Cycle of The West

Cycle Of The West

A Cycle of the West is a collection of five epic poems (called "Songs") written and published over a nearly thirty-year span by John G. Neihardt. As one extended work of literature, the Cycle treats historical topics from the American settlement of the Great Plains and the displacement of the Native American cultures there.

Each poem is written as enjambed heroic couplets in several chapters. As Neihardt gained experience with the form, he began to close chapters, and often verse paragraphs, in the middle of a line, with the first line of the next chapter completing both the suspended line and rhyme. The effect is to pull the speaker forward until the only completely resolved couplet is the one at the end of the Song.

By internal chronological order, the five songs are (with the date of first publication):

  • The Song of Three Friends (1919)
  • The Song of Hugh Glass (1915)
  • The Song of Jed Smith (1941)
  • The Song of the Indian Wars (1925)
  • The Song of the Messiah (1935)

Read more about Cycle Of The West:  The Song of Three Friends, The Song of Hugh Glass

Famous quotes containing the words cycle of the, cycle of, cycle and/or west:

    “The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.”
    —Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)

    “Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.”
    —Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

    “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”
    —Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)

    “But beauty vanishes; beauty passes;
    However rare—rare it be;
    And when I crumble, who will remember
    This lady of the West Country?”
    —Walter De La Mare (1873–1956)