Notes on Neihardt: A Look2 Essay

The Look2 essay series, which replaces our print book reviews, takes a closer look at the careers of accomplished authors who have yet to receive the full appreciation that their work deserves. Reviews of new books can still be found on our blog at blog.pshares.org.

It was my good fortune to have been enrolled in a class called “Twilight of the Sioux” at the University of Missouri in 1964, taught by the Nebraska poet John Neihardt. I was seventeen years old and at Missouri to play baseball and football. “Twilight of the Sioux” was a one-unit course recommended by the athletic department to so-called scholar-athletes because the instructor was well known for liberally handing out As, and was therefore a boon to shoring up athletes’ grade point averages in order to keep them eligible to play.

I knew nothing about Neihardt, but I had spotted him on my first day on campus in Columbia, Missouri, a tiny old guy barely five feet tall, wearing a Homburg-style hat, wire-rim glasses, and a three-piece suit. He was bending down to sniff flowers growing alongside the sidewalks. This gentle-appearing little man seemed to me a curious figure, an anomaly among the fast-moving students and faculty members rushing around on their way to and from classes. Neihardt took his time, and I liked that.

In class, Neihardt spoke softly and with great passion and reverence for the Plains Indians: the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. I was ignorant of his having authored Black Elk Speaks, basically a transcription of the words of an Oglala Sioux holy man, first published in 1932; it was on the Pine Ridge Reservation that the name Flaming Rainbow was bestowed upon Neihardt. In the late 1960s, this book became a kind of sacred text for a new generation interested in Native American history and the notion of “getting back to the land.” Black Elk Speaks continues to be a popular title to this day.

The other students in my class barely paid attention to Neihardt’s lectures; they were there for the grade and were mostly biding their time until team practice. But I was fascinated by his narratives of having lived and moved among those last survivors of the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by predominantly white “settlers” and the United States Army operating according to the mandate of manifest destiny. Neihardt did not disparage this business of “civilizing” the West, but he did talk about the need to preserve the knowledge inherent in Native American cultures and to study their manners of survival. “Twilight of the Sioux” and Black Elk Speaks were inspired by Neihardt’s interest in the Plains Indians’ belief in the coming of a messiah to restore their lands to them during the mid-1880s, which resulted in what the U.S. government deemed a rebellion that ended violently at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890.

I left Missouri in early May of 1965, but I never forgot Neihardt. A few years later, I read his A Cycle of the West, five narrative poems originally published between 1915 and 1949; one of them, “The Song of the Indian Wars,” he had read aloud in our class. I also read When the Tree Flowered (1951), a fictional biography of Eagle Voice, a Sioux Indian; The River and I (1938), a compilation of a series of articles Neihardt wrote for Outing Magazine in 1910 about a trip he made down the Missouri River in 1908; and, of course, Black Elk Speaks.

Neihardt chose to record many of his histories in the form of poetry, using a type of verse derided by the determined modernist Ezra Pound, who declared, in 1908 or so, that it was poetry such as John Neihardt’s, celebrated by ladies’ tearoom societies, that caused him to leave the country. Following his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, Pound taught at Wabash College, a position from which he was fired for allowing a burlesque performer to sleep in his room—on the floor, he said. He soon embarked for Venice, Italy, and upon his arrival there proclaimed it, “a fine place to come to from Crawfordsville, Indiana.”

Pound, of course, along with T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and James Joyce, among others, quickly eclipsed Neihardt and his fellow practitioners whose work was favored by those gathering in tearooms; but it was the poetry and criticism of Eliot, before and after his receiving tutelage and guidance from Pound, that did much to establish, for better or worse, the foundation of English departments in American universities. It is unlikely that the poetry of John Neihardt is today considered an essential part of curricula in literature classes.

I saw Neihardt being interviewed on television, in 1970, I believe, by the talk show host Dick Cavett. Like Neihardt, Cavett was a Nebraskan (though Neihardt was born in Illinois)—the interview took place in Lincoln—and Neihardt, who held the post of Poet Laureate of Nebraska from 1921 until his death in 1973 at the age of ninety-two, had become something of a mini-celebrity owing to the popularity of Black Elk Speaks. By then it had become a hippie handbook, outselling even Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I don’t remember much about the interview other than that the old poet looked much the same as when I had encountered him in Columbia, Missouri, where he was still teaching and where he eventually died. I recall that Neihardt often wore a little flower freshly picked on his morning walk.

Ezra Pound was a great teacher, not only for T. S. Eliot but, through his books The Spirit of Romance, Guide to Kulchur, The ABC of Reading, the anthology Confucius to Cummings, and his Cantos, for me and by now tens of thousands of others. But so was John Neihardt, not as a great poet, perhaps, but as a personal historian of a time and place and culture that without his interest and diligence would certainly be less well understood and appreciated. What’s more, I don’t recall Neihardt ever having said a bad word about Ezra Pound.

—Barry Gifford’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in twenty-eight languages. His books Sailor’s Holiday (Random House, 1991) and The Phantom Father (Harcourt Brace, 1997) were each named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and his book Wyoming (Arcade Publishing, 2000) was named a Novel of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. His film credits include Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango, Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, Ball Lightning, and The Phantom Father. Barry Gifford’s most recent books are Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels (Seven Stories Press, 2010) and Sad Stories of the Death of Kings (Seven Stories Press, 2010). He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information, visit www.BarryGifford.com.