After he had exhausted reservation schools, Momaday spent his last year of high school at a military school in Virginia and then enrolled in the University of New Mexico. It was there that he began writing poetry, and in 1959 published his first poem, "Earth and I Give You Turquoise," in the New Mexico Quarterly. After college Momaday tried a year of law school in the University of Virginia but decided that he did not like it.

When Momaday submitted some poems to a creative writing contest sponsored by Stanford University, Yvor Winters, who judged the poetry entries, awarded Momaday a graduate scholarship to Stanford and took him under his wing. Winters was a distinguished poet, famous for his powerful personality as well as for his scholarship and criticism, and he exercised an enormous influence on Momaday's verse. Winters died in 1968, and Momaday is now experimenting with new forms that Winters probably would have taken a dim view of, but his influence is still evident in much of Momaday's work.

Winters was a great whale of a man, imposing both intellectually and physically, with very marked ideas and a decidedly contentious disposition. His major scholarship was the championing of poets whose work, though excellent, had fallen into obscurity. Among his favorites were Barnabe Googe, Fulke Greville, Jones Very, and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. None of these names are household words today, of course, but their poetry is worth reading, and, thanks to Winters's attentions, it has been republished recently. In fact, Momaday put together an edition of Tuckerman's works [The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, 1965] for his dissertation at Stanford.

Along with his habit of heralding the obscure, Winters had a way of dismissing the famous. He viewed the works of Wordsworth, Keats, Poe, and Whitman with contempt. All this may make Winters sound like a crank, but he was a very sound scholar and a brilliant teacher, and those who knew him never ignored or slighted his opinions. Momaday was very fond of Winters, although, as he admits now, his affection was mixed with awe. Winters, for his part, was endlessly impressed with Momaday. Winters was not one to understate, and after Momaday left Stanford, Winters used to tell students that not only was Scott a great poet and scholar, but he was also powerful enough to pull down the pillars of the building in which they were sitting.

Momaday earned his Ph.D. in English at Stanford and has taught English and comparative literature in the University of California (both Santa Barbara and Berkeley) and at Stanford, and is now teaching at the University of Arizona.

Winters meticulously taught Momaday the poet's craft. He introduced Momaday to a kind of poetry that Winters called post-symbolist, and under Winters's tutelage Momaday adopted post-symbolist methods.

The poets Winters identifies as post-symbolists are a diverse lot, starting with Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and Emily Dickinson, and including Wallace Stevens, Louise Bogan, Edgar Bowers, and Winters himself. As Winters was well aware, the post-symbolists were in no sense a group. He makes clear that Tuckerman and Dickinson, who lived only a few miles apart in Massachusetts, neither knew, nor were influenced by, each other and certainly never thought of themselves as part of a movement. In fact, Winters makes no case for the influence of any of the post-symbolists on any of the others.

What the post-symbolists have in common is the use of imagery in such a way that descriptions of sensory details are charged with abstract meaning. Winters argues that in traditional European poetry, before the symbolists, imagery was primarily ornamental. Donne, for instance, used metaphor to illustrate a clearly stated theme. "The vehicles are more interesting than the tenor," Winters wrote, "therefore they are ornaments, and the tenor—the essential theme—suffers." With the symbolists, image and sensory description largely replace abstract meaning. Symbolist poetry cannot be paraphrased or reduced to rational meaning; meaning, such as it is, resides in the feeling and tone of the poem. Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Verlaine are among the writers whose poems disassociate sense perception and feeling from conceptual understanding. In post-symbolist poetry, according to Winters, "the sharp sensory detail contained in a poem or passage is of such a nature that the detail is charged with meaning without our being told of the meaning explicitly, or is described in language indicating such meaning indirectly but clearly." Let us consider Momaday's "Angle of Geese" to see how a post-symbolist merges abstract meaning and sensory detail:

The poem is difficult to understand until we know more about the circumstances Momaday is describing. The first three stanzas are his reflections on the death of a friend's child, and describe the inadequacy of language to encompass such grief. The last three stanzas turn to an incident that happened on a hunting trip Momaday took as a teenager: he had retrieved a goose that one of the hunters had shot and was holding it as it died. In the lines "How shall we adorn / Recognition with our speech?" Momaday indicates, by his choice of the verb adorn, that language functions in this painful situation merely as decoration. He is alluding to the poverty of words that one always feels in our culture at such times. Very few Americans say, "I'm sorry your little boy is dead"; it sounds so pitifully inadequate. They usually use some peripherasis—"I'm sorry to hear the news"—hoping by vagueness to imply something more meaningful. But the idea here is that, whatever is said, the "Dead first-born / Will lag in the wake of words."

