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John G. Neihardt, Poet Laureate of Nebrask a THERE is only one poet laureate in the Tinted States. This title that takes one hack to the days of John Prxdcn. William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson, of Kngland. ha just been htstowed on John Ci. Neihardt by the Nebraska legislature, Not onl is he the rirt man who has such an honor con ferred on him by any state in the I'nion. hut hi is the only poet since the days of the Cambridge g roup to have one ot hil long epic poems dealing with American life published in a volume by itself for use in t ho tchoola. Two editions were exhausted in i sin 1 yeai lp to 1914, John G. Neihardt was ai obscure port, who made his home at Bancroft, Nebraska. For moi than 20 years he had bun making a study of the hardships of the earlv pioneers, the fur traders and the trappers who came into the plains region following the famous expedition of Lewis and Clark in 1804. These men he has immortalized in a poem, "The Song of Hugh Glass." Instant recogni tion came. I eacnera demanded it for use in the schools. Then the Nebraska legislature, in the spring of 1921 caught the inspiration and passed the following joint resolu tion : ' Whereas. There is the doflest connection between the growth of civilization and the deviiopmen's of literature, and 'Whereas, wise commonwealths in all ages have rec . :.rd this relation by lifting the poet to the same plane as the statesman and military chieftain, and "Whereas. John G. Neihardt, a citizen of Nebraska, has written a national epic wherein he has de veloped the mood of cour ace with which : pi.nees explored and subdued our plains, and thus has in spired in Americans that love of the land and its heroes whereby freat na tional traditions are built and perpetu ated, and "Whereas, our people wish to exalt sue' i Ft! of the human spirit, therefore be it "Resolved and enacted, by the house of representatives, the senate concur ring, that John G. Neihardt be, and hereby is declared poet laureate of Nebraska. Laureate was the name first applied to tl who were honored by the gift of a laurel wreath. It is now a title i an official of the royal household of Great Britain '1 hai been recognized then for more than 500 years. The ceremonies conferring the laureate honors on John G. Neihardt were held at Lincoln, Nebraska, Jane 18, 1921, They were conducted by the Nebraska lY.iversity faculty, and the presental m was made by I ean L. A. Sherman. This is an auspicious day and date for Nebraska." said I u $herman. "No other state, it appears, has by legislative recognition, a poet laureate. No other tna v fairly say. has such a reason. Nature has not shaped for as, in this paradise of prairie coun try, mountains that might become by myth of fancy the home godl and BSUSes. There is, there can be. no Olym; no Parnassus lure. Hut we have that which has given fame to all the sacred groves and mountains and fountains of spiritual history. We have the pot t's ruling risiostj and shaping hand. "The ceremonial that we assembled to witness is "o means l novel one. In the days when Parnas li in the routh time of the art-, sons of Apollo were crowned publicly with his laurel. And so at the of the Middle tges was Petrarch crowned at the capttol in Rome. Were our own great new c. finished, it would have been fitting that the first c la irean of Nebraska should have been honored it its Portals." Before tin audience which came to witness these nation ceremonies, came a slender man just 40. heavy hair and large head would mark him i ipicuoui in any audience. He was simple of ad--tifttple as had been his life. The Poel cihard wai brn m an Unplastered one-room Itructura on a d farm near Sharpsburg. Illinois, January 8. 1881 Shortly after the birth of this sen the family moved to Northwestern Kansas, where pioneer c ditions pre vailed and the family residence was a sod house Five years later the family went to Kansai City, Missouri and in 1892 to Wayne. Nebraska, where Neihardt was educated at the Nebraska Normal School. He wa poor that he earned his tuition by ringing the chapel bell hourly to announce the Convening of classes. Even in his youth there was a noticeable mysticism and melancholia in the nature of Nnhardt. s a little boy he wanted to become an inventor and the back yard of the Kai s;,s City home was strcwi with cabl line ly Stems, tunnell and grades and turbine enginci When the boy was 10 years of age hi father died and his mother supported herself and children h . ing for 50 or 75 cents a day It was while living in Kansas ( ity that the awe and psTVadn atmosphere of the West settled with all its subtle meaning into his nature. The Missouri River as it comes sweeping dowtl thr .ugh the plains at Kansas City touch. .1 him with a feeling of loneliness and