western American Literature 2 (Fall 1967): 205–212.
Bloodworth, William. "Neihardt, Momaday, and the Art of Indian Autobiography." In Where the West Begins, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe and William Geyer, pp. 152–160. Sioux Falls, S.D.: Center for Western Studies Press, 1978.
DeLowry, Linda. "Dynamic Patterns: A Thematic Study of the Works of John G. Neihardt." Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1975.
Deloria, Vine. Introduction to Black Elk Speaks. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.
Flanagan, John T. "John G. Neihardt, Chronicler of the West." Arizona Quarterly 21 (Spring 1965): 2–20.
Grant, George Paul. "The Poetic Development of John G. Neihardt." Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1957.
Hazard, Lucy Lockwood. The Frontier in American Literature. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1941.
House, Julius T. John G. Neihardt, Man and Poet. Wayne, Nebraska: F. H. Jones and Son, 1920.
McCluskey, Sally. "Black Elk Speaks and So Does John Neihardt." Western American Literature 6 (Winter 1972): 231–242.
Mott, Frank Luther. "John G. Neihardt and His Work." The Midland 8 (November 1922): 315–324.
Olson, Paul. "The Epic and Great Plains Literature: Rølvaag, Cather and Neihardt." Prairie Schooner 55 (Spring/Summer 1981).
Rothwell, Kenneth. "In Search of a Western Epic: Neihardt, Sandburg, and Jaffe as Regionalists and Astoriads." Kansas Quarterly 2 (Spring 1970): 53–63.
Sayre, Robert F. "Vision and Experience in Black Elk Speaks."College English 32 (February 1971): 509–535.
Stauffer, Helen. "Neihardt's Journey on the Missouri: The Beginning of an Epic." Paper presented at the Western Literature Association, October 1981.
Todd, Edgeley W. "The Frontier Epic: Frank Norris and John G. Neihardt." Western Humanities Review 13 (Winter 1959): 40–45.
Wahlstrom, Billie Joyce. "TransformingFact: The Poetics of History in John G. Neihardt's Cycle of the West." Ph.D. diss.,University of Michigan, 1975.
Whitney, Blair. John G. Neihardt. Boston: Twayne, 1976.
Young, David. "Crazy Horse on the Trojan Plain: A Comment on the Classicism of John G. Neihardt." Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 5 (Fall 1982): 45–53.
© Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.