Nicholas Vachel Lindsay: Contribution as American Poet

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      Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931), born in Springfield, Illinois, of which he is the most devoted and distinguished citizen since Lincoln, studied for three years at Hiram College and then for five years as an art student in Chicago and New York. Unfortunately his drawings are accessible only in a quarto pamphlet—“A Letter to Program Managers”—which is not for sale. They show the same vigor and the same antic play of fancy inherent in his verse. In 1906 he took his first long tramp through Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and in 1908 a second through the northeastern states. During these two, as in his latest like excursion through the Western wheat belt, he traveled as a minstrel, observing the following rules:

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay

 (1) Keep away from the cities.

 (2) Keep away from the railroads.

 (3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage.

 (4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven.

 (5) Ask for supper, lodging and breakfast about quarter of five.

 (6) Travel alone.

 (7) Be neat, truthful, civil and on the square.

 (8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty.

      These appeared at the head of a little pamphlet entitled “Rhymes to be Traded for Bread,” the only baggage he carried besides a further printed statement called “The Gospel of Beauty.” In smiling defense of his course Mr. Lindsay has said that up to date there has been no established method for implanting beauty in the heart of the average American. “Until such a way has been determined upon by a competent committee, I must be pardoned for taking my own course and trying any experiment I please.” Mr. Lindsay has not limited himself to this way of circulating his ideas. He has posted his poems on billboards, recited them from soap boxes and on the vaudeville stage, and has even descended to select club audiences. He has, however, not allowed the calls of the lyceum managers to convert him from a poet to an entertainer.

      His books have been six in number and, according to his own advice, are to be read in the following order: “A Handy Guide for Beggars,” "Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty,” “The Art of the Moving Picture,” “General William Booth Enters into Heaven,” “The Congo,” and “The Chinese Nightingale.” The first three are prose statements of his social and religious philosophy; the second three are poems. His seventh volume is announced as “The Golden Book of Springfield.” In its title it is a reaffirmation of what appears in many of his poems and of what he stated in “The Gospel of Beauty” (1912): “The things most worth while are one’s own hearth and neighborhood. We should make our own home and neighborhood the most democratic, the most beautiful, and the holiest in the world.”

      The obvious first point about the poetry of Mr. Lindsay is that in it he lives up to his own instructions. He keeps quite as close to his own district as Mr. Masters and Mr. Frost do and he indulges in as wide a play of imagination as does Mr. Robinson. In the rôle of an apostle he tries to implant beauty in the heart of the average American. Yet “implant” is not the proper word; his own word is “establish,” for he re-enforces a latent sense of beauty in hearts that are unconscious of it and he reveals it in the lives of those whom the average American overlooks or despises. On the one hand, he carries whole audiences into an actual participation in his recitals and, on the other, he discloses the “scum of the earth” as poets and mystics.

      Thus “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” tells of Booth’s apotheosis as it is seen and felt by a Salvation Army sympathizer. Booth with his big bass drum, followed by a motley slum crowd, leads to the most impressively magnificent place within the ken of a small-town Middle Westerner. This is an Illinois courthouse square. As a matter of fact, it is bleak, treeless, dust-blown, mud-moated—the dome of the courthouse in the middle, flanked on all sides with ugly brick blocks and alternating wooden shacks with corrugated iron false fronts; but this is splendor to the mind of the narrator. And so in all reverence he says:

 (Sweet flute music)

 Jesus came from out the court-house door,

 Stretched his hands above the passing poor.

 Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there

 Round and round the mighty court-house square.

      From this scene General Booth ascends into heaven. “The Congo” is a similar piece of interpretation. Few types could seem more hopeless than the levee negroes, yet through them Mr. Lindsay makes a study of their race. In a drunken saloon crowd he sees the basic savagery which back in the Congo forests displays itself in picturesque poetry stuff. In a group of crapshooters who laugh down a police raid he finds the irrepressible high spirits which carry the negroes in imagination back to a regal Congo cakewalk, and in the exhortations of an African evangelist he sees the same hope of religion which the slave brought with him from his native soil. Once again, “The Chinese Nightingale” is written in the same spirit, this time accounting for the Chinese laundry-man’s tireless industry through the fact that while his iron pounds in the dead of night he is living in a world of oriental romance.

      Mr. Lindsay’s poetry has two chief aspects, sometimes separated, sometimes compounded. One of these is an ethical seriousness. He might be called an ideally provincial character. He chooses to express himself in terms of his home and neighborhood, but his interests move out through a series of concentric circles which include his city, his state, America, and the world federation. The poems on Springfield, therefore, are of a piece with the poems on “America Watching the War” and those on “America at War.” “The Soul of the City,” with Mr. Lindsay’s own drawings, is quite as interesting as any of the poems above mentioned. “Springfield Magical” suggests the source of his inspiration:

 In this, the City of my Discontent,

 Sometimes there comes a whisper from the grass,

 “Romance, Romance—is here. No Hindu town

 Is quite so strange. No Citadel of Brass

 By Sinbad found, held half such love and hate;

 No picture-palace in a picture-book

 Such webs of Friendship, Beauty, Greed and Fate!”

      “The Proud Farmer,” “The Illinois Village,” and “On the Building of Springfield”—three poems which conclude the General William Booth volume—are all on his favorite thesis and were favorites with his farmhouse auditors.

      His poems related to the war reveal him as an ardent democrat, a hater of tyranny, a peace-loving socialist, and, in the end, like millions of his countrymen, a combatant pacifist, but none the less a pacifist in the larger sense. A pair of stanzas, “Concerning Emperors,” are a very pretty cue both to himself and his convictions. The first in fervent seriousness prays for new regicides; the second states the case unsmilingly, but as it might be put to any newsboy, concluding:

 And yet I cannot hate the Kaiser (I hope you understand).

 Yet I chase the thing he stands for with a brickbat in my hand.

      This leads naturally to his verses of fancy and whimsy, like the group called the “Christmas Tree,” “loaded with pretty toys,” or the twenty poems in which the moon is the chief figure of speech. And these lead naturally to his distinctive work in connection with poetic form, his fanciful and often whimsical experiments in restoring the half-chanted Greek choral odes to modern usage—what W. B. Yeats calls “the primitive singing of music” (expounding it charmingly in the volume “Ideas of Good and Evil”). Mr. Lindsay, in the “Congo” volume has indicated on some of the margins ways in which the verses might be chanted. Before many audiences he has illustrated his intent with awkwardly convincing effectiveness. And with the Poem Games, printed with “The Chinese Nightingale,” he has actually enlisted unsuspecting audiences as choruses and sent them home thrilled and amused at their awakened poetic susceptibility. Mr. Lindsay’s theories are briefly indicated in the two books just mentioned, in Miss Harriet Monroe’s introduction to the former and in the poet’s explanation of Poem Games in the latter. They are briefly stated and should be read by every student of his work. Like most of the developments in modern poetry they are very new only in being a revival of something very old, but in their application they are local, and they partake of their author’s genial, informal, democratic nature in being very American. Among the contemporary poets who are likely to leave an individual impress on American literature, Mr. Lindsay, to use a good Americanism, is one of the few who “will certainly bear watching.”