Ogden Nash - Salem Press

Critical Survey of Poetry Neihardt, John G.
Indian Tales and Others (1926) are often excellent. His
early novels are less successful, but Black Elk Speaks
(1932) and his last novel, When the Tree Flowered
(1951), are considered masterpieces of the literature on
Native Americans and have been translated into many
languages.
In addition, Neihardt excelled in nonfiction: The
River and I (1910) chronicles his outdoor adventure
down the Missouri River, The Splendid Wayfaring (1920)
provides a history of fur expeditions, and Poetic Values
(1925) outlines Neihardt’s philosophy of poetry developed
during an editorial career of almost forty years.
Achievements
For many, John G. Neihardt is the premier Western
poet; he is also a primary midwestern literary critic and
authority on the Plains Indians. In 1917, he received his
first honorary doctorate from the University of Nebraska,
and his epics were subsequently printed in school
editions to acquaint Nebraska’s students with their heritage.
In 1921, he was celebrated as the poet laureate of
Nebraska; he was awarded the Gold Scroll Medal of
Honor in 1935 and the American Writers Award for Poetry
in 1936.
International recognition came in 1959 in Lindau,
Germany, when Neihardt was made a fellow of the International
Institute of Arts and Letters. He was honored
as the Plains State poet laureate in 1968, and at the time
of his death, there was a bill before Congress to appoint
him poet laureate of the United States. Although he received
all these honors graciously, his goal was to do for
the prairies what Homer had done for Ilium.
Biography
John Gneisenau Neihardt was born January 8, 1881,
in a two-room rented farmhouse near Sharpsburg, Illinois.
Later, his family moved into a one-room sod house
in Kansas. Neihardt grew up on the edge of the frontier,
gathering buffalo chips for fuel, as the great herds had
vanished only a few years earlier.
Two experiences deeply impressed the young Neihardt:
the sight of the Missouri River in flood, and a
fever-induced, mystical dream in which he vividly experienced
flight. These two powerful experiences turned
him toward poetry. He continued to gather raw materials
from his closeness to nature’s beauty and power and
through his lifelong contact with Plains Indians, fur trappers,
migrant workers, and cowboys.
Neihardt went directly from elementary school to
Nebraska Normal School. Then after harvesting beets,
pulling weeds, and teaching in a Nebraska country school,
he set out on a hobo journey to Kansas City, Missouri,
all the while revising his first book of poems, The Divine
Enchantment.
Next Neihardt worked as an editor for the Omaha
Daily News and began to establish a fellowship with the
Omaha Indians, whose tribal chant rhythms are directly
reflected in The Wind God’s Wooing. His collected lyric
poems in A Bundle of Myrrh became an immediate success
and brought him an offer to finance a solo adventure
down the Missouri River in a homemade boat, documented
in The River and I. Also, this volume of poetry
reached New Yorker Mona Martinson, who was studying
sculpture in Paris, and after a brief courtship by mail,
she and Neihardt were married in Oklahoma.
In 1910, Neihardt joined the literary staff of The New
York Times, and he subsequently served as editor for the
Minneapolis Journal, The Kansas City Journal, and The
Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. During his editorial career,
he continued to write, producing several short stories,
four verse plays, and two novels, The Dawn Builder
(1911) and Life’s Lure (1914). In 1932, at thirty-one,
with his reputation secure, Neihardt began work on his
epic, A Cycle of the West. Twenty-nine years later, he
completed this heroic cycle on the adventures of the
American fur trade.
Neihardt’s best friend among the Sioux was Black
Elk, the tribe’s last surviving priest. The poet became the
shaman’s spiritual son and absorbed the Lakota mysticism
which became part of Neihardt’s most popular
prose work, Black Elk Speaks.
In 1942, Neihardt worked in Chicago slums with
street gangs while waiting for a vacancy in the Bureau of
Indian Affairs. In 1948, he purchased Skyrim Farm in
Missouri and became poet in residence at the University
of Missouri, Columbia, teaching literary criticism and a
class called Epic America. When he died at ninety-two,
he was in the process of writing Patterns and Coincidences
(1978), a second volume to his autobiography,
All Is but a Beginning (1972).
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