It is important to remember Momaday's roots in Indian culture in reading the poem. When he says "We are civil," one should be aware of the connotation of civilized and should contrast the traditional Indian custom of keening the tremolo, cutting off one's hair, and even occasionally a finger, in wild lamentation, with the "civilized" Anglo's custom of repressing grief. Indian mourning is a violent release and purgation of grief. Accompanied by the passionate emotions of the Indian mourning ceremonies, words would have more force. "I am sorry that your child is dead," would not have a hollow ring in an Indian context. The context of "Angle of Geese," however, is Anglo-Saxon America, and in taking "measure of the loss," Momaday is "slow to find / The mere margin of repose," the way to come to grips with the event emotionally. He cannot even find the margin, the edge, or beginning, of repose.

In the second half of the poem Momaday shifts without transition from the dead child to the dying goose. The link between the two is associational, to use one of Winters's favorite terms. The doctrine of association can be traced to Hobbes and Locke, who argued that ideas arise from association of sensory perceptions. The literary application of this idea affected poetic structure by replacing the traditional logical construction of poems with what Winters called "the structure of revery," and it brought about the post-symbolist practice of expressing ideas through images, which are a verbal record of sensory impressions.

In "Angle of Geese" Momaday moves in memory from the dead child of the present to the dying goose of his childhood. Momaday has described the incident at length in a column he wrote in the Santa Fe New Mexican [September 23, 1973]. His account is beautifully written, and seems worth reprinting in total, both for its own sake and for its help in explaining the poem. It also shows the work of compression that Momaday has done in turning the childhood incident into poetry.

One of the Wild Beautiful Creatures

That day the sun never did come out. It was a strange, indefinite illumination, almost obscure, set very deep in the sky,—a heavy, humid cold without wind. Flurries of snow moved down from the mountains, one after another, and clouds of swirling mist spilled slowly down the slopes splashing in slow, slow motion on the plain.

For days I had seen migrating birds. They moved down the long corridor of the valley, keeping to the river. The day before I had seen a flock of twenty or thirty geese descend into the willows a mile or more downstream. They were still there, as far as I knew.

I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I suppose. I had a different view of hunting in those days, an exalted view, which was natural enough, given my situation. I had grown up in mountain and desert country, always in touch with the wilderness, and I took it all for granted. The men of my acquaintance were hunters. Indeed they were deeply committed to a hunting tradition. And I admired them in precisely those terms.

We drew near the river and began to creep, the way a cat creeps upon a sparrow. I remember that I placed my feet very carefully, one after the other, in the snow without sound. I felt an excitement welling up within me. Before us was a rise which now we were using as a blind. Beyond and below it was the river, which we could not yet see, except where it reached away at either end of our view, curving away into the pale, winter landscape. We advanced up the shallow slope, crouching, leaned into the snow and raised ourselves up on our toes in order to see. The geese were there, motionless on the water, riding like decoys. But though they were still they were not calm. I could sense their wariness, the tension that was holding them in that stiff, tentative attitude of alert.

And suddenly they exploded from the water. They became a terrible, clamorous swarm, struggling to gain their element. Their great bodies, trailing water, seemed to heave under the wild, beating wings. They disintegrated into a blur of commotion, panic. There was a deafening roar; my heart was beating like the wings of the geese.

And just as suddenly out of this apparent chaos there emerged a perfect fluent symmetry. The geese assembled on the cold air, even as the river was still crumpled with their going, and formed a bright angle on the distance. Nothing could have been more beautiful, more wonderfully realized upon the vision of a single moment. Such beauty is inspirational in itself; for it exists for its own sake.

One of the wild, beautiful creatures remained in the river, mortally wounded, its side perforated with buckshot. I waded out into the hard, icy undercurrent and took it up in my arm. The living weight of it was very great, and with its life's blood it warmed my frozen hands. I carried it for a long time. There was no longer any fear in its eyes, only something like sadness and yearning, until at last the eyes curdled in death. The great shape seemed perceptibly lighter, diminished in my hold, as if the ghost given up had gone at last to take its place in that pale angle in the long distance.

These words, like the poem, were written long after the event, after Momaday had undergone a change from an unquestioning, romantic acceptance of hunting to a viewpoint which, the reader can infer, is more critical. What remains in his mind as an adult is a memory of the pathos of the dying goose, yearning to take its place in the "bright angle" with the rest of the flock.

