An American Poet: John G. Neihardt

By Michael Hooper

The book Lonesome Dreamer, the Life of John G. Neihardt by Timothy G. Anderson, portrays a man with an incredible zest for life, a love of Native Americans and a quest for literary greatness.

Neihardt was born in an uninsulated house on Jan. 8, 1881, in Sharpsburg, Illinois, to parents Nicholas and Alice Neihardt. His father named him after John Greenleaf Whittier, the American Quaker poet and abolitionist. Neihardt later changed his middle name to Gneisenau.

In the 1900s, John G. Neihardt became a popular author of poetry and western literature, he wrote 25 books, his most famous book is Black Elk Speaks. In his long life, he lived in Nebraska, Kansas City, Minnesota, Missouri and Chicago, but seemed most connected to Nebraska and Missouri. He died at the age of 92 in 1973. He was friends with Nebraska authors Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz.

His father abandoned the family early on, but his mother was a supportive person who encouraged his literary pursuits. They moved to Wayne, Neb., and later to Bancroft, Neb., near the Omaha Indian reservation, where the young boy developed a lifelong interest in Native Americans.

I enjoyed reading about Neihardt in his youth making friends with other intellectuals in his hometown. In Wayne, Neb., he met Reuben Durrin and James Brittain. Durrin was a "a talented amateur sculptor who made his living as a tombstone carver," Anderson wrote. Young Neihardt often listened to Durrin recite poetry from memory, especially Byron and Shakespeare. Durrin's friend Brittain was a lawyer who also owned the opera house. Brittain loved the theater and Shakespeare was his favorite. Neihardt enjoyed discussions of philosophy, art and literature with these educated men.

At 17, Neihardt wrote his first poetry book The Divine Enchantment, about Hindu religion and Vedanta philosophy. He and a friend went to Kansas City, where he was hoping to get the book published but was rejected. 

In KC, they looked for jobs and and tried to make a go of it there but eventually ended up broke. While living as hobos, some professional hobos encouraged them not to beg for food from rich people, Anderson wrote, but instead stick to the nice little places that maybe need a bit of paint and had flowers.

Eventually, they gathered up enough money to take a train from Kansas City to Omaha and then they walked all the way home to Wayne, Neb., which was 100 miles. The author did not say how they survived on that 100-mile walk. But in those days, around 1900, cars were nonexistent and horses were expensive and people often walked, so this probably wasn't uncommon back then but today the long walk would be an extraordinary feat.

Neihardt published poetry and short stories in newspapers and magazines. He worked as a teacher and later as a reporter at the Omaha Daily News. He wasn't a good reporter, often getting scooped by his competitors, so he got fired.

Neihardt was a bit of a curmudgeon stuck with old-fashioned ideas about poetry and American culture, even when he was young, he stuck to archaic language that he so admired In Tennyson‘s poetry. Words like smote, verily, vulpine and metempsychosis are sprinkled throughout his early stories, Anderson wrote. Neihardt wrote about the Omaha Tribe, and often his stories were mournful and melancholy, and he almost always wrote about men.

He also stuck to a certain type of verse with rhyme and rarely altered from it.

It takes a certain audacity of a white man to write about the American Indian, but I must say that this man went to great lengths to capture the spirit of the native American, especially Black Elk. Neihardt brought cigarettes to Black Elk and other tribal leaders at Pine Ridge. He participated in pipe smoking rituals with the tribe. He interviewed Black Elk, with the help of interpreters and his daughter who took notes.

One criticism I have of Neihardt is that he moved often. He lived in Minneapolis because he had a steady employment with a Minneapolis newspaper writing about books and literature and later he had a similar job in St. Louis. He lived for a long time in Branson, Missouri, but one time he was moving to St. Louis and most of his papers and archives were lost in a wreck in the move. Toward the end of his life he moved to Columbia, Mo., but he often stayed with friends in Lincoln, Neb.

I think he would’ve been better off financially if he would’ve stayed in one place a little bit longer. It’s funny he seemed to be a fairly popular writer, but by the end of the 1930s and the early 1940s he was struggling financially to come up with money. His Cycle of the West is an epic poem that was written over many years. But it made him little money.

His wife Mona was an extraordinary woman who was an artist and sculptress who worked under the sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris. She read one of Neihardt’s books and wrote him a letter; through correspondence they fell in love with one another and actually were betrothed before they had actually met. When she came to Omaha, he met her at the train station and they were married the next day. They remained married for nearly 50 years.

Toward the end of his life, Neihardt looked like he might fall into obscurity, but suddenly his 1932 book Black Elk speaks was republished in paperback by Bison Press of the University of Nebraska and it hit at a perfectly good time in the 1960s when young people were interested in the American Indian and the injustices against them. Black Elk and his visions seemed attractive. I remember reading Black Elk Speaks many years ago, and found it to be very mystical and hallucinatory, full of dreamscapes, wisdom, hardships and great sorrow.

I think Anderson's book is worth reading, the prose is vivid and easy to read, there is no doubt you feel Neihardt was determined to be a successful writer, even though his journey was full of hardships, financial difficulties and criticism, especially from critics who felt his poetry was not modern enough. Yet he captures moods and feelings very well. Here is an example:

L'envoi

Seek not for me within a tomb;

You shall not find me in the clay!
I pierce a little wall of gloom
To mingle with the Day!

I brothered with the things that pass,
Poor giddy Joy and puckered Grief;
I go to brother with the Grass
And with the sunning Leaf.

Not Death can sheathe me in a shroud;
A joy-sword whetted keen with pain,
I join the armies of the Cloud,
The Lightning and the Rain.

O subtle in the sap athrill,
Athletic in the glad uplift,
A portion of the Cosmic Will,
I pierce the planet-drift.

My God and I shall interknit
As rain and Ocean, breath and Air;
And O, the luring thought of it
Is prayer!