Hisismincancc, latrr to be portrayed in the poem, "The River and I" ' I remember well the first time I looked on my turbulent friend, who has since become as a brother to me." said Mr Neihardt in explaining this hushed feeling and smpath inspired by the ner. It wi from Dluft at Kansas City. I know I must have been G I t JOHN G. NBlHAftOT By FRED L. HOLMES a very little boy. for the terror I felt made me reach up to th saving forefinapr of my father, lest this insane devil-thing before me should suddenly develop am un- reasoi ii g hunger for little boys. Tor the iucnin r had smitten the distant moun tains and the June floods ran. Far across the yellow swirl that ipread out into the wooded bottomlands, we watched the demolition of a little town. Many lax) Sunday stroll took us back to the river; aiuf little by little the dread became less, and the wonder grew and a little love crept in. "If in a moment of despair I should reel for a breathing space away from the fight, with no heart for battle cries, and with only a desire to pray. I could do it in no better manner than to lift my arms above the river and cry out into the big spaces. You who somehow understand behold this river ! It expresses what is voiceless in me. It prays for me l At 11 years of age Neihardt forgot his toys, his sailboat, his engines and machinery, and, fol lowing a dream, decided to become a poet. It wa not unnatural, for hil father had scribbled many un published lines. "It was as if a voice called me from my mechanical inven tions, saying: 'Come away. This is not the thing.'" explained Mr. Neihardt. "That was the first feeling which 1 had and it is this compelling influence i i t- t j i wnicn nas guicieu my nic since." Shortly afterward Nei hardt wrote the first of his verses, "The Stubble Haired Boy." At once he began to collect a library of good books in cheap bindings The first volume of poetry he owned wa ' Idylls of the King," obtained as a pre mium for soap wrappers. His first verses were pub lished in the Cook County (Illinois) NeWS. when he was nearly 14 years old. His first poem for which he received pay was printed by the Vouth's C 'omfam ion, It was written in 19(X) in a potato patch with the back of his hoe for a desk and was called "The Song of the Hoe." For neafly six years, 1901-7, Neihardt lived among the Omaha Indians, studying their character, history and legends. He had taught country school two years at Hoskins, Nebraska When this desire came to know mote about the world than the ordinary human sees, he spent his summer tramping through Kansas and Mis souri and between the agt s of In and 20 he engaged in the occupations of farm hand, hod carrier, office boy. marble polisher, stenographer and teacher. Neihardt has always been poor. When he had fin ished the normal school he wanted to go to the state university, but was without funds. Carrying in one pocket a copy of Tennyson and in another Browning, he went back to work in the bc t fields for 50 cents a day. and as he crawled on his hands and knees, weeding and thinning the beets, his h:ain was busy with the great dream. It was called The Divine Enchantment1 and was finisln d in 1900. As soon as the beet- were harvested he be gan the C Ripotition of the poem and continued work on it for mure than two years. It w.;s while as a boy living in a sod house in Northwestern Kansas that Neihardt conceived the greatness of the West, the Compelling beauties of the prairie, the immensity and boundless I weep of its vast untrammeled The Greek and Latin poems which had inspired him in his college course now awakened in him a desire to picture this tern advance of civilization as an epic. "The four decades during which the fur trade flourished west of the Mississippi Kivcr may be regarded as I typical heroic period, differing in no essential from the many otto - great heroic periods that have made glorious the st - pi the Aryan Migration," said Mr. Neihardt m explaining how he conceived the idea of writing western epics. "The heroic spirit, as seen in historic poetry Ue are told, is the outcome of a society cut loos, its r(,ots( of a time of migration, of the shifting of populations. Such conditions are to be found during the time of the Spanish conquests of Central and South America; and they are to he found those wonderful years of our own Wesl when wandering bands , trappers were exploring the rivers and the mountains and the plains and the deserts from the British posv lions to Mexico and from the III soun to the Pacific. "We lack the . mvim vuiiiiiiuii T , I Ot ISsBB A SNAPSHOT OF MR. NEIHARDT on that view. The affairs of antiuuitv c generality of us to be as remote as the a- t0 thc and as little related to nnr ,,,,. ,,mnt sbr call the slow lapse of ages is really only tl vL1 an eye. Sometimes this sense of the clo, K : i ii i . v,,v i. lose litntv