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
Lindsay was born in
Springfield, Illinois
Springfield is the capital of the U.S. state of Illinois and the county seat and largest city of Sangamon County. The city's population was 114,394 at the 2020 census, which makes it the state's seventh most-populous city, the second largest o ...
where his father, Vachel Thomas Lindsay, worked as a medical doctor and had amassed considerable financial resources. The Lindsays lived across the street from the
Illinois Executive Mansion
The Illinois Governor's Mansion (formerly, Illinois Executive Mansion) is the official residence of the governor of Illinois. It is located in the state capital, Springfield, Illinois. The Italianate-style Mansion was designed by Chicago archite ...
, home of the
Governor of Illinois. The location of his childhood home influenced Lindsay, and one of his poems, "
The Eagle Forgotten", eulogizes Illinois governor
John P. Altgeld
John Peter Altgeld (December 30, 1847 – March 12, 1902) was an American politician and the 20th Governor of Illinois, serving from 1893 until 1897. He was the first Democrat to govern that state since the 1850s. A leading figure of the Progr ...
, 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
The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago's Grant Park, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 mill ...
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
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
Hiram is a village (United States)#Ohio, village in Portage County, Ohio, Portage County, Ohio, United States. It was formed from portions of Hiram Township, Portage County, Ohio, Hiram Township in the Connecticut Western Reserve. The population w ...
.
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
Harriet Monroe (December 23, 1860 – September 26, 1936) was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts. She was the founding publisher and long-time editor of ''Poetry'' magazine, first published in 1912. As a ...
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
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, 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 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."
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
Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', ''m ...
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
James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hug ...
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
Most contemporaries acknowledged Lindsay's intention to be an advocate for African-Americans.
[Ward, John Chapman Ward: "Vachel Lindsay Is 'Lying Low'", ''College Literature'' 12 (1985): 233–45)] 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
James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hug ...
, 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
Joel Elias Spingarn (May 17, 1875 – July 26, 1939) was an American educator, literary critic, civil rights activist, military intelligence officer, and horticulturalist.
Biography
Spingarn was born in New York City to an upper middle-cla ...
, chairman of the Board of Directors of the
NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E.&nb ...
, 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
Rachel Blau DuPlessis (born December 14, 1941) is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized.
Early life
DuPlessi ...
, 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
Susan D. Gubar (born November 30, 1944) is an American author and distinguished Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at Indiana University.
She is best known for co-authoring the landmark feminist literary study '' The Madwoman in t ...
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.
Later years
Fame
Lindsay's fame as a poet grew in the 1910s. Because
Harriet Monroe
Harriet Monroe (December 23, 1860 – September 26, 1936) was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts. She was the founding publisher and long-time editor of ''Poetry'' magazine, first published in 1912. As a ...
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
Cabinet or The Cabinet may refer to:
Furniture
* Cabinetry, a box-shaped piece of furniture with doors and/or drawers
* Display cabinet, a piece of furniture with one or more transparent glass sheets or transparent polycarbonate sheets
* Filing ...
.
Marriage, children and financial troubles
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 as she bore him 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
The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four Census Bureau Region, census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of ...
from October 1928 through March 1929. During this time, ''
Poetry magazine'' awarded him a lifetime achievement award of $500 (equivalent to about $ 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
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!"
Legacy
Literary
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
A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...
as an art form, ''The Art of The Moving Picture''. Camp notes that on Lindsay's tombstone is recorded a single word, "Poet".
Other legacy
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 through 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.
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
Amherst College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its then-president Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher educatio ...
holds a small collection of manuscripts and other items sent by Lindsay to Eugenia Graham.
Selected works
* ''Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight
"Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight" is a 1914 poem by American poet Vachel Lindsay. It portrays Abraham Lincoln walking the streets of Springfield, Illinois, stirred from his eternal sleep, a man, who even in death, is burdened by the tragedies of ...
''
* ''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
Charles Edward Ives (; October 20, 1874May 19, 1954) was an American modernist composer, one of the first American composers of international renown. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed f ...
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''
References and notes
External links
*
*
Vachel Lindsay Association website – biography, essays, works
from PBS's ''"I Hear America Singing"'' program, hosted by Thomas Hampson
Vachel Lindsay Collection, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections
from ''Anthology of Modern American Poetry''
*
*
*
*
Vachel Lindsay Collection – Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections
* (online audio from recordings made by W. Cabell Greet
William Cabell Greet (28 January 1901, in El Paso, Texas – 19 December 1972, in Santa Barbara, California) was an American philologist and a professor of English.
He graduated as valedictorian with a bachelor's degree in 1920 from Sewanee's Uni ...
and George W. Hibbitt)
* Vachel Lindsay Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lindsay, Vachel
1879 births
1931 suicides
American male poets
Writers from Springfield, Illinois
School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni
Hiram College alumni
People with epilepsy
Suicides by poison
Suicides in Illinois
1931 deaths