The poem is post-symbolist in technique because Momaday imbues his childhood experience with an abstract significance. The goose becomes the "huge ancestral goose," a prototype of geese, rather than one bird. Momaday compares the formation of the flock in flight to the angle of time and eternity, imbuing their flight with a metaphysical or transcendental dimension. The wounded goose, between life and death, is still alive and alert, and yet it is "wide of time"; that is, its impending death has released it from the bondage of time.

Using post-symbolist technique, Momaday implies a meaning in his description of the scene, though never implicitly stating it. Put baldly, the meaning is that death is not something to be dreaded but a means of escaping the trammels of time. This formulation is oversimple, only a portion of the statement that the description makes, but it does inhere in and is at the center of it. Post-symbolist images cannot be very satisfactorily reduced to prose, yet the prose element, the tenor, is definitely a crucial part of them.

"Angle of Geese" is written in syllabic verse, rather than in the accentual syllabic verse of most traditional poetry. In a syllabic line the "accented syllables must vary sufficiently in number and position that they do not follow a pattern (a pattern would give us standard meter) but must still contribute to the rhythm," whereas accentual syllabic verse contains a regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. In "Angle of Geese" the first and third lines of each stanza contain five syllables and the second and fourth lines contain seven. The rhythm of the poem is very subtle, and its effect not markedly different from that of prose, even though the first and third lines of each stanza rhyme. Since the rhymed lines are not usually heavily endstopped, they are not at all obtrusive and, indeed, might even escape the notice of a casual reader.

The poem recalls Winters in its solemn tone and stately rhythm, in its curiously formal and abstract diction, and in its fondness for polysyllabic, latinate words. "How shall we adorn / Recognition with our speech?" is reminiscent of some of Winters's verse, for instance ["To William Dinsmore Briggs Conducting His Seminar"]:

Amid the walls' insensate white, some crime
Is redefined above the sunken mass
Of crumbled years; logic reclaims the crass,
Frees from historic dross the invidious mime.

The rhyme is heavier, the meter iambic pentameter, but, as in Momaday's poem, the diction is formal, the language abstract and latinate.

Winters was considered an academic poet, and in Momaday's early verse we can sometimes get a faint whiff of the lamp. Consider, for instance, "The Bear."

The reader might naturally suppose that a poem by an Indian about a bear has been inspired by a hunting incident, but, as it happens, the model for this bear is Old Ben in Faulkner's "The Bear." Momaday not only depicts the same scene as Faulkner—the confrontation of the hunter and the huge, old bear—but he borrows from Faulkner's diction as well:

Then he saw the bear. It did not emerge, appear: it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him.

Momaday uses Faulkner's passage the way Shakespeare uses Plutarch's description of Cleopatra's barge, borrowing the most vivid phrases, preserving the essence of the description, and transmuting prose into poetry. Like "Angle of Geese," "The Bear" is syllabic verse, lines one and three of each stanza having five syllables, and lines two and four having seven. Momaday makes greater use of rhyme here than in "Angle of Geese," with alternating lines rhyming. Still, there is not much endstopping or heavy stress on final syllables, so the rhyme is unobtrusive.

Winters had commented that the language of the poem is very quiet, and "could well be the language of distinguished prose." He concludes that it is poetry "by virtue of the careful selection of details and the careful juxtaposition of these details, selection and juxtaposition which result in concentration of meaning, and by virtue of its rhythm, which is the rhythm of verse, but very subtle." This is exaggerated, since the language of prose never includes rhyme, but it is worth noting because it indicates that, even at its most formal, Momaday's poetry was not that far from his recent prose poetry, although at first the new poems seem a dramatic departure.

The importance of noting that Faulkner's Ben and not some real bear provided the model for Momaday's poem is that it reminds the reader that Momaday is a man of letters, not a noble savage, and that his poetry is in the same literary tradition as that of any American writing today. But "The Bear" is not only literary; like most of Momaday's verse, it is vividly descriptive. More than anything else Winters detested vagueness, and inveighed against it to Momaday and all his other students. Winter's argument with the romantics was that they seldom described poetic subjects in visual terms.

Shelley was one of Winters' favorite examples of this romantic tendency, because his famous poem "The Skylark" is a series of similes, none of which serve to describe the bird in its avian manifestation. In the poem Shelley compares the lark to a "cloud of fire," a "poet hidden," a "high-born maiden," and an "unbodied joy." In contrast, Momaday presents the bear, not in full detail, but in a few descriptive strokes, as in a line drawing that suggests as much as it depicts, but nonetheless presents a fully realized creature. We see, or sense, the bear—massive, old, still, and maimed.

