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Andrew Benson Brown‘s epic-in-progress, Legends of Liberty, chronicles the major events of the American Revolution. He writes history articles for American Essence magazine and resides in Missouri. Watch his Classical Poets Live videos here.
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Andrew Benson Brown‘s epic-in-progress, Legends of Liberty, chronicles the major events of the American Revolution. He writes history articles for American Essence magazine and resides in Missouri. Watch his Classical Poets Live videos here.
I missed the previous episode, and will have to go back to it. But this one and the others—I have enjoyed them tremendously. There’s a lot to take in, and I think they merit watching more than once. I can’t comment on the poetry of “Messiah,” since I have only read through the first two parts; but your description of the Ghost Dance movement is fascinating in its syncretic aspects. Splendid stuff.
I’m glad I could introduce you and others to Neihardt, Stephen. I’ve gotten about 10 emails from people who watched these, started reading Neihardt, and weighed in. Some thought he was more sentimental than I’d described him as being, others less. A few didn’t care for him, but most have been impressed by the quality of his verse. Which is to say that everyone has different opinions. Almost none of the poets I’ve been in contact had heard of him before. Just glad people are talking about him again.
So much to love and enjoy. Such great creativity and so many beautiful, skillfully wrought, descriptions and sentiments!
Much thanks for your support, Roy, and glad you enjoyed.
This is a fitting and eloquent conclusion to ABB’s video series about the poetry of John Neihardt. It raises many difficult and disturbing questions about poetry, and its reception.
Neihardt wanted his great epic cycle to “endure,” and he was disappointed when it did not. But like many Americans he may have been caught up in the notion that success — to be real — always has to be immediate and in one’s lifetime. Is Neihardt’s work not enduring right now? First there was the unexpected success of “Black Elk Speaks,” then there was the new critical and annotated edition of his work, and now there is ABB with his video series. Although he is not a household name like Tennyson, Neihardt is not forgotten.
Poets need to take the long-range view. The Gawain Poet’s work sat forgotten, a lonely parchment manuscript on a shelf for 500 years, and only after that was the man recognized as a major voice of late medieval English poetry. The sole surviving complete manuscript of Catullus was discovered propping up a barrel in a wine cellar. Neihardt didn’t have that kind of precarious luck. (Poor Sappho had no such luck at all!)
What Neihardt faced was an entire cultural shift (a tectonic-plate shift, you could say) in literary taste, received values, and accepted social attitudes that came about with modernism, the First World War, and subsequent political upheavals. This was a psychological tsunami that nobody really noticed at first, because it was so widespread, penetrating, and inescapable.
We in the poetry world see it largely through the lens of metrics, stylistics, diction choice, change of preferred subjects, and general disregard for the common reader. But quite frankly, poetry is just small potatoes in terms of the big picture. The things that limited the popularity of Neihardt’s work in his own lifetime were multifaceted — political change, social upheaval, educational collapse, moral skepticism, widespread cynicism, sexual confusion, and the overwhelming deflation of Western confidence, self-respect, and pride. Neihardt’s work was truly of the 19th century, not just because he wrote in couplets and iambic pentameter, but because his entire mindset and worldview had been shaped in a time long before any of this new garbage happened.
ABB, you have done a great job. You have helped to resuscitate the reputation and literary status of an important writer. The world of letters owes you a vote of thanks.
Yes, you’re right about the long view. The Beowulf Poet, whoever he was, had to wait even longer for recognition than the Pearl Poet. I’m glad to be taking part in the resurgence of interest in Neihardt.
As it happens, I was contacted by his great-granddaughter over LinkedIn. She is a scholar who is heading up development of a Neihardt research center and archives through Kansas U near where I am. So may have some role to play in that, very exciting. Things are looking up.
Andrew, for some reason I found this last section on Neihardt to be the most moving of your three videos. It is almost certainly because of an elegiac tone as we follow the poet’s final works – especially Song of the Messiah. And that sense of endings is paralleled by a painful sunset of the culture of the Great Plains Indians which he is immortalizing and interpreting. When I lived in Santa Fe, reminders of Indian culture are everywhere and this is something one never forgets. The Ghost Dance movement has long fascinated me for it is a highly evocative example of a metaphysical solution to a physical problem. It is no wonder the U.S. Army feared it for it is infused with a haunting power. As for Neihardt himself, the more exposure I have to his poetry the more I love it. The lines you read from “the winter died” moved me tremendously. This is, for me, a unique example of a poet working in a very restricted form who nevertheless is able to demonstrate great heart. What poets who are dedicated to free verse don’t get is that it can often be the very confines of the poetic form which so focus thought and feeling as to make them far more powerful. If the work is good. And Neihardt’s work is exceptional.
While this is not the focus of your piece, I’m intrigued by your observation that traditions in the Midwest – especially poetry and art – are conserved much more than they are in the coastal states. This rings true and parallels a linguistic phenomenon as well in which the language of a colony will tend to preserve the original language (vocabulary, accent) more faithfully than the point of origin. It’s said that the way English is spoken in some parts of the deep South and in the Ozarks is more faithful to the language of 17th and 18th Century London than the way English is spoken in the U.K. itself in the present day. Londoners would likely have found the language of the American Revolutionaries to be rather old-fashioned. I believe it works this way with folk music as well (considering folk songs of Appalachia, for example, which remain faithful to their British heritage.)
Returning to Neihardt, I am also quite moved by the obvious spiritual connection between Neihardt and Black Elk. I believe in such things and they were obviously meant to combine efforts in a beautiful and unique way. Neihardt’s devotion to Black Elk’s legacy is quite moving and would itself make the subject of a beautiful poem.
And I believe that you, Andrew, are helping to manifest the generous prophecy by poet Hillyer that Neihardt’s work would become widely known. Your work here is stellar and important.
The Midwest has been slower in giving into the trendy nonsense than others, but recently it seems most of the middle states have followed suit. I just read—not knowing this before a few days ago—that the current poet laureate is a young African American woman named Jewel Rodgers. She performs ‘spoken word poetry,’ otherwise known as reciting ordinary prose in a rhythmic cadence. Her poem ‘Humble’ places her in the same category of Amanda Gorman:
https://www.1011now.com/video/2025/01/06/new-nebraska-state-poet-jewel-rodgers-performs-humble-ceremony/
Sadly, we must conclude that Nebraska is now lost. Something similar has happened here in Missouri, where one of the recent poet laureates won for a poem about her grandmother’s cooking. The poem is just a recipe list. It really drives me crazy that the people in these positions don’t reflect the values of most of the people in their state.
Neihardt is officially rolling in his grave. How generous of you to say that I am helping to fulfill Hillyer’s prophecy. We must seize hold of destiny and overthrow the clowns.
More brilliant analysis, Andrew – so very perceptive: both in terms of your account of the individual epics he wrote, and in terms of the cultural factors that led to his being ignored as a significant poet. I myself weary of too much heroic couplet, yet from your readings I can see immense talent and virtuosity in his lines: I think the Messiah readings the best of them all, and I like the sense of mystery around some of them. What you are doing is placing another ‘brick in the wall’ in re-building the classical tradition and enabling real poetry to find an audience. We are all so tired of the phoney stuff. Thank you.
Thanks, James.
When Neihardt went on the Dick Cavett show, he spent about 10 minutes reciting ‘the Death of Crazy Horse’ scene from memory. He was known for doing this quite a bit—he was the American Homer in this sense as well, of tapping into the oral tradition. I wonder—would he have been able to devote his passages to memory as well if he had chosen a more complex rhyme scheme? I’m not sure exactly why he chose the heroic couplet as opposed to something else, but if I had to guess, I’d say that it’s for this reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBcJ8fxEwig
Though heroic couplets are dull compared to say, the Spenserian stanza or terza rima, I think that dullness falls away when you hear it out loud. And it goes without saying that listening to Neihardt recite his stuff is far more impressive than the performances of ‘spoken word poets’–the ultimate euphemism for hacks.