Vachel Lindsay

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Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was born and died in his father’s house next to the Governor’s Mansion in Springfield, Illinois. His father, Vachel Thomas Lindsay, was a general practitioner whose home and financial stability made possible his son’s slow progress toward a self-sustaining career as a poet. His mother, Esther Catharine Frazee Lindsay, a college mathematics teacher and instructor of painting before she married, had the spirit and endurance to continue to support their son as he ambivalently moved from college (leaving Hiram College in June of 1900 without a degree after three years), to the Art Institute in Chicago, and on to New York to try to market his skills as an artist. His father may have hoped that his son would join his practice and settle down, but both parents were trampers and travelers in their own way. They had courted each other in the art galleries of Europe in the summer of 1875 and had taken the family to Europe in the summer of 1906, immediately after Lindsay’s first American walking tour. In the spring of 1906, Lindsay had walked from Florida back north through the Okefenokee swamp to Atlanta, lecturing (on the Pre-Raphaelites), singing his poems (“The Tree of the Laughing Bells”) all the way to Grassy Springs, Kentucky, and the home of relatives. The immediate leap to Europe, the Louvre, and the tomb of Napoleon was in some ways shocking, but Lindsay was comfortable in both milieux, marking the range of his experience, the talents and interests of his parents, and the end of the era of art and design as his principal interests.

His next “tramp” (in 1912) led directly to publication. He had tried “poem-peddling” in New York in the spring of 1905 without success, but now set out to trade rhymes for bread as he walked from Illinois to California. He caught the Santa Fe Trail in Kansas and felt charged with poetic material and enthusiasm. That the trip was hard was undeniable; there was less room for self-delusion or self-indulgence than in any other episode of his life. When he “gave up” and took the train from Wagon Mound, New Mexico, to Los Angeles, he felt defeated; but here, after gloom and despair, came the inspiration for “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.” Booth of the Salvation Army had died almost a month earlier, but as Lindsay walked the city at night, the poem flashed into being.

“General William Booth Enters into Heaven” was his making, and, because it was such a showpiece to read, perhaps his unmaking as well. Lindsay’s career has been divided into sections of composition and recital, with the transitional stage between the publication of General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and Other Poems by Kennerley in 1913 and The Chinese Nightingale, and Other Poems by Macmillan in 1917. After this period, regardless of his own interests and enthusiasms, he was seen as a reciter of his own verse, a performer, an actor. His livelihood depended on the income generated from such recitals, and the verse he wrote later (with several notable exceptions) does not match the standard of the poetry of the 1910’s.

It is important to note that Lindsay saw his public readings as the best way to reach the largest audience of American readers of poetry. If they all wanted to hear“The Congo,” he would read it, repeatedly, even though he knew it was not representative of his best work. “I have tried to fight off all jazz,” he said. He knew that it was he (as much as his verse, or more) who charmed...

(This entire section contains 1110 words.)

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or conjured his audiences; he had to read his work to have it go. He termed his reciting style and material a “higher vaudeville” and knew that in reaching new audiences he would have to alienate older or more traditional ones. In his day, however, academe did not scorn him: Yale, Wellesley, Oxford, Cambridge, all invited him to read, and they sat spellbound. Robert Graves, who introduced him to the circle of Oxford dons and students with the notion of showing off an American curiosity, was astonished at Lindsay’s success. It is hard to reconstruct the experience: It depended on the power of Lindsay’s delivery, but he asserted that the energy was there in the lines. In his passionate, reverent attention to his audience, his desire for its conversion, he poured himself out. Thus, in his reciting tours, Lindsay saw himself as no less than the Christian-democratic poet, a man who could, by the power of his poetry and personality, revive the artistic and moral sensibility of the nation.

Lindsay seemed more showman than troubadour, a performer, not a poet, primarily because he was more interested in speaking to America than to literary critics. The poets who supplanted him in American poetry anthologies consciously and particularly addressed themselves to the scholar-reader, the literary elite, the would-be student of literature. There is more to the contrast than this: Lindsay may have felt that he could not impress that literary elite beyond the first shock of amazement and delight at his readings, or, he may have doubted his staying power, his ability to follow “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” and “The Chinese Nightingale” with more of the same. Although Paul Wakefield (his brother-in-law) finally got him to the Mayo Foundation in Rochester, Minnesota, in June, 1924, for a diagnosis of his nervous condition, Lindsay must have feared the worsening of his serious physical and nervous disorder all his adult life. The word “epilepsy” was not mentioned until Eleanor Ruggles’s biography (1959), but the severe seizures were public knowledge.

Celibate and unmarried until his mid-forties, but in love with a series of remarkable women who rejected his proposals, Lindsay married Elizabeth Conner on May 19, 1925, without revealing the secret of his seizures until after the ceremony. Paranoia, “morbid fancies,” as Ruggles painfully documents them, insulting and insane accusations of family and stranger alike: These multiplied in the late 1920’s and gave Lindsay’s career a kind of lurid richness that tempts readers to consider the pathological case and not the poet. Lindsay drank a bottle of Lysol at home, upstairs, early in the morning of December 5, 1931, killing himself quickly but painfully. In the past decade, he had read triumphantly in England, married a young, bright, determined wife, and was known internationally for poems many could recite from memory, but fear of the increased frequency of epileptic attack, financial anxieties, anger with critics who wanted “more of the same,” and despair that he was tied to the task of reading to audiences that would not read him—these concerns, and doubtless others, resulted in suicide.

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