Mr. Neihardt has always taken himself and his mission as a poet seriously, and worked with high ambition and a sense of responsibility. His Collected Poems represents a life-work loyally carried on against all the crushing distractions—domestic, worldly, financial—which impede and often conquer so many a fine vocation. His most important offering, filling nearly four hundred of these over six hundred pages, is a series of Epics of the West, in which he has given a poetic setting, in rhymed couplets, to dramatic and characteristic episodes of our pioneer history. Thus he has fulfilled, to an exceptional degree, the command of his muse; and, in doing so, he has endeavored patriotically to monumentalize certain fast-fading figures, to give heroic form to our conquerors of the wilderness. (pp. 99-100)

The more personal part of Mr. Neihardt's poetry was the work of his youth—the lyrics comprised in...