John Neihardt’s Epic ‘Cycle of the West’: A Video by Andrew Benson Brown

This is an amazing analysis – Benson Brown ought to be offered a professorship somewhere as his knowledge of poetry and poets is encyclopaedic. Sadly, of course, his views don’t fit. But, as the American poet, Christopher Morley once urged us: “Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.” Benson Brown could never be described as ‘part of unanimity’ – thank God for that! Well done – excellent piece.

An extremely interesting and informative introduction to (and critical analysis of) the work of a barely remembered poet. It seems that Neihardt gave his creative energy to understanding his own locality, culture, and its history without worrying about whether an audience of anonymous poets and academics would appreciate his work. The continuing prejudice against his “Black Elk Speaks” book is due to the failure of critics to understand that Neihardt was producing a work of art, not a documentary text, and therefore could take liberties with his transcriptions of what Black Elk said. The real objection that many have had to the book is the unspoken one of “cultural appropriation,” which is always dredged up when a white man writes a boo about a non-white culture.

About Neihardt’s overuse of dialect — we had an American poet, James Whitcomb Riley, who wrote almost exclusively in his Hoosier dialect of Indiana and its environs. His work was quite popular, even outside of the area where the Hoosier dialect predominated. And Joel Chandler Harris made excellent use of the very difficult black Gullah dialect when he wrote his collection of stories about Brer Rabbit.

It’s true that an extended use of dialect in poetry is not favored today, because of the fact that universal education has made standard English the common speech for an educated readership. But in many European countries, local dialects have existed for centuries and have developed a large historical canon of received texts. In Italy alone there is Neapolitan, Milanese, Sardinian, Venetian, Sicilian, Calabrese, Friulian, and Romanesco (the latter is the dialect of Rome, and the world-class poetry of G.G. Belli is totally in that idiom).

This video by ABB is probably going to be the go-to place for future scholarship on the poetry of John Neihardt — assuming, of course, that academics get over their dislike of formal poetry.