In the following essay, Mason provides an in-depth analysis of The Gourd Dancer, examining the major themes of each section and the volume as a whole.

In the essay below, Mason provides an in-depth analysis of The Gourd Dancer, examining the major themes of each section and of the volume as a whole.

In the following excerpt, Schubnell discusses Momaday's poems that center on his Native American heritage, focusing in particular on part two of The Gourd Dancer.

In the following excerpt from an interview conducted in December 1982, Momaday discusses such subjects as Yvor Winters' influence on his works, the difference between poetry and prose, the major themes in his poetry, and Native American literature.

In the essay below, Velie provides background information on Momaday' s life and career and discusses how Yvor Winters and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman influenced his early poetry. Velie concludes that although Momaday is a good poet overall, he is at his best in his prose poems.

In the excerpt below, Dickinson-Brown offers a stylistic analysis of several poems in Angle of Geese.

Winters was an American critic, poet, short story writer, and editor who emphasized that all good literature necessarily serves a conscious moral purpose. In his best-known critical work, In Defense of Reason (1947), Winters stated: "I believe that the work of literature, in so far as it is valuable, approximates a real apprehension and communication of a particular kind of truth." Momaday, who studied under Winters while at Stanford, has noted that Winters greatly influenced his writing. In ...

Winters was an American critic, poet, short story writer, and editor who emphasized that all good literature serves a conscious moral purpose. Momaday, who studied under Winters at Stanford University, has noted that Winters greatly influenced his writing. In the excerpt below, Winters offers an analysis of "The Bear, " "Buteo Regalis, " and "Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion, " placing Momaday's work within the Post-Symbolist tradition.

In the essay below, Meredith discusses Momaday's literary attempts to preserve Native American culture and examines his use of Kiowa traditions as a narrative form and "a measured angle of vision" through which to view the world.

Abbey was an American novelist and nonfiction writer. In the following, he offers a positive review of The Names.

Below, Anderson provides a thematic and stylistic review of In the Presence of the Sun.

Here, Anderson provides a thematic and stylistic review of In the Presence of the Sun.

In the following mixed review, Marston faults Momaday's romanticized view of Native history in The Ancient Child.

In the piece reprinted below, McAllister provides a mixed review of The Names, questioning, in particular, Momaday's advocacy of self-imagining as a means of establishing Native identity.

An American critic, essayist, novelist, and editor, Larson is the author of American Indian Fiction (1978). In the following excerpt from a review of The Ancient Child, he praises Momaday's "poetic" depiction of a protagonist who recovers his Native heritage, but contends that the novel is disrupted by irrelevant subplots.

In the following review, Finlay offers a stylistic and thematic description of Angle of Geese, praising the volume as Momaday's best work.

In the following review, Finlay offers a stylistic and thematic description of Angle of Geese, praising the volume as Momaday's best work.

In the following review, Bode praises Momaday's descriptions of Kiowa culture and history as well as his use of voice and language in In the Presence of the Sun.

As a modern, historical consciousness and a member of a largely desacralized society, [Momaday] knows that he cannot return to the mythopoesis and archaic ontology of his Indian ancestors, that the Kiowa verbal tradition "has suffered a deterioration in time,"… and that the Kiowa culture can no longer establish identity and compel belief solely through the authority of its myths and rites. As a Kiowa who "feels Indian" in spite of all this, he is intent on reconciling his ...

In the following positive review, Meredith argues that In the Presence of the Sun fully achieves Momaday's purpose, which is to "express my spirit fairly."

"The Names" is an Indian book, but not a book about wrongs done to Indians. It is a search and a celebration, a book of identities and sources. Momaday is the son of parents who successfully bridged the gulf between Indian and white ways, but remain Indian. In boyhood Momaday made the same choice, and in making it gave himself the task of discovering and in some degree inventing the tradition and history in which he finds his most profound sense of himself…. In the earlier "Way t...

In The Gourd Dancer N. Scott Momaday writes in the iambic tradition, in short-line free verse, and (of Indian lore or inventions) in paragraph-poetry. He is a good poet in all three modes. His best iambic lines are good examples of the "spiritual control" his mentor Yvor Winters admired in closely varied meter…. His best short-line free verse has comparable force, and it shares the primary theme—the radical unintelligibility of nature—as though one tried by sheer force of ...

[In The Gourd Dancer Momaday] achieves a memorable evocation of indigenous rhythms and emotion in a numer of poems, while turning Janus-faced in a second style to the Anglo-American tradition of "fine" writing. What is remarkable is his ability to fuse both styles into a third. The technical temptation to do so must have been irresistible, and it is true that in some cases an uneasy feeling of déjà vu troubles the reader. Yet before analysis one's realization is seldom tha...

Although he considers himself a Kiowa, Mr. Momaday's ancestry involves several other bloodlines, including the European. This memoir [The Names] both records and recreates the lives of his forebears, and fuses them with the childhood experiences that formed the author's conception of himself as an Indian—a status which his father's talent and his mother's family might well have enabled him to discard. All of which sounds more complicated than it is when put into Mr. Momada...