Momaday's bear, however, is no less a symbol than Shelley's lark. To Faulkner, Old Ben was not only a bear, but also a symbol of the vanishing wilderness. Momaday incorporates a sense of this into his poem. As Winters describes it, "The poem is more descriptive than anything else, yet in the third and last stanzas the details are more than physical and indicate something of the essential wilderness." Momaday is careful to soften the effect by the use of "seems," but the bear, "dimensionless, … forever there," is clearly more than one particular animal; he is also the incarnation of some primeval, fundamental truth about the wilderness.

Another poem in which Momaday combines symbols with minute and keen description is "Buteo Regalis":

His frailty discrete, the rodent turns, looks.
What sense first warns? The winging is unheard,
Unseen but as distant motion made whole,
Singular, slow, unbroken in its glide.
It veers, and veering, tilts broad-surfaced wings.
Aligned, the span bends to begin the dive
And falls, alternately white and russet,
Angle and curve, gathering momentum.

Here is a brief sketch of a hawk swooping to its kill. The prey is an unspecified rodent; we are not told whether it is a rat, mouse, or prairie dog. Momaday alternates the use of syllabic verse with iambic pentameter (lines 2, 4, 5, and 6 are iambic), and Winters suggests, persuasively, that "the first and third lines, in their syllabic rhythm suggest the sudden hesitation; the four pentameter lines suggest the smooth motion of the soaring hawk; the last two lines in their syllabic rhythm and fragmented phrasing, suggest the rapid and confusing descent."

Notice Momaday's description of the rodent: its frailty is "discrete"—separate—a reference to its isolation in its last moments of life. Momaday depicts the hawk impressionistically. The rodent senses it more than sees it—"Unseen but as a distant motion made whole." The vignette is not completed—Momaday does not tell us whether the hawk gets his prey or not. Somehow the outcome seems less important than the iconic glimpse we get: hawk stooping, rodent turning. It is a glimpse into the wild heart of nature. As Winters puts it, "It seems rather a perception of the 'discrete' wilderness, the essential wilderness." After Winters, the most important influence on Momaday's early poetry was the work of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, the nineteenth-century New Englander whose poems were the subject of Momaday's Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford. Momaday's interest in Tuckerman persisted beyond his dissertation. He wrote an article on Tucker-mans' "The Cricket," published an edition of Tuckerman's poems, and still includes Tuckerman in his course on the antiromantic movement in nineteenth-century American literature.

There are some notable parallels between Momaday and Tuckerman. Tuckerman, the earliest of the post-symbolists, wrote poetry that combined subtle and detailed descriptions of nature with symbolism, a practice Momaday has emulated. Momaday, like Tuckerman before him, is an amateur naturalist. Furthermore, both men studied but never practiced the law, preferring to become poets.

Tuckerman influenced Momaday both stylistically and philosophically. Stylistically, Momaday admired and adopted Tuckerman's naturalist's eye for detail. Tuckerman's poems are full of references to flowers like bloodroot, king orchis, pearlwort, and jacinth, and herbs like wastebalm and feverfew. Sometimes Tuckerman just names the plants; sometimes, in his best verse, he describes them, briefly but vividly. Momaday describes Tuckerman's poems as "remarkable, point-blank descriptions of nature; they are filled with small, precise, and whole things: purring bees and varvain spikes, shives and amaryllis, wind flowers and stramony." The impression one has to Tuckerman is of a man who sees the world of nature clearly and distinctly, rather than through a romantic blur.

But Tuckerman is just as capable as Shelley of making a creature into a symbol. In "The Cricket," which in Momaday's opinion is Tuckerman's greatest poem, the cricket is a complex figure symbolizing the forces of nature. Tuckerman asserts that to understand the cricket's song is to understand the universe, an idea akin to Tennyson's statement in "Flower in the Crannied Wall." Tuckerman concludes that it is an immoral act to pry into nature's secrets, what Chaucer called "Goddes pryvetee." Although Tuckerman does not make the comparison, he apparently sees the invasion of the natural world by the probing mind as similar to the original sin of eating of the tree of knowledge. Tuckerman's conclusion is existential; the universe is impenetrable, and the important question, as Momaday put it in his article on "The Cricket," ["The Heretical Cricket," Southern Review 3, Nos. 1-2 (1967)] is "how to live in the certainty of death."

Philosphically, although it would be too simplistic to attribute Momaday's existential views solely to Tuckerman's influence, it is worth noting that the men share a similar outlook. Momaday's poem "Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion" is informed by ideas very similar to those of "The Cricket":

I ponder how He died, despairing once.
I've heard the cry subside in vacant skies,
In clearings where no other was. Despair,
Which, in the vibrant wake of utterance,
Resides in desolate calm, preoccupies,
Though it is still. There is no solace there.

