Illinois Issues Summer Book Section

By ROBERT BRAY

This essay on Vachel Lindsay and his discontent with Springfield is based on his prose and poetry edited by Dennis Camp and published in five volumes by Spoon River Poetry Press at Marshall, Minn. The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay: Complete and With Lindsay's Drawings is in three volumes; volumes I (1984) and II (1985) are $24.95 (cloth), volume III (1986) is $14.95 (cloth). The Prose of Vachel Lindsay: Complete and With Lindsay's Drawings is in two volumes; Volume I (1988) is $24.95 (cloth). Volume II is forthcoming.

As his hard friend and critic Edgar Lee Masters so characteristically observed, Nicholas Vachel Lindsay grew up "under the very shadow of the capitol building, the product of much malversation and bad taste." There in the family home on Fifth Street, just east of the Statehouse, the son of Esther and Vachel Lindsay was born and there he died and there between times he wrote much of his best poetry. From a window of his upper room — the "battlements" as he liked to call his Hamlet's vantage point — Lindsay, boy and man, looked out over Springfield, the city of his dreams and discontent, seeing both what it was and what he wanted it to be: Apocalyptic Springfield, the New Jerusalem that his poetry would reveal if only the Babbitts besieging him would pay attention. And so it went over the years: Lindsay at the window gazing, then back to the desk; Lindsay scribbling, crumpling paper, walking the floor; always restless, moving in a repeated rhythm of increasing futility, like the lifetime of hometown departures and returns that organizes his biography.

At first there were days when his vision came "in cataracts" — visions half owing to the mystical Christian in him, half to the credulous Caliban:

I saw wild domes and bowers,

And smoking incense-towers,

And mad, exotic flowers,

In Illinois.

So while he was "drunk" with clairvoyance Lindsay wrote in a fever to catch the ineffable. But by the late 1920s, after the prodigal's last return, the visions through the window became darker and fewer, as did the poems. Back home for good, this time with a wife and children, Lindsay again sat trying to write in his chamber and still felt that cold, east-slanting shadow of the Statehouse, still watched the midnight procession of Springfield's unquiet ghosts, led of course by Lincoln's: "Near the old court house pacing up

Photo by D. Carr and R. Victor/Springfield Art Association
The Vachel Lindsay house on South Fifth Street, Springfield

and down." But where before the visions rose "three times as high as the dome," and Lindsay impersonated Lincoln with swagger to spare, lately his voice failed to lift the long shadow or lay the ghosts. After one especially desperate December night of blocked writing and obscured insight, the poet relinquished to something he must long have wanted to do: He stepped into one of the "empty boats" that were forever drifting by his window. For more than 20 years they had beckoned, and he had refused the journey: "Each soul is haunted by a ship in which that soul might ride/ And climb the glorious mysteries of Heaven's silent tide." But now he was ready to go. Preparing to sail, he accepted the valedictory cup proffered by his Miltonic imagination and drank: Then he was away, dead within minutes early on the morning of December 5, 1931. He was 52.

At his death Lindsay left a considerable body of poetry and prose, important parts of which had appeared in fugitive editions of Lindsay's own publishing that are now extremely hard to find. Thanks to Sangamon State University English Professor Dennis Camp's long labor of editorial love, all of Lindsay's work — good, bad or merely indifferent — is now put in order and gathered into a five-volume library edition

16/July 1992/Illinois Issues

from Spoon River Poetry Press. (The last volume in the edition, volume II of Lindsay's prose writings, has been delayed at the publishers and was not available in time to be discussed in this essay.) Camp has thus given us the first collected Vachel Lindsay — an immense but problematic gift. For the first time we can follow "the growth of a poet's mind" from those earliest self-published beginnings at the turn of the century, through the heady success of his books with Macmillan during the World War I years, to the tentative new directions of the 1920s.

