John G. Neihardt is most widely known for his book about a Sioux holy man, Black Elk Speaks (1932), but he considered himself a poet and designated as his masterwork the five-part epic, A Cycle of the West, begun in 1913 and completed in 1941. In his...

Throughout his seventy-five-year career as a writer, John G. Neihardt's aspiration was to be the epic poet of the American West; he is remembered chiefly, however, for his work as an editor. His ambition was to fulfill what he became convinced at an...

John Neihardt's reputation rests on five historical epics begun in 1912, completed in 1941, and collected in the 656-page volume, A Cycle of the West (1949). The heroes are the white trappers who opened the Rocky Mountains to fur trading, the explorers...

[Neihardt's] youthful lyrics show his attentiveness to poetic forms; testing meters and rhyme schemes, he experimented with free verse and chant forms of the Omahas, as well as rhythm and sound combinations. By the end of his lyric period he had rejected the influence of Whitman, abandoned free verse, and modified the super-sonics of Poe and Swinburne that affected him temporarily. In his matured poetic technique he shows most clearly the influence of F.W.H. Myers' theory that rhythm and sound...

The Splendid Wayfaring, as the subtitle informs us, is "the story of the exploits and adventures of Jedediah Smith and his comrades, the Ashley-Henry men, discoverers and explorers of the great central route from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean." Mr. Neihardt lists his sources, and a student familiar with the authorities realizes how accurately and intelligently he has followed them throughout his narrative; how he has clarified and vivified them by the careful selection and animated e...

[The] heroic celebration of the conquest and settlement of the Trans-Mississippi West has remained a viable theme, ripe for the attention of America's would-be epicists. Such a narrative poem, when and if it were successfully composed, and then widely accepted by an American audience, might be called an "Astoriad." As Astoriad, it would be a verse sequel to Washington Irving's Astoria …, a history of John Jacob Astor's opening up of the West to the fur trade, his es...