= Vachel_Lindsay =

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= Vachel_Lindsay =
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Introduction
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Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (; November 10, 1879 - December 5, 1931) was
an American poet. He is considered a founder of modern 'singing
poetry,' as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or
chanted.

Early years
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Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois where his father, Vachel
Thomas Lindsay, worked as a medical doctor and had amassed
considerable wealth. The Lindsays lived across the street from the
Illinois Executive Mansion, home of the Governor of Illinois. The
location of his childhood home influenced 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 US President Grover Cleveland.

Growing up in Springfield influenced Lindsay in other ways, 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!" This line was later adopted as the official
motto of the Association of Lincoln Presenters. In his 1914 poem
"Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight (In Springfield, Illinois)",
Lindsay specifically places Lincoln 'in' Springfield, with the poem's
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 Ohio's Hiram College from 1897 to 1900,
but he did not want to be a doctor; his parents were pressuring him
toward medicine. Once he wrote to them that he wasn't meant to be a
doctor but a painter; they wrote back saying that doctors can draw
pictures in their free time. He left Hiram anyway, heading 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. His 1915 book 'The Art of the Moving Picture' is generally
considered the first book of film criticism, according to critic
Stanley Kauffmann, discussing Lindsay in 'For the Love of Movies: The
Story of American Film Criticism'.

Beginnings as a poet
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While in New York 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 titled '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". Going
through Kansas, he was supposedly so successful that "he had to send
money home to keep his pockets empty". On his return, Harriet Monroe
published in 'Poetry magazine' first his poem "General William Booth
Enters into Heaven" in 1913 and then "The Congo" in 1914. At this
point, Lindsay became very well known.

Poetry as performance
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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
Vaudeville':
"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, p. 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 Buffaloes' 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.

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]

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

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 onomatopoeic 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.

Lindsay's extensive correspondence with the poet W. B. Yeats details
his intentions of reviving the musical qualities of poetry as they
were practiced by the ancient Greeks. Because of his identity as a
performance artist and his use of American midwestern themes, Lindsay
became known in the 1910s as the "Prairie Troubador."

In the final twenty years of his life, Lindsay was one of the best
known poets in the U.S. His reputation enabled him to befriend,
encourage and mentor other poets, such as Langston Hughes and Sara
Teasdale. His poetry, though, lacked elements which encouraged the
attention of academic scholarship, and, after his death, he became an
obscure figure.

Attitudes towards race
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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 the white US 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. ... It
goes without saying that he only partially succeeds." Added DuBois:
"Mr. Lindsay knows little of the Negro, and that little is dangerous."
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. One such critic, Rachel DuPlessis, argues that the
poem, while perhaps meant to be "hopeful," actually "others" Africans
as an inherently violent race. In the poem and in Lindsay'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.

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

In 1932, Edgar Lee Masters published an article on modern poetry in
The American Mercury that praised Lindsay extensively and wrote a
biography of Lindsay in 1935 (four years after its subject's death)
entitled 'Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America'.

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. In 1915, Lindsay gave a poetry reading to President
Woodrow Wilson and the entire Cabinet.

Marriage, children and financial troubles
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Lindsay's private life was rife with disappointments, such as his
unsuccessful courtship in 1914 of fellow poet Sara Teasdale before she
married rich businessman Ernst Filsinger. While this itself may have
caused Lindsay to become more concerned with money, his financial
pressures would greatly increase 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, at age 45, he
married 23-year-old Elizabeth Connor. The new pressure to support his
considerably younger wife escalated when they had a daughter, Susan
Doniphan Lindsay, in May 1926 (wife of Lord Amberley) and son Nicholas
Cave Lindsay in September 1927.

Desperate for money, Lindsay undertook an exhausting string of
readings throughout the East and Midwest from October 1928 through
March 1929. During this time, 'Poetry magazine' awarded him a lifetime
achievement award of $500 (equivalent to about $500 in today's
dollars). In April 1929, Lindsay and his family moved to the house of
his birth in Springfield, Illinois, an expensive undertaking. In that
same year, coinciding with the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Lindsay
published two more poetry volumes: '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
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Crushed by financial worry and in failing health from his six-month
road trip, Lindsay sank into depression. On December 5, 1931, he
committed suicide by drinking a bottle of lye. His last words were:
"They tried to get me; I got them first!"

Literary
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Lindsay, a versatile and prolific writer and poet, helped to "keep
alive the appreciation of poetry as a spoken art" whose poetry was
said to "abound in meter and rhymes and is no shredded prose", had a
traditional verse structure and was described by a contemporary in
1924 as "pungent phrases, clinging cadences, dramatic energy, comic
thrust, lyric seriousness and tragic intensity". Lindsay's biographer,
Dennis Camp, says that Lindsay's ideas on "civic beauty and civic
tolerance" were published in 1912 in his broadside "The Gospel of
Beauty" and that later, in 1915, Lindsay published the first American
study of film as an art form, 'The Art of The Moving Picture'. Camp
notes that on Lindsay's tombstone is recorded a single word, "Poet".

Vachel Lindsay House
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The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency helps to maintain the Vachel
Lindsay House at 603 South Fifth Street in Springfield, the site of
Lindsay's birth and death. The agency donated the house to the state,
which then closed it for restoration at a cost of $1.5 million. As of
October 8, 2014, the site was again open to the public, with guided
tours available on Thursday to Sunday from 1 to 5 pm. Lindsay's grave
lies in Oak Ridge Cemetery. The bridge crossing the midpoint of Lake
Springfield, built in 1934, is named in Lindsay's honor.

Archives
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The Vachel Lindsay Archive resides at the Albert and Shirley Small
Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. It
comprises his personal papers, manuscripts of his works,
correspondence, photographs, artworks, printing blocks, books from his
personal library, and a comprehensive collection of books by and about
Lindsay.
The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds a small
collection of manuscripts and other items sent by Lindsay to Eugenia
Graham.

Selected works
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* 'The Daniel Jazz and Other Poems' (1920)
* 'Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight'
* 'An Indian Summer Day on the Prairie'
* 'A Rhyme About an Electrical Advertising Sign'
* 'A Sense of Humor'
* 'Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan'
* 'The Dandelion'
* 'Drying Their Wings'
* 'Euclid'
* 'Factory Windows are Always Broken'
* 'The Flower-Fed Buffaloes'
* 'General William Booth Enters Into Heaven'the American composer
Charles Ives wrote music to this poem (with minor text alterations)
shortly after its publication
* 'In Praise of Johnny Appleseed'
* 'The Kallyope Yell'see Calliope for additional information
* 'The Leaden-Eyed'
* 'Love and Law'
* 'The Mouse That Gnawed the Oak Tree Down'
* 'The North Star Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son'
* 'On the Garden Wall'
* 'The Prairie Battlements'
* 'The Golden Book of Springfield'
* 'Prologue to 'Rhymes to be Traded for Bread
* 'The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race'
* 'The Eagle That is Forgotten'
* 'The Firemen's Ball'
* 'The Rose of Midnight'
* 'This Section is a Christmas Tree'
* 'To Gloriana'
* 'What Semiramis Said'
* 'What the Ghost of the Gambler Said'
* 'Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket'
* 'Written for a Musician'

Other
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* The poem 'The Congo' is quoted in the 1989 American film 'Dead Poets
Society'.

External links
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* [http://www.vachellindsay.org Vachel Lindsay Association website -
biography, essays, works]
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/19970607204639/http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/poet/lindsay.html
Profile of Vachel Linsay] from PBS's '"I Hear America Singing"'
program, hosted by Thomas Hampson
* [https://archivesspace.amherst.edu/repositories/2/resources/133
Vachel Lindsay Collection] and
[https://archivesspace.amherst.edu/repositories/2/resources/259
Lawrence H. Conrad Collection of Vachel Lindsay and Robert Frost
Material] at the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections
* [http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lindsay/lindsay.htm
Entry on Vachel Lindsay] from 'Anthology of Modern American Poetry'
*
*
*
* [http://www.bartleby.com/271/34.html "The Chinese Nightingale"]
*
[http://emotional-literacy-education.com/classic-books-online-b/cngop10.htm
"The Congo and Other Poems by Vachel Lindsay"]
*
*
[http://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15878coll52#nav_top
Vachel Lindsay Collection - Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections]
* (online audio from recordings made by W. Cabell Greet and George W.
Hibbitt)
* Vachel Lindsay Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

License
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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vachel_Lindsay