nine anq an nutnan experience has com v 01 311 strongly that I have felt, for an intense nZjV just a little hurry on my part might get m? ,u W tune to hear Aeschylus training a chorus J! thcre wizard chisel still busy with the Parthenon thc to hear Socrates telling his dreams to his ? is :n some such mood that I approach tin hi II precious saga-Stuff which I have called h udy0t American Kpos ; and I see it, not as a th i ,25? but rather as one phase of the who, raceBf. the beginning, indeed, the final link in that Inn lm ot heroic periods stretching from the region J Euphrates eastward into India and westward m e own Pacific Coast." rd ,nto our Out of this study of thc advance of the nionrrrc establishment of trading posts, the rise and deel L the fur trade, the depredation of Indians, he o n in of military camps, and the picture of the 2 ? come the epic poem, "The Song of Hugh Glass" It is the story of a pioneer trapper who enters the WV and who in searching for food is caught bv a fifeu and left prostrate on the plain. His friends discover h.m. but after two days of watching the unconsd man was left alone to die. Rut Hugh Glass, a moun tain of a man. the embodiment of sinew and brawn and adventure, revives, and crawls a hundred miles back to CSTtllzatlon, subsisting on berries and the frafa ot brush and thicket the while. tS Founded on historic facts, this poem h not a story of colorless and naked straight lines but is a rich mosaic made up of a thousand historic incidents pictures of shades and light, of watte citangiftf everv hour from dawn to midnight, the odorous ozone of rain-drenched land, the soughing of the winds in the cottonwoods. the nickering of horses in the corral the disturbing voices of wild life, the blistering heat of summer, the blinding snow of the blizzard and the loneliness and solitude under the judgment' of stars twinkling in thc night. Deserted by friends in the drear and waste of a land then desolate. Hugh's memory paints the picture of days at home, the twilight and evening It was the hour when cattle straggle home. Across the clearing in a hush of sleep They saunter, lowing; loiter belly-dcq) Amid the lush grass by the mead' m stream. How like the sound of water in a dream The intermittent tinkle of yon bell. A windlass creaks contentment from I well; And co,,l deeps gurgle as the bucket sinks. Now blowing at the trough the plow team drinks; The shaken harness rattles. Sleepy quails Call far. The warm milk hisses fa the pails There in the dusky barn lot. Crick. j t ry. One hears the horses munching at their oats. The green grow s black. A veil of slumber floats Across thc haunts of home-enamored men. It is not alone the colorific portrayal of Hugh Glass which the Poet Neihardt would canvass, but it is the story of that body of adventurers, their characteristics and their aspirations, who from 1822 to 1S-H opened a way of expansion of the nation beyond the Missouri, found the southern pass through the mountains and the overland route to California. which thousands were to travel in a mad rush to the gold fields 20 years later. It il the story of westward expansion in America told in its relation to the whole race movement from the begin ning. It is the humble achieve ments of ordinary men, not the official leaders. "History as written in the past, has been too much a chronologica record of official governmental acts, too little an intimate ac count of the lives of the people themselves," said Mr Neihardt m explaining the basic inspiration back of this poem. "Doubtless the democratic spirit that now seems to be sweeping the world will, if it continues to spread, revolutionize our whole concep tion of historv. bringing us to realize that the glory of the race is not the glorv of a chosen tew. K,,t Ut it radiates from P" precious heroic stuff of common human lives. And that view. I am proud to say, i keeping with our dearest national traditions. . "I ire mud of making those men live again tor -oung men and women of my country. The trernen moos of heroism that was developed in our Ame ' WtS! during that period h properly a part WT J racial inheritance; and certainly no less ,mj,or,f(J it part than thc memory of ancient heroes in can be shown that these men Kentuckians. irg jn IVnnsvlvaniani, Ohioans-were direct j1"" the epic line, of all the heroes of Of Aryan ns. U i Kr. mtKratoil hv thr nocts Of thc last. u . t 4 am. j . f a nra ' of Rolana. or us it 14 almost a tlimvli u u . i ' u ? W,"H ofgan yrsierna morning' and too much of our contemporary literature is based me epic line, oi an mc huvaj v. . have been celebrated by the poets of thc 1 ast ants of Achilles and Hector; oi Aeneas, - Sigurd, and of the Knights ot Annur vw... m went as torch bearers in the van of our wester ilization. Your Present is, in a great measure, age from their Past.' (Ci