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