Before I visited the Vachel Lindsay Home in Springfield, Illinois, a month ago, Vachel Lindsay was just a multiple-choice answer on a high school American lit quiz. Besides, I never was quite sure of how to pronounce his first name. Now that I have been to his home and am reading his story and poetry, he is becoming a personality whose work and role in 20^th century poetry is becoming increasingly significant in my eyes.

    The Vachel Lindsay Home, an Illinois Historical Site on the National Registry of Historic Places, was built in Greek revival style in 1843, with an Eastlake style addition in the 1890s. Currently, the Vachel Lindsay Association is managing the site, and restoring the interior and a conservatory to the way it was in the early twentieth century when Lindsay’s parents owned it.
    Born here in 1879, Vachel Lindsay found sanctuary in this home, moved his family into it when he could not financially support them elsewhere, and took his own life in the bedroom in which he was born.
    The day I visited, the docents were forthright, knowledgeable, and empathetic relating Lindsay’s prolific, mercurial, and tragic life. They had met Lindsay’s son Nicholas and two cousins when the three visited the home, giving them a personal relationship to the poet and his family. A documentary narrated in part by Nicholas was both thoughtful and stimulating.

    Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was the second of six children born to a Scottish country doctor and an artist-teacher mother. Both were religious fundamentalists, a life perspective that had a pervasive and lasting influence on Vachel and his poetry.

    Springfield, its environs, resident personalities, and the events that transpired during the nineteenth century were a continuing impact on Lindsey. Most notably were his Lincoln poems, his publication The Sangamon County Peace Advocate (1909), his lectures at the Y.M.C.A. following a deadly race riot, and others foretelling his vision of a Springfield of the future.

    After failing in premedical training and in art institutes in Chicago and New York City, Lindsay set out to hike through the country, “sharing the lives of and bringing hope to the common people in the depths through his poetry and art. He would support himself by trading poems and pamphlets for food and shelter.”

    Strong rhythms in American vernacular, religious fundamentalism, patriotism, and socialist and racial justice, in Midwest themes, were the poems Vachel Lindsay wrote and dramatically delivered in living rooms, public venues, and to private audiences from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., Florida to Chicago, and Springfield to Santa Fe. He called his verse singing poetry, to be sung or chanted in the tradition of the ancient Greeks.

    After the sale of two poems to a New York publisher in 1904, Lindsay enthusiastically handcrafted his first book. Unable to generate any interest in it or any of his other art and poetry, he resorted to selling what little he could on the street.

    Following his first hike, a 600-mile tramp (his term) from Florida to Kentucky in 1906, Lindsay wrote to a friend that “no one cared for my pictures, no one cared for my verse, and I turned beggar in sheer desperation.” He continued these tramps, writing and reciting poetry mixed with day labor for bed and board, crisscrossing the country through the summer of 1912, thus gaining his reputation as “Prairie Troubadour.”

    Although Lindsay’s parents’ disappointment had turned to hostility by 1908, he returned home and “borrowed” money from his father to self-publish pamphlets that he freely handed out to bemused passersby. His public failure turned to success in 1910, when his self-published first edition of The Village Magazine was well recieved.
     Lindsay began to be recognized as a serious poet in 1912 when his self-published “The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotus” celebrating the joining of eastern and western cultures by the Panama Canal was distributed to Congress on the day the Panama Exhibition opened. National exposure came in 1913 when Poetry magazine featured “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven.” This resulted in his first trade publication, “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven” and Other Poems. 

    These were quickly followed with more publications and more recitations throughout the Midwest. In 1915, Lindsay was invited to recite his poetry for President Wilson and Cabinet at the White House.

    Between 1915 and 1922, Lindsay was almost continuously on tour, reciting, lecturing, and writing, with his activities frequently on the front pages of newspapers. His list of publications, self-publications, and journal contributions grew. In 1920, Lindsay became the first American poet to speak at Oxford and Cambridge.

    During this time, Lindsay is credited with “discovering” Langston Hughes waiting table in New York City, and in writing the first book on film as an art form and its impact on society.

    Although his popularity waned with the changing literary climate of the late twenties, Lindsay continued to publish. In 1925, at the age of 45, he married 23-year-old Elizabeth Conner. As the decade closed, financial difficulties that had plagued him throughout his life, mounted. In an attempt to abate them, he undertook a marathon speaking tour and continued publishing with diminishing interest. By 1929, he was forced to move his family from New York City to his parents’ home in Springfield.

    Financial worries, failing health resulting from an exhaustive six-month road trip, and a sense that he had returned to his life as a poet without an audience deepened Lindsay’s recurring depression in late 1931. In early December, he drank a bottle of Lysol and died in the bed of his birth.

    A good introductory site to the life and home of Vachel Lindsey is www.vachellindsayhome.org. For a detailed chronology of Lindsay’s life, go to www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lindsay/chrono.htm. Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/vachel-lindsay) has a comprehensive biography, an extensive bibliography, and a selection of Lindsay’s poems.


    How I reimagine Vachel Lindsay:

Prairie Troubadour

Over prairie fields
and river paths,

he wandered,
the road his home

 

From Gulf to Chicago,

New York to Santa Fe,

for bread, he tramped.

 

Before senators and the president,

farmers and scholar, the

homeless on the street, he sang

his rhymes of butterflies, cornfields,

children’s verse, and justice.

 

In an American voice
Midwest speech,

he sang,
     and wandered,

                wandered,
                        wandered . . .
this prairie troubadour. 