That calm inhabits wilderness, the sea,
And where no peace inheres but solitude;
Near death it most impends. It was for Him,
Absurd and public in His agony,
Inscrutably itself, nor misconstrued,
Nor metaphrased in art or pseudonym:

A vague contagion. Old, the mural fades …
Reminded of the fainter sea I scanned,
I recollect: How mute in constancy!
I could not leave the wall of palisades
Till cormorants returned my eyes on land.
The mural but implies eternity:

Not death, but silence after death is change.
Judean hills, the endless afternoon,
The farther groves and arbors seasonless
But fix the mind within the moment's range.
Where evening would obscure our sorrow soon,
There shines too much a sterile loveliness.

No imprecisions of commingled shade,
No shimmering deceptions of the sun,
Herein no semblances remark the cold
Unhindered swell of time, for time is stayed
The Passion wanes into oblivion,
And time and timelessness confuse, I'm told.

These centuries removed from either fact
Have lain upon the critical expanse
And been of little consequence. The void
Is calendared in stone; the human act,
Outrageous, is in vain. The hours advance
Like flecks of foam borne landward and destroyed.

Like W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts," this poem is about a poet's reaction to a painting, and his consequent reflections about life. From the outset it is apparent that Momaday takes an existential view of the crucifixion: God is dead. Christ dies in despair, his cry subsiding in "vacant skies"—skies empty of God. Man is alone on earth, "where no peace inheres but solitude." To Momaday, Christ's agony is absurd and inscrutable, or it has meaning only as a singular gesture; it did not, as Christianity teaches, bring redemption to man. Christ's death is often misconstrued, Momaday says, or translated into art, into pictures like the mural. The mural implies eternity, but there is none. The change after death is not to eternal life, but to silence, nothingness. During one's lifetime there is little comfort because time is relentless. Momaday's great image is taken from the sea he watches in the poem. "The cold / Unhindered swell of time" is a prototypical example of a post-symbolist image. Momaday expands on the image in the last stanza: "The hours advance / Like flecks of foam borne landward and destroyed."

The idea that time is passing ceaselessly is of course one of the most familiar themes in poetry, the basis of ubi sunt and carpe diem poems, for example, but Momaday's lines are particularly reminiscent of the best lines in "The Cricket":

Behold the autumn goes,
The Shadow grows,
The moments take hold of eternity;
Even while we stop to wrangle or repine
Our lives are gone
Like thinnest mist,
Like yon escaping colour in the trees.

Momaday continues to write poems in his conservative, Wintersian mode—poems, for instance, like "Anywhere Is a Street into the Night," the title poem from the collection that he published after a trip to Russia. But he has also begun to experiment with a more fluid form, the prose poem. These are usually about Indian subjects, and although, as Winters pointed out, even his most traditional poems approached the "rhythm of stately prose," these prose poems seem a radical departure. They most resemble the oral tradition of the Indian tale, and, indeed, most of them are short narratives.

     "The Fear of Bo-Talee"

Bo-talee rode easily among his enemies, once, twice, three—
and four times. And all who saw him were amazed, for he
was utterly without fear; so it seemed. But afterwards he said:
Certainly I was afraid. I was afraid of the fear in the eyes of
my enemies.

     "The Stalker"

Sampt' drew the string back and back until he felt the bow
wobble in his hand, and he let the arrow go. It shot across
the long light of the morning and struck the black face of a
stone in the meadow; it glanced then away towards the west,
limping along in the air; and then it settled down in the grass
and lay still. Sampt'e approached; he looked at it with wonder
and was wary; honestly he believed that the arrow might take
flight again; so much of his life did he give into it.

These two short recitatives might have appeared as chapters in The Way to Rainy Mountain. They have the stately oral cadence of the Indian teller of tales and, although strongly rhythmical, have shed the last formal regular strictures of verse.

Momaday is a fine poet, but in my opinion he is at his best in prose. His prose is masterful in House Made of Dawn, but it is at its best in the lyrical short passages of The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Names. These new poems, like "The Fear of Bo-talee," seem to indicate that Momaday's verse and prose, once so different, are conjoining to create a single and powerful voice. Momaday's prose, both fiction and nonfiction, had been written solely from an Indian point of view; his verse, academic and formal, showed more trace of his literary than of his ethnic beginnings. These new prose poems are Indian in tone and subject.