“For a poet,” his daughter Hilda would later write, “John Neihardt was unusually physical.” She claimed that, as a younger man, “he could lift his own weight - 125 pounds - over his head with one arm.” Due to his reputation as an easy grader and exceptional storyteller, his voice animated by grit and gusto, his crooked fingers galloping across the oaken desk, Neihardt’s course routinely attracted more students than the largest room in the Arts and Science Building could accommodate. Students campuswide soon relished their encounters with the Hobbit-like bard in browline frames, an epic written in his wrinkles, in the way he carried himself, small but mighty, like the amateur boxer he once was, so many years ago. The lectures were based on his life’s work, a series of five “songs” or “heroic narrative poems” called A Cycle of the West, written at a pace of roughly three lines a day between the ages of 31 and 60, “designed,” he wrote, “to celebrate the great mood of courage that was developed west of the Missouri River in the nineteenth century.” With the last song several years behind him now, and the Macmillan Company promising to publish the cycle in full, Neihardt turned “with great enthusiasm” (and a long wooden pointer) toward that which he had once considered the “backwaters” of creativity: academia. Neihardt - barely 5 feet tall with a shock of buoyant white hair and a blue serge suit - perched himself casually on the edge of his desk at Mizzou and began performing a course he called Epic America. In the spring of 1949, a diminutive man named John G. This dirt-street scholar, a lover of wide open spaces and the audacity it took to master them, could with equal aplomb navigate the Missouri River, commune with a cousin of Crazy Horse and make literature to immortalize it all. In the 1960s, well into his ninth decade, the national spotlight shone on Neihardt when his Black Elk Speaks struck a cultural chord and became a spiritual guide to a new generation. When John Neihardt joined MU’s faculty 70 years ago, this charismatic poet not only beguiled legions of students with his epic tales of the frontier but also helped forge the voices of talented young authors, including William Least Heat-Moon, who went on to write the bestseller Blue Highways. Please visit the Liberal Arts Student Resources page to find step by step instructions for Canvas and Zoom: Online Learning Resources Sign Up for Graham School news and updates.Photos courtesy the State Historical Society of Missouri You will receive an invitation to join Canvas about a week before your course begins. Remote courses require you to login to Canvas to access the Zoom Classroom. Notesĭeadline for Online Registration: Tuesday, December 28 at 5 pm CT. This course will introduce the study of indigenous religious traditions, read and discuss Black Elk Speaks, and discuss interpretations of the questions the book poses to us. Black Elk recounts his first-hand memories and experiences as a medicine man through these battles, victories, losses, hopes, and tragedies. The book has inspired and enkindled love and fascination with the religious tradition and perspectives of the Lakota people as they experienced the calamities surrounding the so-called Great Sioux War. Nicholas Black Elk stands behind the great spiritual and religious classic, Black Elk Speaks, written by John Neihardt.
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