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Vachel Lindsay |
Vachel Lindsay left medical school to be an artist, and then left art to become the “Prairie Troubadour”, walking across America, selling his poems for a penny and presenting them when he could at Grange halls and churches. Sometimes he would write an original poem on the spot in return for a meal or clean clothes. By 1913 his performances were famous: wild declamations more jazz than poetry, shouting and whispering, stamping and waving his arms, bringing what he called the “gospel of beauty”, the “higher vaudeville”, to the masses. “Let us be prophets of Beauty, in this nation, half begun, and still to grow.”
One reviewer wrote: “When the citizens saw him stand up and throw back his head and heard him emit his barbaric “Boomlays” (“Simply bellowing,” remarked one of them), when they saw his eyes begin to roll like a man’s in a fit and his hands shoot from the cuffs of his dress suit and jab the air and his body rock and shoulders weave to the tom-tom beat of “Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,” they sat at first stunned.”
He performed at the White House. He won a lifetime achievement award from Poetry Magazine. But the reviews were mixed and the money was never enough to pay the bills. He began to have visions, and by the time the Depression hit in 1929 he was paranoid and broke. His wife and child were living on gifts from friends.
“All in all there is an intense and vivid Americanism in these poems,” wrote one reviewer. “A racy, pungent, authentic note, which, if he fulfills the last measure of his [artistic] promise, will make Mr. Lindsay a prophet of American life.” But Lindsay sank into depression, and after an unsuccessful six-month speaking tour he committed suicide by drinking a lye-based disinfectant at fifty-two.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |