Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) in 1913. Photo by Victor George. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Vachel Lindsay
Born	November 10, 1879 Springfield, Illinois
Died	December 5, 1931 (aged 52)
Occupation	Poet

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (November 10, 1879 - December 5, 1931) was an American poet.

Life

Overview

Lindsay is considered the father of modern singing poetry, as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted. His correspondence with poet William Butler Yeats details his intentions to revive the musical qualities in poetry as had been practiced by the ancient Greeks.

Because of his identity as a performance poet and his use of American Midwest themes, Lindsay became known in the 1910's as the "Prairie Troubadour." For the final 20 years of his life, Lindsay was one of the best-known poets in America. His reputation was high enough to enable him to befriend, encourage, and mentor other poets, such as Langston Hughes and Sara Teasdale. However, his poetry lacked elements that encouraged the attention of academics, and after his death he became an obscure figure.

Youth

Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois, where his father, Vachel Thomas Lindsay, worked as a medical doctor and had considerable financial resources. As a result, the Lindsays lived next door to the Illinois Executive Mansion, home of the Governor of Illinois. This location of his childhood home had its influence on Lindsay, and one of his poems, "The Eagle that is Forgotten," eulogizes Illinois governor John P. Altgeld, whom Lindsay admired for his courage in pardoning the anarchists involved in the Haymarket Affair, despite the strong protests of U.S. President Grover Cleveland.

Growing up in Springfield influenced Lindsay in other ways as well, as evidenced in such poems as "On the Building of Springfield" and culminating in poems praising Springfield's most famous resident, Abraham Lincoln. In "Lincoln", Lindsay exclaims "Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all!" In his 1914 poem "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight (In Springfield, Illinois)", Lindsay specifically places Lincoln 'in' Springfield, with the poem opening:

It is portentous, and a thing of state

That here at midnight, in our little town

A mourning figure walks, and will not rest...

Lindsay studied medicine at Hiram College in Ohio from 1897 to 1900, but he did not want to be a doctor. His parents pressured him toward medicine. He wrote home to his parents saying that he wasn't meant to be a doctor and that his true living should be that of a painter; his parents wrote back saying that doctors can draw pictures in their free time.

Leaving Hiram, he thought he would become an artist, and went to Chicago to study at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1900 to 1903. In 1904 he left to attend the New York School of Art (now The New School) to study pen and ink. Lindsay remained interested in art for the rest of his life, drawing illustrations for some of his poetry. His art studies also probably led him to appreciate the new art form of silent film, on which he wrote a book in 1915: The Art of the Moving Picture, generally considered the earliest book of film criticism (according to critic Stanley Kauffmann, discussing Lindsay in For the Love of Movies: The dtory of American film criticism).

Beginnings as a poet

While in New York City in 1905, Lindsay turned to poetry in earnest. He tried to sell his poems on the streets. Self-printing his poems, he began to barter a pamphlet entitled "Rhymes To Be Traded For Bread", which he traded for food as a self-perceived modern version of a medieval troubadour.

From March to May, 1906, Lindsay traveled roughly 600 miles on foot from Jacksonville, Florida, to Kentucky, again trading his poetry for food and lodging. From April to May, 1908, Lindsay undertook another poetry-selling trek, walking from New York City to Hiram, Ohio.

From May to September 1912 he traveled - again on foot - from Illinois to New Mexico, trading his poems for food and lodging. During this last trek, Lindsay composed his most famous poem, "The Congo". On his return, Harriet Monroe published in Poetry magazine his poem "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" in 1913, followed by "The Congo" in 1914. At this point, Lindsay became very well-known.

Poetry as performance

Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle, Harry the uplands, Steal all the cattle, Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle, Bing. Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom...

