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Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets

John G. Neihardt

by Marie J. K. Brenner

Other literary forms

The range of John G. Neihardt (NI-hahrt) is extensive. During a seventy-five-year literary career, he wrote at least 3,027 poems, plays, novels, stories, essays, articles, reviews, and histories, as well as a two-volume autobiography. Most of Neihardt’s prose fiction was written before 1912. His short stories about fur trappers and Native Americans gathered in The Lonesome Trail (1907) and 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. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1943 and served as chancellor for the Academy of American Poets from 1951 to 1967.

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 consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. 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 John Greenleaf Neihardt on 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 that 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: Youth Remembered, 1881-1901 (1972).

Analysis

With his pockets filled with poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, pulling weeds for a living, John G. Niehardt composed his first major work. The Divine Enchantment is a long narrative poem inspired by his readings in Hindu mysticism. It received some favorable reviews, but most of the five hundred copies of the first and only edition ended in his stove as needed fuel. Niehardt later gave these same ideas theoretical expression in Poetic Values (1925). Throughout his life, he sustained a mystical view that all parts of life are an interconnected expression of the life force, and his associations with the Sioux would reveal new facets of this harmonious unity.

A Bundle of Myrrh

Neihardt published thirty-one love lyrics in his first successful book of poetry, A Bundle of Myrrh. In his 1965 prefatory note, he indicated that this volume represented the beginning of a spiritually progressive sequence with its “experiences of groping youth.” The reviewers were enthusiastic, and even though this is apprentice work, there are indications of the powers of the future poet. “Recognition” is the outpouring of a lover who sees lovers of the past in himself and his beloved:

O I have found

At last the one I lost so long ago

In Thessaly.

Here the poet claims a link to the great poets of antiquity. In many of his works, Neihardt insists on the unity of all time and human experience. With Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, he celebrated a transcendent organic tradition and, like T. S. Eliot, felt that a writer should not write only with his own times in mind, but rather in the light of the whole tradition of literature from Homer forward.

“Let Me Live Out My Years,” the most popular poem in this volume, exemplifies the heroic resolve of Tennyson’s Ulysses:

Let me live out my years in heat of blood!

Let me die drunken with the dreamer’s wine!

Let me not see this soul-house built of mud

Go toppling to the dust—a vacant shrine!

Here is a memorable expression of Neihardt’s love of adventure, of living life on an epic scale, and of not settling for a faded or mechanical life: “Give me high noon,” the poet shouts, displaying the fire and idealism of adolescence.

Man Song

Neihardt’s 1909 volume Man Song contains twenty-seven lyrics that examine various aspects of manhood, including the contemplative life and struggles with the dehumanizing world of labor (“Lonesome in Town” and “Song of the Turbine Wheel”). “A Vision of Woman” is a mature love song, a long meditation in blank verse, more conversational and more philosophical than the earlier love lyrics.

The Stranger at the Gate

After expressing youthful rapture and then the joys of matrimony in his two previous collections of lyrics, Neihardt, in The Stranger at the Gate (1912), celebrates in twenty-one lyrics the mystery of new life at the birth of his first child. Some reviewers felt the poems were unabashedly sentimental, while others found their spiritual insights worthy of careful study.

The long poem The Poet’s Town, included in The Stranger at the Gate, explores the poet’s relationship to society and community, which for Neihardt at this time was the provincial midwestern town of Bancroft, Nebraska. He decries the poet’s poor reception by the greedy philistines in the town:

None of your dream-stuffs, Fellow,

Looter of Samarkand!

Gold is heavy and yellow,

And value is weighed in the hand!

He also explores other themes: an acceptance of the genteel poverty of a poet, the heroic ideals found in Greece and Rome, nature’s great organic power, the degradation and futility of the business ethic, and the development of a cosmic consciousness.

After this apprenticeship in lyric poetry, as well as a brief attempt at dramatic verse, Neihardt was a mature poet with developed views and a clear goal. He then set out to spend his next thirty years writing his epic cycle of songs on the West.

A Cycle of the West

Neihardt’s extended national epic celebrates important figures of the American fur trade and of the American Indian wars. It consists of five songs composed over twenty-nine years and totaling more than sixteen thousand lines. The five songs merge in a unified work around a central theme: the conflict over the Missouri River Valley from 1822 to the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee, which marks the end of Sioux resistance.

Neihardt chose the heroic couplet to help underscore his topic’s universal significance. He also modeled his poetry after other heroic epics, noting in The River and I that the story of the American fur traders had such literary potential, it made the Trojan War look like a Punch and Judy show.

The Song of Three Friends, though composed second, begins the cycle with Will Carpenter, Mike Fink, and Frank Talbeau starting up the Missouri River in 1822 with a beaver-trapping expedition. These comrades end up destroying one another’s potential over what starts as a rivalry for a chief’s half-breed daughter. The descriptive passages are powerful because, as Neihardt notes in his 1948 introduction, “If I write of hot-winds and grasshoppers, of prairie fires and blizzards, . . . of brooding heat and thunderstorms in vast lands, I knew them early.”

