"Four Mountain Wolves" makes use of an innovative combination of modernist free verse and traditional American Indian chant forms. Free verse, which was developed as a poetic style in the 1800s and pioneered by such figures as Walt Whitman, was an attempt to allow the poet's emotions to drive the length and form of a line of poetry. For almost all of human history and in almost every human society, poetry was characterized by regularity in its lines. As an oral form, poetry needed to have such regularity in order for performers to more easily memorize the poems and for audiences to be drawn in by the rhythm and sound of the words. But largely because of the Romantic movement of the late 1700s and early 1800s, poets began to believe that they should be allowed to use any form, or even no form, to express themselves, because...