Vachel Lindsay: another ‘eagle’ that’s been forgotten

Bill Knight column for Dec. 17, 18 or 19, 2018

Eight-seven years ago this month, Illinois writer Vachel Lindsay committed suicide, leaving a legacy that reached the world but started in Illinois. However, Lindsay’s voice from the New Poetry of the early 20th century has been nearly silenced by literary or commercial Powers That Be.

Despite generations of young students – especially in Illinois – learning Lindsay’s work in pieces such as “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” and “The Eagle That is Forgotten” (about Illinois’ reform governor John Peter Altgeld), he’s been virtually ignored for decades.

One of the “prairie poets” with Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters and others, Lindsay was considered an eccentric in his hometown of Springfield, but he’s credited with helping revive poetry as an oral art form for common people. A performance artist of sorts, Lindsay’s verse was intended to be chanted or sung, and his readings had a theatrical delivery. After his death, his standing changed with popular and critical attitudes, and now he’s omitted from basic English texts like the “Norton Anthology of American Literature” and Macmillan “Anthology of American Literature.”

Ken Bradbury, who co-wrote a two-act play based on Lindsay’s work (“Vachel with a V”), said, “The book business blows with the wind. What’s included frequently is what will sell”

Critic Granville Hicks in Saturday Review wrote, “Vachel Lindsay has long been out of fashion. No poetry could differ more from that which is currently esteemed than his. He was exuberant and open, whereas the moderns are disciplined and intricate. He was a preacher, enthusiastic and hopeful; the moderns are secretive and dark. As [William Butler] Yeats observed, [there is] a strangeness in his poetry that lifts it above provincialism.”

Born Nicholas Vachel Lindsay in 1879 to Esther Frazee and Dr. Vachel Thomas Lindsay (the poet’s birthplace and deathplace is a two-story house on Fifth Street in Springfield, across Edwards from the Governor’s Mansion), Lindsay was plain in a blissful sense, blending ordinary and extraordinary. He fancied himself an intellectual but seemed to touch people most with an hypnotic boldness.

With curly, sandy hair and deep-set blue eyes, Lindsay tried higher education in Ohio, New York and Chicago, but he learned by thinking, doing and traveling the country – early as a hiking traveler and later as a touring celebrity. Before World War I, he grew fond of vagabonds’ romantic restlessness, and he walked the continent subsisting by reciting poetry or showing drawings. His life had struggles, from a love affair with poet Sara Teasdale to recurrent emotional crises, including a mental collapse. However, there was joy, too. In 1925 he married Elizabeth Conner, a teacher 22 years his younger, and they had a daughter and a son.

Lindsay was a populist character yet spoke of thoughts, dreams and visions. His heroes ranged from St. Francis to Shakespeare, Jefferson to Jesus. He scoffed at “art for art’s sake,” believing substance more important than style. Recalled for poems such as “The Congo,” “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” and “The Proud Farmer,” Lindsay “represented a tendency much richer and more indigenous than the imagists,” wrote Poetry editor Harriet Monroe a century ago. “His roots run deep into the past of American literature: Mark Twain and [James Whitcomb] Riley and Brer Rabbit Harris were his relatives. All the wild lore in our western blood -- our love of wilderness, the magic in nature and life, the instinct of sympathy with all kinds and races of men -- is in Vachel Lindsay.”

A journalist in spirit, interacting with everyday people, recording his observations and sharing many, the poet and illustrator also contributed to The Nation and New Republic magazines and the Spokane (Wash.) Daily Chronicle. As a newspaperman, Lindsay wrote about architecture and museums, poets Ezra Pound and William Borah (both from nearby Idaho), wild flowers and wheat, Johnny Appleseed and the Pacific Northwest’s scenery, and aviators as heirs to lumberjacks as genuine outdoorsmen.

The writer’s relation to central Illinois sometimes had locals ridiculing him as a burden to his parents; other times indulging him as an oddball, and occasionally respecting him as an artist praised elsewhere.

“I am not going to be robbed of central Illinois by anyone, however deft and powerful they may be,” he wrote. “I am emphatically a citizen of Springfield, Illinois, and Sangamon County. All my future life involves a very special attitude toward Springfield, toward the Middle West.

“Everything begins and ends there for me,” he added, prophetically, it turned out, as he died at home in 1931 after drinking a bottle of Lysol.

Literati, historians or Midwestern readers can have short memories or fickle judgments. Today, some 12 miles south of the State Capitol is Lake Springfield, spanned by a bridge dedicated on July 12, 1935: the Vachel Lindsay Bridge.