Once upon a time, when I was too old for
nursery rhymes and young yet for T. S. Eliot, Vachel Lindsay was one of my
favorite poets. Along with works like
Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” Byron’s "The Destruction of
Sennacherib," and the works of Edgar Allan Poe (my favorite was
“Ulalume”), I relished Lindsay’s strident rhythms. Alone, I would read aloud “General William Booth
Enters into Heaven” or “The Congo” for the sake of sound, hardly noticing themes. By high school I had abandoned him in favor
of the High Modernists of his era, reproducing the evolution of taste that led
to the diminution of Lindsay’s reputation in the ‘twenties. Lindsay’s pounding cadences which had seemed
innovative, even avant-garde, seemed suddenly vulgar, and his work was
discounted and then ignored. Renewed
interest was nearly always defensive.
Attempts to rehabilitate him could sound
almost apologetic. One friendly critic
argued for a “redefinition” of Lindsay’s significance taking into account the
total body of his work, “even if such a survey decided that no reassessment of
Lindsay’s literary merit was justified.” [1]
Another, recognizing that his literary reputation was “dead,” asks “might he be taken as in any sense now a
serious poet?” [2] Because “Lindsay is
not seen much these days,” vanished from anthologies and textbooks, a scholar
must remind readers that he “was once considered a giant of ‘The New Poetry,’
one of the handful of major poets in the second or third decades of this
century who seemed capable of shaping the American idiom in verse for the
modern age.” [3] Yet another concedes,
while making a plea for portions of his work, that he was himself “largely
responsible for the decline in his reputation,” since his “critical judgement”
was “deficient,” resulting in the fact that “none of his books is free of
shoddy.” Not to mention the “slovenly proofreading.” [4]
Yet when new his work had been greeted in The Little Review as
“perilously near great poetry, broad in sweep, imaginative, full of fire and
color,” and Lindsay was proposed to be “the next great American poet.” To this critic the obstacle to Lindsay’s
recognition was not his playing to the masses, but, on the contrary, his
advanced technique. “Like every artist
who creates a new form,” she observed, he must “educate his public.” [5] In
1920 future British poet laureate John Masefield called him “the best American
poet.” [6]
The respect the poet received from critics
was more than matched by popular acclaim.
Whereas he had tramped across the country in 1906 and 1912, he now sold
out large halls before paying audiences.
A literary historian notes that “during the early 1920’s Vachel Lindsay
was undoubtedly the most widely known and popular of contemporary American
poets.” [7] He himself was uneasy with
aspects of his celebrity. Having coined
the term “the Higher Vaudeville” to describe his more sensationally bombastic
pieces, he was then chagrined to find that his audience knew nothing of his
other work. Referring to bookings at intellectual
centers such as universities, he noted that he had been “frosted in Boston and
hissed at Bryn Mawr” [8] and observed that “most schools do not want me but
once.” [9] He complained that he did not
wish to be “the ‘Casey At-The-Bat’ of American poetry.” [10]
Though Lindsay was well aware of the
tensions between popular art and high art, he felt he could lure the less
refined masses into enlightenment and progress by convincing them it was all a
lark. He thus cultivated “a sort of
rag-time manner that deceives them into thinking they are at the vaudeville.” [11] Since he considered that he was slipping art
to his readers or listeners without their quite knowing that it is good for
them, he sometimes called the Higher Vaudeville the Higher Irony. [12] In this way he differed from proletarian
authors like the Wobblies’ T-Bone Slim (Matti Valentin Huhta) or the
Communists’ Mike Gold who considered their own aesthetics to be those of the
masses.
Lindsay for his part rejected other
innovators of his own time. He dismissed
imagism as an “Aesthetic Aristocracy singing on an island to one another while
the people perish.” [13] For him cubism
in painting was a trend that would rapidly be forgotten. [14] Though he was called “the jazz poet,” he had
no taste for jazz which he, as an opponent of alcohol, associated with drink. He wrote at a time when the split between
popular art and high art was becoming ever greater and commodified mass culture
was replacing traditional folk culture.
Many artists, the Symbolists and the High Modernists in poetry as well
as Dadaists and Surrealists, reacted defensively, producing defiantly unpopular
work, sometimes intentionally obscurantist, while Lindsay went out of his way
to use demotic idiom..
