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VOICES WEST: COWBOY POETRY SECTION
Poetry: Introduction
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F. Loesser's Have I Stayed Away Too Long

F. Loesser's "Have I Stayed Away Too Long"
1943

This section is heavily influenced by many excellent articles in The making of masculinities: the new men's studies, edited by Harry Brod (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987). John Crowley in "Howells, Stoddard and male homosocial attachment in Victorian America" states: "Some clarity is gained, therefore, by following the example of those feminist critics who distinguish between homosocial, referring to the entire range of same-sex bonds, and homosexual, referring to the part of the homosocial continuum marked by genital sexuality. Although the homosocial-homosexual distinction is problematic at best, it has a useful, if limited, descriptive value." (p.302). My lists of cowboy poetry and song material will be just this, very descriptive, following in the footsteps of authors noted by Crowley, i.e., Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sharon O'Brien, and Robert K. Martin.

Dorothy Hammond and Alta Jablow in their "Gilgamesh and the Sundance Kid: the myth of male friendship" (In: The making of masculinities: the new men's studies) note that "the major change in modern versions of the myth is the loss of the aristocratic tradition ... modern protagonists, often heroes in spite of themselves, are usually of the lower class: common soldiers, seamen, prospectors, cowboys, criminals, and policemen. Their dangerous occupations provide the arena for the drama of friendship" (p.252). There is much in print providing access to the aristocratic written record. Few cowboys left journals, diaries or correspondence. So the oral tradition is one source of recovering cowboy friendship, myth and legend. The long poems by John G. Neihardt fall easily into this mythology.

Hammond and Jablow add: "the ideology of friendship -- affection, loyalty and trust -- has never gone out of style (p.256).

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Last revised: December 30, 2000