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American poet

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay ('/v//eɪ//tʃ//əl// /'/l//ɪ//n//z//i/; November 10, 1879 – December 5, 1931) was an American poet. He is considered a founder of modern singing poetry, as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted.

While in New York in 1905 Lindsay turned to poetry in earnest. He tried to sell his poems on the streets. Self printing his poems, he began to barter a pamphlet titled Rhymes To Be Traded For Bread, which he traded for food as a self perceived modern version of a medieval troubadour. From March to May, 1906, Lindsay traveled roughly 600 miles on foot from Jacksonville, Florida, to Kentucky, again trading his poetry for food and lodging. From April to May, 1908, Lindsay undertook another poetry selling trek, walking from New York City to Hiram, Ohio. From May to September 1912 he traveled—again on foot—from Illinois to New Mexico, trading his poems for food and lodging. During this last trek, Lindsay composed his most famous poem, "The Congo". Going through Kansas, he was supposedly so successful that "he had to send money home to keep his pockets empty". On his return, Harriet Monroe published in Poetry magazine first his poem "General William Booth Enters into Heaven" in 1913 and then "The Congo" in 1914. At this point, Lindsay became very well known.

Most contemporaries acknowledged Lindsay's intention to be an advocate for African Americans. This intention was particularly evident in the 1918 poem "The Jazz Birds", praising the war efforts of African Americans during World War I, an issue to which the vast majority of the white US seemed blind. Additionally, W. E. B. Du Bois hailed Lindsay's story "The Golden Faced People" for its insights into racism. Lindsay saw himself as anti racist not only in his own writing but in his encouragement of a writer he credited himself with discovering: Langston Hughes, who, while working as a busboy at a Washington, D. C. restaurant where Lindsay ate, gave Lindsay copies of his poems. DuBois also criticized "The Congo," which has been the most persistent focus of the criticisms of racial stereotyping in Lindsay's work. Subtitled "A Study of the Negro Race" and beginning with a section titled "Their Basic Savagery", "The Congo" reflects the tensions within a relatively isolated and pastoral society suddenly confronted by the industrialized world. The poem was inspired by a sermon preached in October 1913 that detailed the drowning of a missionary in the Congo River; this event had drawn worldwide criticism, as had the colonial exploitation of the Congo under the government of Leopold II of Belgium. Lindsay defended the poem; in a letter to Joel Spingarn, chairman of the board of directors of the NAACP, Lindsay wrote that "My 'Congo' and 'Booker T. Washington Trilogy' have both been denounced by the Colored people for reasons that I cannot fathom The third section of 'The Congo' is certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to be in regard to any race." Spingarn responded by acknowledging Lindsay's good intentions, but saying that Lindsay sometimes glamorized differences between people of African descent and people of other races, while many African Americans wished to emphasize the "feelings and desires" that they held in common with others. Similarly, critics in academia often portray Lindsay as a well meaning but misguided primitivist in his representations of Africans and African Americans. One such critic, Rachel DuPlessis, argues that the poem, while perhaps meant to be "hopeful," actually "others" Africans as an inherently violent race. In the poem and in Lindsay's defenses of it, DuPlessis hears Lindsay warning white readers not to be "hoo doo'd" or seduced by violent African "mumbo jumbo." This warning seems to suggest that white civilization has been "infected" by African violence; Lindsay thus, in effect, "blames blacks for white violence directed against them." and wrote a biography of Lindsay in 1935 (four years after its subject's death) entitled Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America. Lindsay himself indicated in the 1915 preface to "The Congo" that no less a figure than William Butler Yeats respected his work. Yeats felt they shared a concern for capturing the sound of the primitive and of singing in poetry. In 1915, Lindsay gave a poetry reading to President Woodrow Wilson and the entire Cabinet.

Lindsay's private life was rife with disappointments, such as his unsuccessful courtship in 1914 of fellow poet Sara Teasdale before she married rich businessman Ernst Filsinger. While this itself may have caused Lindsay to become more concerned with money, his financial pressures would greatly increase later on. In 1924 he moved to Spokane, Washington, where he lived in room 1129 of the Davenport Hotel until 1929. On May 19, 1925, at age 45, he married 23 year old Elizabeth Connor. The new pressure to support his considerably younger wife escalated when they had a daughter, Susan Doniphan Lindsay, in May 1926 (wife of Lord Amberley) and son Nicholas Cave Lindsay in September 1927. Desperate for money, Lindsay undertook an exhausting string of readings throughout the East and Midwest from October 1928 through March 1929. During this time, Poetry magazine awarded him a lifetime achievement award of $500 (equivalent to about $500.0 in 1929 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years in today's dollars). In April 1929, Lindsay and his family moved to the house of his birth in Springfield, Illinois, an expensive undertaking. In that same year, coinciding with the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Lindsay published two more poetry volumes: The Litany of Washington Street and Every Soul A Circus. He gained money by doing odd jobs throughout but in general earned very little during his travels.

Crushed by financial worry and in failing health from his six month road trip, Lindsay sank into depression. On December 5, 1931, he committed suicide by drinking a bottle of lye. His last words were: "They tried to get me; I got them first!"

Lindsay, a versatile and prolific writer and poet, helped to "keep alive the appreciation of poetry as a spoken art" whose poetry was said to "abound in meter and rhymes and is no shredded prose", had a traditional verse structure and was described by a contemporary in 1924 as "pungent phrases, clinging cadences, dramatic energy, comic thrust, lyric seriousness and tragic intensity". Lindsay's biographer, Dennis Camp, says that Lindsay's ideas on "civic beauty and civic tolerance" were published in 1912 in his broadside "The Gospel of Beauty" and that later, in 1915, Lindsay published the first American study of film as an art form, The Art of The Moving Picture. Camp notes that on Lindsay's tombstone is recorded a single word, "Poet".

The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency helps to maintain the Vachel Lindsay House at 603 South Fifth Street in Springfield, the site of Lindsay's birth and death. The agency donated the house to the state, which then closed it for restoration at a cost of $1.5 million. As of October 8, 2014, the site was again open to the public, with guided tours available on Thursday to Sunday from 1 to 5 pm. Lindsay's grave lies in Oak Ridge Cemetery. The bridge crossing the midpoint of Lake Springfield, built in 1934, is named in Lindsay's honor.

The poem The Congo is quoted in the 1989 American film Dead Poets Society.