SOURCE: "John Rollin Ridge," in Southwest Review, Vol. XVII, No. 1, Autumn, 1931, pp. 59-71.

In the following excerpt, Debo provides an overview of Ridge's poetry, concluding that Ridge was "a Cherokee poet only in the sense that he was both a Cherokee and a poet, and that his intellectual bent was all Christian, classical, and American rather than native".

Most of Ridge's literary work has been lost; probably a great deal of it was of the ephemeral sort that goes to make up much of the output of the journalist. A volume of his verse [Poems] was published posthumously by his wife in 1868. Although somewhat disappointing after the strength and beauty of literary style revealed by his personal correspondence, still these poems throw some additional light on his strange and many-sided personality. As most of his life was spent in banishment from what was felt to be his home...