Lindsay’s “Gospel of Beauty” was entirely bound up with his concepts of reforming American culture. A devotee of what he called “the new localism,” his “Gospel of Beauty” was one not only with “the love of the hearth and the Village.” but also with “the love of God.” Eschewing “art for art’s sake,” for him a “theory of aesthetics” and a “theory of the new Localism” were portions of the same system. [15] Beneath his artistic practice lay a vision of social justice, and beneath that a vaguely Swedenborgian mysticism of his own invention. Even his apparently political “Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket” concludes with a wholly spiritual motive.
Come, let us vote against our human nature,
Crying to God in all the polling places
To heal our everlasting sinfulness
And make us sages with transfigured faces.
In this way he advances in the
twentieth century Whitman’s vision of a spiritual democracy by using language
to uplift, unite, and enlighten his fellow countrymen.
His work is problematic in the first place
because his search for a popular idiom was driven less by his innate verbal
genius as by his ambition to have an effect on society, to advance his program
to bring America around to a mystical socialism more exotic than the existing
American varieties, among them the Christian socialism of Francis Bellamy,
author of the Pledge of Allegiance (and brother of Edward Bellamy, whose Looking
Backward inspired the Nationalist Clubs); the populist partisanship of Julius
Wayland’s Appeal to Reason (published in Girard Kansas), and the
perennial socialist campaigning of Presbyterian minister Norman Thomas. Even these trends, more palatable to some
Americans than the I. W. W. with its heavy immigrant membership and willingness
to sanction violence, however, were extirpated with the vigorous suppression of
all shades of anti-capitalist activity. Lindsay’s visions had by the mid-twentieth
century, long seemed obsolete.
Whatever assessment one may make of the
aesthetic value of Lindsay’s oeuvre, he has an undeniable place in several
sub-narratives of American literature.
In both performance poetry and in Tendenzdichtung his place is
secure next to Carl Sandburg, another once-celebrated poet now neglected for
being accessible even to ill-educated readers.
His unique style of recitation, chanting and singing, stretching and
compressing words, is fortunately preserved in recordings made during the last
of the eighteen years he toured the country.
[16]
Lindsay did write a good deal apart from
his declamatory poems. He composed a
number of quieter lyrics in conventional forms meant to be read in calmer
fashion. The contemplative “Abraham
Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” doubtless due to its theme, was highly popular
despite being quieter than his poem to “John Brown.” Lyrics like “On the Garden Wall” and
“Shakespeare” which lack Lindsay’s fiery energy, are palpably second-rate. “The City of Glass” is pretty in the manner
of a Maxfield Parrish print. “Buddha,”
while otherwise unremarkable, may engage the reader’s attention through its
topic.
In addition to his poetry,
Lindsay produced prose pieces detailing his “Gospel of Beauty” and his
wanderings on the open road, a treatment of the art of cinema, short stories, a
novel too strange for most readers, visual art and photography, all neglected
today.
His book on movies The Art of the
Moving Picture first came out in 1915.
Its date alone makes it a groundbreaking work, and Lindsay was a serious
filmgoer. Every page of his study is
filled with specific examples of stories, sequences, and actors to illustrate his
points, in spite of the fact that feature length films were still in their
infancy. His respect for popular
entertainment anticipates Gilbert Seldes’ study The Seven Lively Arts
which productively treats comic strips, vaudeville, circuses, and other popular
entertainments as art. His larger schemes
such as the division of films into those focusing on action, intimacy, or
splendor may no longer seem useful, though at least it does foreground the
visual character of the medium, but many of his comments are insightful. His book is replete with clever and
provocative observations such as his comparison of Mary Pickford with a figure
in Botticelli. [17]
Lindsay had considered his novel The
Golden Book of Springfield likely to prove the chef d’oeuvre of his
career. He said shortly before its release
“I am making it the one thought of my life, and hope when it is done, it will
be the one book of my life.” Buoyed by
optimism about his visionary project, he said “I feel younger, and may sail to
the end of the world, yet!” [18] yet a short time later he noted sadly of The
Golden Book “I am afraid it is a failure.” [19]
The book indeed proved to be a popular and critical failure, by some
accounts the starting point of the depression that led to his suicide. It has found few readers since and has been
pronounced unreadable by some who approached it. It is utopian and yet dystopian, socialist
yet individualist, realistic and fantastic.
In the rapid changes from 1918 to 2018, from “prognostication” to future
incarnations, never knowing when the book itself will come flying through the
air, it is little wonder that many find Lindsay’s most ambitious project a
dizzying mess.