Is reading through Lindsay worth the effort? I think so, though literary criticism a la mode certainly disagrees. The most popular of his chants, "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven," may persist in the American literature anthologies if only as a sort of museum curiosity. Yet the best of Lindsay, I would venture, is not found in "Booth" or the other free-verse extravaganzas, still less in the prose, but in his protracted lyrical quarrel with Springfield. Here, early in the 20th century after his return from college, art schooling in Chicago and New York and the first of his major tramps across the country was the serious beginning of Vachel Lindsay, the "rhymer-designer" so steeped in William Blake. But at the same time he was attempting in other and "more serious" verse to emulate Milton's "heroic argument," justifying not god's way to man, but rather his prophetic calling to remake Springfield (in poetry if not of it). As the poet announced in one of his "War Bulletins":

For good or ill I have eaten of the flower of the Holy Spirit [the Amaranth], the most dangerous bloom in the Universe. There are days when visions come in cataracts. With these pictures burning heart and conscience away, I would compass Heaven and Earth to make one proselyte. I would go through smoke and flame to prove that these my visitations came to me. The martyr's crown would be sweeter than honey. The result of this early and intense period of "burning heart and conscience away" was perhaps a dozen lyrics; a few more in the same vein were written (or, as Camp shows us, rewritten) in the 1920s. A small number, to be sure, to represent his best, given Lindsay's hundreds of poems from which to choose, but into them, I believe, he distilled his single great subject: the conflict of the idealist "chosen"? to redeem the reluctant and earthbound town. These poems vary widely in form and are ecstatic, funny, hortative and angry — sometimes all at once. What they reveal is a surprisingly tough self-consciousness ("They do not read my books, but O they have read me,/ An egotist by no means mild") and an impressive technical range in reiterating the matter of Springfield.

There is room for just a few illustrations that I hope will suggest how beguiling — and convincing — this poetry can be. We all know how Lindsay bangs and booms, as in "Booth" and "The Congo"; less familiar perhaps are the tinkling wind-chimes of "The Angel and the Clown" (first stanza quoted above) or, to make the figure more Blakean and romantic, the "wind-harps" singing in "The Soul of the City":

Censers, tremendous,

Gleam overhead,

Wind-harps are ringing,

Wind-harps unseen —

Calling and calling: —

"Wake from the dead.

Rise, little city,

Shine like a queen."

Photo by D. Carr and R Victor/Springfield Art Association Lindsay House staircase

Whether reciting "Booth" before a huge audience or reading to his kids at home, Lindsay was a "strolling player," histrionic, delighting in the masquerade behind the mask. In other words he loved the imposture, the sheer imitation of the thing. He was a master of effect. At the same time, however, he quite sincerely believed in his "gospel of beauty" and insisted on preaching it. This baroque inconsistency deforms "An Argument" into a kind of Decoration Day civic pageant or a Saturday Evening Post cover by Maxfield Parrish:

I have seen lovers by those new-built walls
Clothed like the dawn in orange, gold and red.
Eyes flashing forth the glory-light of love
Under the wreath that crowned each royal head.
Passion was turned to civic strength that day —
Piling the marbles, making fairer domes
With zeal that else had burned bright youth away.
I have seen priestesses of life go by,
Gliding in samite through the incense-sea —
Innocent children marching with them there,
Singing in flowered robes, "THE EARTH IS FREE."

Unfortunately for the world (and in this case for poetry), when a nice guy hates, it is usually the wreck of the self that follows, not its objectification in action or art. Lindsay was nice, and he did hate, and ultimately he wrecked himself. Once in a while his rage made a poem. "Babbitt Jamboree' (1925) bristles with Lindsay's anger at seeing, somewhere' out west, "an Indian dressed for war/ Yet dancing at a Babbitt jamboree." He asserts the "one drop of Indian blood" in him remembers the Mohawk nation of which he had fantastically made his physician father a member ("Dr. Mohawk"), and he declares war on the whole tribe of Babbitts: "I will lead the young braves not in vain," he vows, so that one day the "Sons of this soil will come into their own."

