Another Look at Vachel Lindsay

 

     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. 

12.  See Ann Massa, “The Artistic Conscience of Vachel Lindsay,” Journal of American Studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (Oct., 1968).

13.  “A Letter About My Four Programmes, For Committees In Correspondence” p. 6.

14.  The Golden Book of Springfield, p. 13.

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.