The second book of the cycle is The Song of Hugh Glass, based on the historical trek of an old trapper who survives because he knows the ways of the wilderness. Left to die by the others after being mauled by a grizzly, Glass is filled with a desire for revenge. He crawls for miles, endures starvation, thirst, near drowning, and freezing to track his betrayers. However, instead of a brutal revenge, he chooses to nobly forgive. Much like the Ancient Mariner, Glass is brought back to his better self by the vision of a ghostly brother:

Stripped of his clothes, Hugh let his body drink

At every thirsting pore. Through trunk and limb

The elemental blessing solaced him

The Song of Jed Smith, though last to be completed, presents the third song of the cycle. This story is told by three first-person narrators, all trapper friends of Smith. Also, while the first two songs center on the larger-than-life, but brutish, figures of Mike Fink and Hugh Glass, Jed Smith represents a more perfect flowering of the frontiersman. He is an awe-inspiring hero, a frontier saint, finding water in the desert, trail-blazing the unknown.

The Song of the Indian Wars begins in 1865 with the period of migration; it focuses on the last great contest for the bison lands between the Plains Indians and the superior technology of the invading white race. The Sioux cannot understand the white people’s lust for land and gold, for their faith assumes a sacred unity with the earth and its resources.

Because Neihardt intended his cycle to show a progress in spirit, in this song he turns from the mere indomitable physical prowess celebrated in the earlier songs to the spiritual triumph of the Sioux, even in the midst of their defeat. After his victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse is hounded into starvation and surrender. The last section of this song, “The Death of Crazy Horse,” was Neihardt’s most popular work and was most often requested at his recitations. Here the landscape and animals reflect the agony of the tragic hero as Crazy Horse surrenders for the sake of his people. He

loosed the bonnet from his head

And cast it down. “I come for peace,” he said;

“Now let my people eat.” And that was all.

The last moments of the brave young man are dignified and noble, his language simple and straightforward.

The Song of the Messiah, the fifth and last song of the cycle, records the conquered people, whose time for heroic deeds is over. The beavers, the buffalo, and the mighty hunters are gone; all that remains of these native people is their spirit. Although the whites appear to have mastered the continent, the poet indicates that he still needs to attend to his spiritual self if he is to be whole.

The reduced Sioux people turn to the Ghost Dance religion, which offers nonviolence and a mystical link to ancestors, but this desire for rebirth is doomed; the song ends with the massacre at Wounded Knee. As the leader Sitanka dies, he has a vision of the soldier who smashes his skull:

. . . And he knew

The shining face, unutterably dear!

All tenderness, it hovered, bending near,

. . . . . . . . . . . .  . .

. . . He strove to rise in vain,

To cry “My brother!”

      And the shattered brain

Went out.

Although the white solders seem to have won, they have not yet understood the harmony of the flowering tree or the sacred hoop’s mystery of universal brotherhood and transcendental unity.

Bibliography

1 

Aly, Lucile F. John G. Neihardt: A Critical Biography. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1977. The most complete biography of Neihardt, factual and well documented, although it lacks an index.

2 

Deloria, Vine, Jr., ed. A Sender of Words: Essays in Memory of John G. Neihardt. 1984. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. A collection of essays honoring Neihardt, contributed by Dee Brown (author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 1970), as well as by editors, historians, professors, anthropologists, singers, actors, political commentators, and theologians. The range of contributors and their topics testifies to the universal appeal and the expansive application of Neihardt’s work.

3 

Lee, Fred L. John G. Neihardt: The Man and His Western Writings. Kansas City, Mo.: Trail Guide Press, 1974. A friend’s brief account of Neihardt’s life; Lee, an expert on writings about the American West, also examines Neihardt’s work in the light of that tradition.

4 

Lind, L. R. “The Great American Epic.” Classical and Modern Literature 17, no. 1 (Fall, 1996): 7. Examines North and South American long poems that convey traditional beliefs and customs fundamental to specific American cultures; Neihardt’s A Cycle of the West is examined among other twentieth century North and South American poets.

5 

Neihardt, Hilda Martinsen. The Broidered Garment: The Love Story of Mona Martinsen and John G. Neihardt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Neihardt’s daughter writes of the romance between her parents and of their subsequent marriage. Her mother was a sculptor living in Paris when she read a volume of Neihardt’s poetry and wrote to him.

6 

Richards, John Thomas. Rawhide Laureate: John G. Neihardt. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983. An annotated bibliography of the works of Neihardt. Also includes a complete listing of Neihardt’s articles, essays, reviews, and literary criticism, as well as recordings and films of the poet, books and dissertations on his life and work, and public and private collections of Neihardtania.

7 

_______. A Voice Against the Wind: John G. Neihardt as Critic and Reviewer. Oregon, Wis.: New Frontiers Foundation, 1986. Covers Neihardt’s career as a professional critic, reviewer, and editor; outlines his views on Western literary tradition and examines his critical philosophy, which ultimately became the graduate course he taught at the University of Missouri.

8 

Whitney, Blair. John G. Neihardt. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976. Contains biographical and critical material, especially focusing on the rugged, frontier aspects of both the man and his work.

Citation Types

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Format
MLA 9th
Brenner, Marie J. K. "John G. Neihardt." Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets, edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSPAM_12520160000700.
APA 7th
Brenner, M. J. (2011). John G. Neihardt. In R. M. Reisman (Ed.), Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Brenner, Marie J. K. "John G. Neihardt." Edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman. Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.