A Study Guide for N. Scott Momaday's "New World"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for N. Scott Momaday's "New World," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535829496

Book preview

12

New World

N. Scott Momaday

1976

Introduction

N. Scott Momaday is a Kiowa-Cherokee Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and poet. In his fiction, Momaday explores the relationship between Native American traditions, cultures, and beliefs and modern American society. Similarly, his poetry blends Native oral traditions and themes with poetic forms derived from contemporary white and European movements and traditions. Like a number of his works, the poem New World focuses on the natural world, giving it spiritual significance. The poem moves in time from dawn to the dead of night, detailing the changes in the natural world as the day progresses. In each of the four short stanzas, Momaday uses two-syllable lines to capture the stark images of the natural world. Reverent in tone, the poem honors the world as a thing apart from humanity. The first line of the poem suggests that humans are just witnesses to the world of nature, but the relationship between the human world and the natural world may also be read in another light, as Momaday pleads with humanity to cultivate the proper tone of reverence toward nature.

New World was originally published in 1976 in the poetry collection The Gourd Dancer. It was reprinted in 1992 in the collection In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961–1991. That collection was reissued in 2009 by the University of New Mexico