[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...

The nature of our concept of reality determines the nature of our actions because every ethical act is performed within a metaphysical framework. In his writings, John G. Neihardt has investigated this relation of attitude to action, of metaphysics to ethics; and especially two of his lengthy poems The Divine Enchantment, a poem of Hindu mysticism, and The Song of the Messiah, a poetic treatment of the Sioux ghost-dance religion, demonstrate his statement that "our conception of values, by which we l...

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 cou...

I have certain quarrels on minor points [in The Song of the Indian Wars]: the use of 'twas, 'twere, alas, aye, etc., for which this poet has been sorrowfully reproached before; the lack of feminine endings which, rhymed, would have given variety and animation; the very rare use of the trochee for the iamb in search for musical relief and emphasis; the lack of an occasional illegal dactylic foot for suppleness; the use of the French word coup; the heading of the first part, The Sowing of the Dr...

An old Indian man sits alone in his snow-shrowded tipi, dreaming of the past and blowing meditatively on an eagle-bone whistle. A younger White man comes to visit him, bringing gifts and a sympathetic ear for the old man's tales of long ago. This situation, incidentally portraying the early fieldwork of many [American ethnographers] … has been skillfully used by poet-novelist John Neihardt [in When the Tree Flowered] to recreate the experience of the Oglala Sioux in the mid-nineteenth century....

[The Song of Three Friends] has not hitherto been reviewed in Poetry, because it seemed unnecessary to repeat criticisms fully suggested, in February, 1916, in a notice of The Song of Hugh Glass, the first poem published of its author's projected epic series, though the second in artistic order. But the recent P.S.A. award to this book, as one of the two best American books of verse of 1919 … seems to call for a more complete statement of our exceptions to the committee's verdict, our r...

[All Is but a Beginning] is a masterpiece of autobiography. The only regrettable aspect of the book is that it is simply the first installment covering Neihardt's first twenty years. We must be grateful for small favors, however, and hopeful that God will be generous enough to allow him enough time to complete what he has started.

["The Song of Hugh Glass," "The Song of Three Friends," and "The Song of the Indian Wars"] are Mr. Neihardt's most important work to date, and they partially compose a work to which he is devoting the twenty best years of his life. To judge by his handling of the episodes of the Ashley-Henry time and of the time of Custer he is eminently justified. He has given us vivid, heroic, authentic canvases. He has handled the flow of his couplets with power and beauty...

Patterns and Coincidences is the second part of [John Neihardt's] autobiography. It is a slight book but not without its charm. In his modest introduction Neihardt denies that "the life story of an ordinary man is necessarily of sufficient interest to justify the telling." But he adds that almost any life has high spots which are worth sharing with the rest of humanity. As a consequence, he brings together without much coherence and with no obligation to preserve chronology some inciden...

In ["The Song of the Indian Wars"], the history of the Indian wars in the west during the decade following the Civil War is detailed in verse which is always competent and sometimes brilliant and powerful. The moods of the times—in the Indian village, in the soldiers' camp, and in the pioneer's cabin—are poignantly distinct; and the human note, as always in Neihardt's work, rises clear and plain. Here is the greatest Indian fighting, without a doubt, in Ameri...