Louis LAmour - Smoke from This Altar

The first book Louis purchased for his own library was The Standard Book of British and American Verse. It was published in 1932 and much used and loved. It is still in our library, now in its second binding. Louis love of poetry and the English language was so strong and important in his life that it carried him through many dangerous and lonely days. At the time, poetry was the expression of Louis most important thoughts and feelings. It was the first manner in which he wrote about his life, his views and the places he had seen. Some of these poems got published in various newspapers and magazines, and though he made only a few dollars from these sales, they gave him the optimism to keep writing.

One of his most encouraging moments came in 1936, when he received a letter from George Riley Hall, the editor of the Daily Free-Lance, about his poem, Banked Fires, which had just been published in the Daily Oklahoman. A section of the letter read: The poem is exquisite. The craftsmanship shows the master workman. The imagery is all one could ask. The treatment is skilled. The sentiment one that will appeal to millions. There is one line that is worthy of the old mastersThe arching of a dream across the years. A gifted writer might produce a whole volume and not write a line like that.

Louis returned to the United States in the late nineteen thirties, after years at sea. He moved in with his parents on a small farm near Choctaw, Oklahoma, that Parker, his brother, had bought for them a few years before. He was thirty years old, and knew that if he was ever going to make something of himself as a writer he had better get started. He began writing short story after short story but they almost always were rejected. I think that he must have felt very tempted to leave again, to go back to the kind of life he had lived before he settled down and forced himself to think about his future. You can feel that wanderlust calling to him in his poems, Im a Stranger Here, Words From a Wanderer, and I Shall Go Back. He even wrote about putting his old life behind him and facing his future in Let Me Forget, the poem that he used to close the Yondering collection.

Earlier, he had taken a few stabs at poetry. In the beginning he didnt even know about rhyme and meter. A friend who read some of his attempts in the late twenties told him that it didnt scan. He had no idea what she was talking about, but being Louis, back to the library he went to read and reread Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Frost, and Service, to discover just what it was that made a great poem.

During his travels he would occasionally compose poems, and it always seemed remarkable to me that he could both create and then remember them without writing them down; it seemed as if he could never forget a line or even a word. Louis explained that before the development of writing, poetry was one of the tricks ancient people used to remember stories. The rhyme and meter of each line would help you to remember the next. Because of this, poems that told a story, like those of Robert Service, were very popular with the hobos and sailors of his day. They were men with few possessions, some even illiterate, and so they were, in a way, like those ancient people who carried their literature in their heads.

One night in a ships focstle, Louis had been trying to work out a particularly romantic poem when several of the other seamen began to tease him about only being able to write love-stuff. After several hours of work he presented them with My Three Friends, proving that he indeed had other talents.

When we first began dating, Louis gave me a copy of Smoke From This Altar, and through it I began to learn a little about the man who would become my husband and the rather of our children. Many of the poems are about what he saw and thought and felt while he was in China and the South Pacific; others are about places he visited that we went back to together. We drove out to Secret Pass, the subject of a poem in this book, just after we got married. If I remember correctly, it is on the old Hardyville stage road outside of Kingman, Arizona. Biography In Stone was written about an outcropping of rock that Louis thought looked slightly like a man; he had become fascinated by it when he was a young man working at the Katherine Mine in the same area. Enchanted Mesa was written sixty years ago about what he saw when he first came through the area just west of where we now have our ranch.