The Congo

Unlike Lindsay's more purely intellectual contemporaries, the poet declaimed his works from the stage, complete with the extravagant gestures of a carnival barker and old time preacher, from the beginning declaring himself to be a product of what he termed 'Higher Vaudevilleâ': 'I think that my first poetic impulse is for music; second a definite conception with the ring of the universe' (Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters 1935, page 62) This is evidenced by the 1931 recording he made just before his suicide, his still-radical performances of 'The Mysterious Cat', 'The Flower Fed Buffalo' and parts of 'The Congo' exhibiting a fiery and furious, zany, at times incoherent delivery that appears to have owed more to jazz than poetry, though the highly-religious Lindsay was always reluctant to align himself thus. Nevertheless, part of the success and great fame that Lindsay achieved - albeit briefly - was due to the singular manner in which he presented his poetry "fundamentally as a performance, as an aural and temporal experience...meant...to be chanted, whispered, belted out, sung, amplified by gesticulation and movement, and punctuated by shouts and whoops." [2] His best-known poem, "The Congo," exemplified his revolutionary aesthetic of sound for sound's sake. It imitates the pounding of the drums in the rhythms and in onomotopeic nonsense words. At parts, the poem ceases to use conventional words when representing the chants of Congo's indigenous people, relying just on sound alone.

Fame

Lindsay's fame as a poet grew in the 1910s. Because Harriet Monroe showcased him with 2 other Illinois poets - Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters - his name became linked to theirs. The success of either of the other 2, in turn, seemed to help the 3rd.

File:Vachel Lindsay 1912.jpg

Vachel Lindsay in 1912

Lindsay himself indicated in the 1915 preface to "The Congo" that no less a figure than William Butler Yeats respected his work. Yeats felt they shared a concern for capturing the sound of the primitive and of singing in poetry.

Lindsay was well known throughout the nation, and especially in Illinois, because of his travels which were sometimes recorded on the front page of every newspaper.

Marriage, children, financial troubles

Despite his fame, Lindsay's private life featured many disappointments, such as his unsuccessful courtship in 1914 of fellow poet Sara Teasdale; she married a rich businessman, Ernst Filsinger. While this itself may have caused Lindsay to become more concerned with money, his financial pressures increased even more later on.

In 1924 he moved to Spokane, Washington, where he lived in room 1129 of the Davenport Hotel until 1929. On May 19, 1925, he married the 23-year-old Elizabeth Connor. The 45-year-old poet at this point found himself under great economic pressure, due at least in part to the new need to support his considerably younger wife. These financial worries escalated even more when in May 1926 the Lindsays had a daughter, Susan Doniphan Lindsay, and in September 1927 a son, Nicholas Cave Lindsay.

Desperate for money to meet the growing demands of his growing family, Lindsay undertook an exhausting string of readings throughout the eastern and midwestern United States that lasted from October 1928 through March 1929. During this time, Poetry magazine awarded him a lifetime achievement award of $500 (a substantial sum at the time).

After this tour, in April 1929, Lindsay and his family moved to the house of his birth in Springfield, Illinois: an expensive undertaking. In that same year, and coinciding with the stock market crash of 1929, Lindsay published two more books of poems: The Litany of Washington Street and Every Soul A Circus.

He gained money by doing odd jobs throughout, but in general earned very little during his travels.

Suicide

Crushed by financial worry, and in failing health from his 6-month road trip, Lindsay sank into depression, and on December 5, 1931, Lindsay committed suicide by drinking a bottle of Lysol. His last words were, "They tried to get me - I got them first!"

He is buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery, Springfield.

Writing

Attitudes towards race

Most contemporaries acknowledged Lindsay's intention to be an advocate for African-Americans. This intention was particularly evident in the 1918 poem "The Jazz Birds", praising the war efforts of African-Americans during World War I, an issue to which the vast majority of white America seemed blind. Additionally, W.E.B. Du Bois hailed Lindsay's story "The Golden-Faced People" for its insights into racism. Lindsay saw himself as anti-racist not only in his own writing but in his encouragement of a writer; he credited himself with discovering Langston Hughes, who, while working as a busboy at a Washington, D.C. restaurant where Lindsay ate, gave Lindsay copies of his poems.

However, many contemporaries and later critics have contended over whether a couple of Lindsay's poems should be seen as homages to African and African-American music, as perpetuation of the "savage African" stereotype, or as both. DuBois, before reading and praising "the Golden-Faced People," wrote in a review of Lindsay's "Booker T. Washington Trilogy" that "Lindsay knows two things, and two things only, about Negroes: The beautiful rhythm of their music and the ugly side of their drunkards and outcasts. From this poverty of material he tries now and then to make a contribution to Negro literature." DuBois also criticized "The Congo," which has been the most persistent focus of the criticisms of racial stereotyping in Lindsay's work.

Subtitled "A Study of the Negro Race" and beginning with a section titled "Their Basic Savagery", "The Congo" reflects the tensions within a relatively isolated and pastoral society suddenly confronted by the industrialized world. The poem was inspired by a sermon preached in October 1913 that detailed the drowning of a missionary in the Congo River; this event had drawn worldwide criticism, as had the colonial exploitation of the Congo under the government of Leopold II of Belgium. Lindsay defended the poem; in a letter to Joel Spingarn, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the NAACP, Lindsay wrote that "My 'Congo' and 'Booker T. Washington Trilogy' have both been denounced by the Colored people for reasons that I cannot fathom.... The third section of 'The Congo' is certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to be in regard to any race." Spingarn responded by acknowledging Lindsay's good intentions, but saying that Lindsay sometimes glamorized differences between people of African descent and people of other races, while many African-Americans wished to emphasize the "feelings and desires" that they held in common with others.

Similarly, critics in academia often portray Lindsay as a well-meaning but misguided primitivist in his representations of Africans and African Americans. Critic, Rachel BlDuPlessis argues that the poem, while perhaps meant to be "hopeful," actually "others" Africans as an inherently violent race. In the poem and in Lindsays's defenses of it, DuPlessis hears Lindsay warning white readers not to be "hoo-doo'd" or seduced by violent African "mumbo jumbo." This warning seems to suggest that white civilization has been "infected" by African violence; Lindsay thus, in effect, "blames blacks for white violence directed against them."

Conversely, Susan Gubar notes approvingly that "the poem contains lines blaming black violence on white imperialism." While acknowledging that the poem seems to have given its author and audiences an excuse to indulge in "'romantic racism' or 'slumming in slang,'" she also observes that Lindsay was "much more liberal than many of his poetic contemporaries," and that he seems to have intended a statement against the kind of racist violence perpetrated under Leopold in the Congo.

Recognition

In 1915, Lindsay gave a poetry reading to President Woodrow Wilson and his entire cabinet.

Edgar Lee Masters published a biography of Lindsay in 1935 (4 years after its subject's death) entitled Vachel Lindsay: A poet in America.

Today, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency helps to maintain the Vachel Lindsay House at 603 South 5th Street in Springfield, the site of Lindsay's birth and death. The Agency has donated the home to the state which then closed it to restore the home costing $1.5 million. The site is now again open to the public giving full, guided tours for those who choose to ring the bell. The hours are Tues-Sat: 12-4:00pm.

The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds a collection of his papers.

Publications

Poetry

• The Tree of the Laughing Bells. New York: privately printed, 1905.
• The Village Magazine. Springfield, IL: Jefferson's, 1910. 2nd enlarged edition, 1925.
• Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread: Being new verses by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Springfield, Illinois, June, 1912, Printed expressly as a substitute for money. This book is to be used in exchange for the necessities of life on a tramp-journey from the author's home town through the west and back. Springfield, IL: privately printed, 1912.
• General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and other poems (first edition published as Nicholas Vachel Lindsay; includes poems from previous volumes). New York: Kennerley, 1913.
• The Congo, and other poems (with introduction by Harriet Monroe). New York: Macmillan, 1914.
• The Chinese Nightingale, and other poems. New York: Macmillan, 1917.
• The Daniel Jazz, and other poems. London: George Bell, 1920.
• The Golden Whales of California, and other rhymes in the American language. New York: Macmillan, 1920.
• Collected Poems (illustrated by Lindsay). New York: Macmillan, 1923
  • revised illustrated edition, 1935.
• Going-to-the-Sun (illustrated by Lindsay). New York: Appleton, 1923.
• Going-to-the-Stars (illustrated by Lindsay). New York: Appleton, 1926.
• The Candle in the Cabin: A weaving together of script and singing (self-illustrated by Lindsay). New York, NY: D. Appleton, 1926.
• Every Soul Is a Circus (illustrate by Lindsay & Richards). New York: Macmillan, 1929; Granger Books, 1976.
• Selected Poems (edited & with introduction by Hazelton Spencer). New York: Macmillan, 1930.
• Selected Poems. (edited by Mark Harris). New York: Macmillan, 1963.
• Adventures, Rhyme and Design: Early writings (with introduction by Robert F. Sayre). New York, NY: Eakins, 1968.
• Collected Poems, Volume I (edited by Dennis Camp). Peoria, IL: Spoon River Poetry Press, 1983.
• The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay: Complete and with Lindsay's drawings (edited by Dennis Camp). (3 volumes), Peoria, IL: Spoon River Poetry Press, 1984-1986.

