Because Haniel Long is outside mainstream literary movements and cults, he traditionally is viewed as a minor poet and essayist, whose best-known work, Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca (1936), while it received international attention, further cast him as a regional writer and critic. At least a decade younger than Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robert Frost, Long was a contemporary of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Yet, Long ignored the experimental movement in modern poetry, even though he shared the classical enthusiasms of Eliot and the Chinese interests of Pound. Reviewed retrospectively, Long's poetry--merely out of step with poetic modes considered superior by the New Critics of his time--stands up remarkably well as the chronology of a writer whose work grew out of and matured with his friendships and intellectual background and reflected the influence of his region. Moreover, regionalism, often a disparaging tag attached to would-be...