Mostly, though, his anger at Springfield stayed inside. Since 1909 every return had been grudging ("Yes I will go back to that heartbreak that is home"), and by the 1920s Lindsay's alienation from "the stupid, the bigoted, the conservative, the impatient, the cheap" was complete. He said "an old battered, scratched violin called Springfield" would do him now. But how to play his "ultra tunes" on an instrument so debased? The bankers let him back into the Fifth Street house on usurious terms; the electric company turned off his lights;

and, worst of all, the "townsmen" showed no spark of understanding or repentance. Lindsay might appear to effuse over the wonder of the city's new man-made lake; covertly he was plotting his revenge on the town. His friends thought him eccentric; the Babbitts were sure he was mad. But if so, there was method in him yet. One of his finest later poems is "Hamlet" (1920), in which Lindsay gives the prince of alienation his way both in Elsinore and Springfield, prevailing, transcending tragedy as all of Lindsay's heroes must ("Hamlet, Hamlet will never lose his crown"). Lindsay remembers a performance of Hamlet he had seen as a boy at the old Chatterton Opera House "thirty years ago." In middle age Lindsay can still see the actor and the scene of old, but this time the poet himself is playing Horatio:

Photo by D. Carr and R. Victor/Springfield Art Association Dining room in the Lindsay house

Hamlet struts with players
Till the world's last day.
With seeming shameless strollers
He swaggers his black cloak,
With a prince's glittering eye.
He spoils the townsmen's joke.
As I watch him and attend him
He compels them to give room,
And makes Fifth Street our battlement
Against the shades of doom.

Hamlet spoiling the townsmen's joke was bittersweet recompense for not having converted them. Lindsay hoped that the battle for Springfield's soul would go on; and he had to believe that it would finally be won. On some civic day of days, he prophesied, the "tremendous Amaranth" flower of heaven would descend, looking perhaps rather like the giant spaceship at the end of Close Encounters. And then "that sweet town, that wonder-town shall rise/ . . . Though it may not be/ Just as I dream, it comes at last I know." Vachel Lindsay's personal soldiering in the local salvation army was finished. New generations would have to carry on the fight and produce their own "Golden Book of Springfield."

Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all, That which is gendered in the wilderness. . . . "Vachel was the greatest of us all," Edgar Lee Masters once declared, thinking no doubt of Lindsay, himself and Carl Sandburg as the three great figures in Illinois and American poetry circa 1915. Now their names are no better than third magnitude stars on the setting horizon of American literature, their constellation a dim triangle, lines connected dot-to-dot only by specialists in midwestern letters. Sandburg, once so outsized, is remembered today for a single poem, "Chicago," and for his monumental Lincoln. Masters has just Spoon River Anthology to stand for his 50-some books, his 50-some years of writing. But what of Lindsay, the best of them? To put it bluntly, he is all but unknown to readers and despised among critics. Beyond "Booth" and "The Congo" — both classic tours de force and performance pieces, the latter embarrassing to contemporary audiences because of its racial references — his poetry is nowadays either disregarded or simply forgotten.

Like Masters and Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay very nearly has no academic literary reputation — and hasn't for many years. He continues in Illinois folk-biography as a kind of poetic Johnny Appleseed (another of his heroes) who tramped the country trading rhymes for bread and, later, chanted his popular pieces night after night in a self-parodying one-man vaudeville. The caricature captures not even the entire man, let alone his entire literary output. I believe Vachel Lindsay deserves a reconsideration. Dennis Camp's splendid edition puts all the materials at hand, and the poems and the prose are vibrant in the expectation of new readers. But will they come? At the center of Lindsay's art is a perennially fresh sense of the American city as democratic community, a sense Lindsay shared with other big-time dreamers of his era. Modernism's attack on traditional poetry, its detestation of the formal and the ideal that brought Lindsay, Masters and Sandburg down has long since itself become traditional, hidebound. The modern "final solution" for American literature was utterly to efface a romanticism that may turn out to be more truly "American" than anything wrought from the diseased heart of the 20th century. Vachel Lindsay is of course a romantic in the direct line of Emerson and Whitman, and like them — like the lot of his once numerous tribe — his poetic constitution has a large proportion of "sheer fudge" mixed with a modicum of genius. Arbiters of literary reputation should understand that "Presentism" — the delusion that all time is in the cultural moment — is a terrible and endemic condition. Lindsay's share of genius and the few poems that formed its fire are more than most poets have who sneer at him today. More, and enough.

Robert Bray is Colwell Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University. He served on the committee that chose the 35 Illinois authors whose names are carved in stone around the frieze of the new Illinois State Library in Springfield.

18/July 1992/Illinois Issues