Non-fiction

• The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: Macmillan, 1915; revised edition, 1922;
  • revised edition (with introduction by Stanley Kauffmann). New York: Liveright, 1970.
• Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (travel memoirs; 1st edition published as Nicholas Vachel Lindsay). New York: Kennerly, 1914; New York: Macmillan, 1916.
• A Handy Guide for Beggars, Especially Those of the Poetic Fraternity: Being sundry explorations made while afoot and penniless in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. New York: Macmillan, 1916.
• The Golden Book of Springfield. New York: Macmillan, 1920.
• The Litany of Washington Street (essays & articles, many originally published in Dearborn Independent). New York: Macmillan, 1929.
• Through a Poet's Eyes. Marshall Mitchell, 1957.
• The Progress and Poetry of the Movies: A second book of film criticism (edited with commentary by Myron Lounsbury). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995.

Juvenile

• Springfield Town Is Butterfly Town, and other poems for children (illustrated by Lindsay; edited by Pierre Dussert; with introduction by Louis Untermeyer). New York: Macmillan, 1922.
• Johnny Appleseed, and other poems for children. New York: Macmillan, 1928
  • new edition (illustrated by Lindsay & George Richards). Buccaneer, 1981.

Letters

• Letters of Nicholas Vachel Lindsay to A. Joseph Armstrong (edited by A.J. Armstrong). Baylor University Press, 1940.
• Letters (edited by Marc Chenetier). New York: B. Franklin, 1979.

THE CONGO, by Vachel Lindsay

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• "Aladdin and the Jinn"
• "The Chinese Nightingale"
• Vachel Lindsay at The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog: profile & poem, "General William Booth Enters into Heaven"
• 4 poems by Lindsay: "An Indian Summer Day on the Prairie," "A Rhyme About an Electrical Advertising Sign," "The Dove of New Snow,"  "The Eagle That is Forgotten"
• Vachel Lindsay 5 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• "The Congo"
• Vachel Lindsay in The New Poetry: An anthology: "General William Booth Enters into Heaven," "The Eagle that is Forgotten," "The Congo," "Aladdin and the Jinn," "The Chinese Nightingale"
• Additional poems by Vachel Lindsay.
• Vachel Lindsay 1879-1931 at the Poetry Foundation.
• Selected Poetry of Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) (11 poems) at Representative Poetry Online.
• Lindsay in Poetry: A magazine of verse, 1912-1922: "General William Booth Enters into Heaven," "The Moon is Mirror" (12 poems), "Aladdin and the Jinn," "The Fireman's Ball," "The Santa Fe Trail - A humoresque," "The Black Hawk War of the Artists," The Chinese Nightingale," "Booker Washington Trilogy," "Our Mother Pocahontas," "Niagara," "Mark Twain and Joan of Arc," "The Soap Box," "How Samson Bore away the Gates of Gaza," "The Empire of China Is Crumbling down," "Kalamazoo," "The Modest Jazz-bird," "Davy Jones' Door-bell," "The Conscientious Deacon," "The Horrid Voice of Science," "My Lady Is Compared to a Young Tree"
•  Vachel Lindsay at PoemHunter (200 poems)

Prose

• Essays and stories

Audio / video

• Vachel Lindsay at PennSound
• Vachel Lindsay at YouTube
• Librivox audio recordings of Vachel Lindsay works
• Profile of Vachel Lindsay from PBS's "I Hear America Singing", PBS

Books

• The Congo, and other poems by Vachel Lindsay
• Works by Vachel Lindsay at Project Gutenberg
• Vachel Lindsay at Amazon.com

About

• Vachel Lindsay in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Vachel Lindsay at NNDB
• Entry on Vachel Lindsay from Anthology of Modern American Poetry
• Vachel Lindsay at Find a Grave
• Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) at Modern American Poetry

Etc.

• Vachel Lindsay Association
• Vachel Lindsay Collection, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections