His completed cycle seems like a throwback when it is compared with modernist poetry published within the same decade, works such as T.S. Eliot's
Four Quartets (1936-1942) and Wallace Stevens's
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942).
Neihardt was born on 8 January 1881 near Sharpsburg, Illinois, to indigent parents descended from Pennsylvania German and Irish stock. Although uneducated, his father, Nicholas Neihardt, passed on his love of reading everything from Darwin to modern poets; the son was named John Greenleaf after Whittier. To emphasize his German roots John later adopted the middle name Gneisenau, after the Prussian field marshall August Graf Neithardt von Gneisenau (1760-1831), who helped defeat Napoleon at Waterloo. Within a decade, Neihardt's father abandoned the family. Used to adversity, his mother, Alice Culler Neihardt (who had decorated log-cabin homes with curtains made of newspapers and a carpet cut from a wagon cover, then decorated with walnut-stain patterns), moved the family to frontier country in Wayne, Nebraska. Suffering a fever during 1892, Neihardt received a vocation to write poetry in a shaman-style dream where he found himself flying through space. Shortly afterward, his poem "Ambition" appeared in the Bloomington Eye.
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