# Cowboy Poetry: History, Origins, Influences, Forms

David Stanley discusses the history and development cowboy poetry in American culture as part of the Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series sponsored by the American Folklife Center. Stanley has been researching cowboy poetry for nearly 20 years. Cowboy poetry in the United States dates back to the period of the long-distance cattle drives from Texas to Kansas that followed the Civil War, and it has been a thriving and ever-changing tradition ever since. As a genre, it has been influenced by literary works - the Bible, the Odyssey, Shakespeare's plays, the works of the Beat Generation - by popular writers such as Robert W. Service and Rudyard Kipling, by Victorian popular culture and its fondness for schoolhouse and parlor recitations, by Hollywood cowboy films, by country-western music and by political developments from the advent of homesteading and barbed wire in the 19th century to contemporary vegetarianism, environmentalism and economic development associated with the "New West."

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2006
- By: American Folklife Center
- Genres: Western, History
- Archive: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2024698373/)
- Licence or status: Rights statement at the Library of Congress (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Library of Congress
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/loc/2024698373?play=1)