Even Lindsay’s more sympathetic critics
have regularly qualified their praise until it nearly vanishes. Even during his heyday, when Time
magazine saluted him as “a true poet,” its critic added that, “a great deal of
his work will probably last much longer than some of our elaborately
sophisticated cognoscenti believe.” [20]
The scholarly consensus since has been cooler yet. Virtually every mildly positive comment on
him sounds defensive, apologetic, hedged about with qualifications. One if his most acute defenders focuses quite
rightly on Lindsay’s his role as a reformer, moralist, and shaper of a new
American culture rather noting a specifically artistic legacy. ““Perhaps we can again value his vision of
America, the words, rhythms, and experiences of the many, sung or sounded with
imagination and authenticity.” When read
aloud, Lindsay might still afford a a glimpse of “Lindsay’s vision of America .
. . a rich, troubling, musical, and fantastic view of our culture. [21]
This praise follows Lindsay’s own
preference for a social rather than aesthetic role. Anticipating the publication of The Golden
Book of Springfield he wrote “I hardly see myself as a poet any more. I see
myself as a kind of a forecaster and maker of dreams in Springfield.” The goal
of leading his fellow-citizens to a more enlightened way of life had always
underlain his work; the Higher Vaudeville gave him a huge audience and with it
an income for a time, but he recognized as well as the critics the limits of
such work. Like a good deal of spoken
word today, orally performed poems are generally free of contradictions,
mysteries, and ambiguities; they are typically simple enough to be digested at
first hearing. The dramatic spectacle of
recitation does not survive the occasion, however exciting the live show may
have been.
In the end another look at Vachel Lindsay
may only remind readers of the twenty-first century that more than one lineage
may be accommodated in literary history.
The coexistence of a variety of genres can only enrich American
literature. Vachel Lindsay’s bombastic
performance pieces are, in their own way, beautiful and significant as are the
blues lyrics of Robert Johnson, toasts like “the Signifying Monkey,” the Wobbly
songs of Ralph Chaplin, Baxter Black’s cowboy poetry, and raps by Tupac
Shakur. Lindsay’s intention to push
toward a new vision of America is fundamentally a spiritual and a social
program, best measured against fellow American dreamers from the nineteenth
century Owenites and Fourierists, through Bellamy’s Looking Backward, to
the Haight-Ashbury communalists of the ‘sixties and beyond. He is worth remembering if only for having
made Johnny Appleseed an American saint.
1. Ann Massa, “The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay,” Journal of American Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Oct., 1968).
2. Edwin H. Cady, “Vachel Lindsay Across the Chasm” in Indiana University Bookman 5 (1960).
3. John Chapman Ward, “Vachel Lindsay Is
"Lying Low," College Literature Vol. 12, No. 3 (Fall, 1985),
pp. 233-24. Note the article’s title.
4.
Albert Edmund Trombly, “Listeners and Readers: The Unforgetting of Vachel
Lindsay” in the Southwest Review Vol. 47, No. 4 (autumn 1962), pp.
294-302.
5. “Eunice Tietjens’ review of The Congo and Other Poems in The Little Review April 1914 (I,4).
6. The English and American Muse,” The Bookman, Volume 57 (February 1920).
7. Trombly’s
article (cited in note 5).
8. Handwritten 1919
marginal note on Lindsay’s copy of “A Letter About My Four Programmes, For
Committees In Correspondence.” Repeated
in a July 20, 1919 letter to Sara Teasdale.
9. April 21, 1919 letter
to A. J. Armstrong,
10. June 16, 1927 letter
to Frederic Melcher, quoted in the Vachel Lindsay number of the Indiana
University Bookman, no. 5, December 1960, p. 41.
11. Letter of
Vachel Lindsay to Jessie B. Rittenhouse, quoted in Jessie B. Rittenhouse My
House of Life, p. 316.
13. “A Letter About My Four Programmes, For Committees In Correspondence” p. 6.
15. Letter to Witter Bynner April 6, 1912.
16. A rich selection of Lindsay’s performances is available at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lindsay.php.
17. On p.28
18. Both phrases are in a May 30, 1919, letter to Sara Teasdale.
19. December 7, 1920 letter to Sara Teasdale.
20. In a review of Lindsay’s Collected Poems, July 09, 1923.
21. John Chapman Ward, “Vachel Lindsay Is "Lying Low," College Literature Vol. 12, No. 3 (Fall, 1985), pp. 233-24.
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