                            Springfield, IL, 2010

June 6, 1994. It's almost 10:00 a.m. I'm having my morning coffee in La Patisserie, a little French and Vietnamese bakery-restaurant about four blocks from home. I'm the only customer, typical for this time on Monday morning.
    It is quiet at the intersection of Lynn and Northwest. One or two cars pass through every other light change. Three are wandering around the boats in front of Yeager's Sporting Goods across the street, waiting for the doors to open.
    Although the street is dry, I drove my '76 Chevy pickup instead of riding my bicycle. Those storm clouds boiling up in the southwest are threatening.
    Phan, always polite, always ready to smile, just handed me a freshly baked raspberry cream cheese Danish. As is her habit, she waited for her first customer before turning on the coffeemaker. We exchange a few remarks about the weather and this being Monday morning. I hand her two dollars. She gives me thirty cents change and continues spraying the glass tabletops with Windex© and wiping them with crumpled pages from yesterday's newspaper.
    I place my Danish on Table #6, "my spot" near the window, and go to the service counter for a spoon, fork, napkin, and a couple creamers. By now, the coffee is ready. I pour a cup.
    There’s nothing visible on the street noting the significance of this day, a pensive one for me.
    My thoughts have skipped between this day, fifty years ago, and the televised commemorations held on the Normandy beaches in France, 4800 miles away. My reverie is deepened by the subdued and plaintive background music coming over the speakers: "I'll Walk Alone,” "Till Then,” "When the Boys Come Home," interspersed with Glen Miller and Duke Ellington renditions.

    I flash back to that morning on June 6, 1944. I’m ten years old. School had been out less than a week. I’m sitting in the cab of Dad’s 1927 Chevy flatbed truck on the ferry, crossing the Skagit River. We are on our way to Grant Nelles’ blacksmith shop, west of Concrete.
    I didn’t expect to cross the river until the middle of the month. Normally, I’d be in a hayfield walking along the newly mown swathes, shaking loose the heavy bunches of green hay with a three-tine pitch fork so they could dry more quickly. The mower broke down before Dad could start cutting. 
    Dad said he’d take us to the Strawberry Festival and to see Grandma Harris in Burlington, if the hay is shocked, if he can get our 1930 Reo Flying Cloud to run, if he has any leftover gasoline ration stamps, and if the river isn't flooding. He’d have to draw some money from the Mitchell Brothers, the "gypo" loggers for whom he was working. That is, if they’d been paid for their latest shipment of logs. (Smalltime loggers were probably called  “gypos” because they moved from site to site, frequently logging areas too small to be worthwhile for larger companies.)
    When I asked Dad if I could go, I was surprised that he said, “Get in.” Loretta and Jim knew better than to ask. They’re too young and Dad would be busy helping the blacksmith and swapping stories with others waiting to repair busted-down equipment. Besides, Mom didn’t want them running around the hot forges with their flying sparks and getting in the way.
    Dad always repaired our farm equipment himself. He would rummage through the pile of parts and pieces in "the old milk house" or scavenger from some derelict machine rusting in the blackberry vines and nettles in the back of one the neighbors' fields until he found what he needed. If the part were wooden, he would carve a new one from a vine maple sapling he’d cut from the brush growing behind the barn. This time, he couldn't find a part to fit the old relic of a mower that had been around since it was freighted up the river in a canoe in the 1880's when the place was homesteaded. His only remedy was to weld the part back together. This meant a trip to the only blacksmith shop upriver.Seldom did the sun shine long enough this early in June to dry the fields enough so Dad can cut, rake, and shock the hay before the next storm soaks it and rot begins.
    Not only does he lose haying weather with these breakdowns, he loses a valuable day of unpaid vacation time. Also, each repair usually takes the last money in the house, and burns up precious gasoline.
    Frank Tom, the operator, had just dropped the ferry apron at the edge of the river where the road sloped down to the landing on the Rockport side, and Dad is starting the truck engine, when a neighbor literally skipped through the shallow water and onto the ferry. He sticks his head though the hole in the door on Dad's side where the window used to be. "Did ya' hear?” he blurts out. "They landed in France!"
    "They did?” Dad responds, as much in surprise as disbelief.
"Yaah! They got those krauts on the run." (Kraut is a derogatory term that everyone I knew called Germans, especially German soldiers.)
    "Well, it'll soon be over," Dad says, as he steps on the clutch and slowly shifts into first gear. It is good news, but his mind is on the broken mower and the time he is losing.
    I didn't say anything. After all, I was just going into the sixth grade. And, I’m not so sure that the Germans will be quickly defeated. I’d been following war as closely as I could until the battery packs on our radio ran out, a couple weeks ago. Mrs. Baughman, our teacher at Rockport School, had let a couple of us read her newspaper when our lessons were done. Even if the Germans are defeated, the war with the Japanese in the Pacific had to be won.
    The engine whines as the old truck creeps off the ferry and inches up the incline, over the railroad tracks, and onto State Route 20 near the Rockport Hotel. It is an hour's drive over Rockport Hill and winding down the valley to the blacksmith shop.

    My second cup of coffee is gone. It's time to leave a tip, climb into my old Chevy pickup, and go home. Maybe the rain will hold off long enough to mow some lawn.
***
(Here's a couple pages from Upriver Images, my mixed genre memoir. Let me know if the POV works, or has inconsitencies. Please, no 'junk' or pseudo-messages designed to link your website advertising your product. I WILL NOT APPROVE!)