Since 1903, members of Arts and Letters have delivered commemorative tributes to fellow members who have passed away. These remarks celebrate and reflect on the lives and work of the members being honored and acknowledge their contribution to the arts. A selection of tributes is now available in the digital archive below. As we prepared this archive, we were reminded that these tributes reflect their times, and, in some instances, include terminology and social and moral judgments we do not endorse.
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John G. Neihardt is not a familiar name to readers of contemporary verse and his work is not to be found in any of the representative anthologies of recent years. His writing never entered into the stream of modernism; even twenty-five years ago he could be described as an "old-fashioned" poet. But, curiously, since he anticipated some of the primary concerns and themes of the current generation, it may yet be necessary to go back to the texts and reappraise his contribution to American letters.
Born in 1881, of German ancestry, near Sharpsburg, Illinois, he prided himself on belonging to a pre-Revolutionary pioneer family. Most of his formative years, following a Kansas childhood, were spent in Nebraska, the state that was eventually to designate him poet laureate. In his early teens he began a systematic, intensive reading of the classics of world literature, from which he emerged with a command of Latin and Greek. Aeschylus succeeded Virgil as the literary god of his youth.
In 1911, after publishing lyrics and short stories, he conceived the idea of devoting the rest of his life to an Epic Cycle of the West, to consist of five book-length narrative poems, dealing with the entire trans-Missouri country from 1882 to 1890, when the battle of Wounded Knee marked the end of Indian resistance on the plains. Of his motives and qualifications for this ambitious task he was to write: "My life in northwestern Kansas, my discovery of the Missouri River at the age of six, and my intimate contact with old-timers, both white and Indian, were responsible for my compelling desire to do this work. I have been too well acquainted with Indians since 1900 to regard them as romantic curiosities and never sought them for 'local color.' The word 'epic' was used from the beginning as being properly descriptive of the material, the time, and the mood of the time under consideration.''
When the five parts of Cycle of the West were assembled in a single volume in 1949, it should have been clear, despite the homespun quality of the verse, that the substance of the work represented an heroic effort to restore a fading chapter of our history, that here was an authentic and sporadically vital re-creation of frontier life dating back to the opening of the Missouri Territory.
The same may be said of another of Neihardt's neglected books, published in 1932, Black Elk Speaks, in which, out of his long association with the Sioux Indians, he attempted—"for the first time," he noted—to set forth "the inner world of an Indian 'holy man.'"
John Neihardt was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1942; subsequently he became a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and poet-in-residence at the University of Missouri. He outlived his own generation by many years, dying at the age of ninety-two. Of himself he said, in a rare moment of self-revelation: "Although I have read enormously, I have never been a bookworm, but have mixed with the living world and known all types of men…. My life work has been poetry, but I've long regarded it as merely the burning center of a universal interest…. My deep interest in the worldwide social process precludes attachment to any political party, and the religion I have managed to achieve through direct experience seems too profound for dogmatic statement."
As valedictory for a man I never knew, though he sent me a letter once, from which I have quoted, let Black Elk speak for me:
Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to have our children.