November 10, 1879

Vachel Lindsay, born on November 10, 1879 died young, really, on December 5, 1931. His life suggests a complexity and beauty that is forgotten now, so we start with a long excerpt from this biographical source.

Lindsay, Vachel ..., writer, was born Nicholas Vachel Lindsay in Springfield, Illinois, the son of Vachel Thomas Lindsay, a physician, and Esther Catherine Frazee. The Lindsays were devout Campbellites, a church founded in 1830 by the immigrant Scotch-Irish clergyman Alexander Campbell, whose emphasis on individual spiritual life, education, the missionary role of American democracy, and the hope for a nondenominational Christian church had a profound impact upon Lindsay, shaping his career as poet, pamphleteer, and performer.

From 1897 to 1899 Lindsay attended a Campbellite school, Hiram College in Ohio, but he never took a degree. There he kept notebooks and diaries, a practice he had begun when he was seven and continued throughout his life. He headed each diary with "This book belongs to Christ," consecrating himself to a lifelong project of spreading what he called "the gospel of beauty" devoted to the redemption of mankind through art.
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On 23 and 24 March 1905 Lindsay had copies of two poems printed and tried to sell them on the streets of New York. These evenings spent peddling his poetry set the pattern for much of his career as a self-fashioned troubadour or wandering poet. His wandering began in earnest when he set sail for Florida on 3 March 1906 to begin the first of his tramps. Starting from Jacksonville, he walked through Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, and home to Springfield. To pay his way, he gave recitals and lectures and sold copies of his poems. Shortly after his return home in June, he accompanied his family to Europe. On the night of 4 September, as the ship neared New York, he had a vision of Christ singing in Heaven. Between 10 November and Christmas he wrote "I Heard Immanuel Singing," expressing his millennerian vision.

On 21 April 1907 Lindsay left New York and set out on foot to Springfield. In August 1908 he lectured on race at the YMCA after witnessing race riots in Springfield, and in 1909 he lectured on behalf of the Anti-Saloon League. On 19 July 1909 he published at his own expense the first of five War Bulletins, which attacked greed, urbanization, and race prejudice. The third contained "The Creed of a Beggar," in which he declared himself a believer "in Christ the Socialist." The fourth, a collection of poems called The Tramp's Excuses, was published in September, and the fifth appeared in November.

From 1909 to 1912 Lindsay remained at home writing. In 1910 he published several hundred copies of The Village Magazine, consisting largely of editorials, with some poems and newspaper clippings, which brought him his first public notice when it was reviewed by Current Literature. Hamlin Garland, then a well-known novelist, ordered a copy and invited Lindsay to Chicago to address his club, the Cliff Dwellers, which he founded for regional writers, artists, and professional men.

On 29 May 1912 Lindsay set out on his most ambitious tramp, planning to walk to Los Angeles, then to Seattle, and back to Springfield, again carrying copies of his work to trade. He abandoned his plan in New Mexico and took a train to Los Angeles, where he spent a month writing "General William Booth Enters into Heaven," a tribute to the founder of the Salvation Army. The poem, which was set to music by Charles Ives in 1914, celebrates, with a vulgar pietism, Booth's militant Christianity in hectic rhythms derived from the hymn "The Blood of the Lamb." In the first part Booth leads a procession of outcasts into heaven where, in the second part, Christ heals them, followed by a chorus of celebration. This poem brought him instant fame when Harriet Monroe published it as the lead piece in the fourth issue of Poetry in January 1913.
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However, Lindsay's reputation began a precipitous decline with the publication of his utopian prose work, The Golden Book of Springfield (1920). The book opens in 1920 with a gathering of the "Prognosticators' Club," which consists, among others, of a Campbellite minister, a Jewish boy, a black woman, and a skeptic, who offer a vision of Springfield in 2018 in prose derived from such varied sources as the Bible, Swedenborg, and Marx. Although Lindsay continued to receive praise from English critics, American critics and readers dismissed him as tedious and incomprehensible. Opinion since has not changed.
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In June 1924 Lindsay went to the Mayo Foundation in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was diagnosed as epileptic. In July 1924 he moved to Spokane, Washington, where he met Elizabeth Conner, a 23-year-old high school teacher. They married in 1925 and had two children. Suffering from paranoid delusions and spurred by resentment toward his audiences, Lindsay was given to sudden outbursts of rage at public functions, but his deteriorating financial situation forced him to go on tour in 1926....

The last years and end for Vachel Lindsay are sad, but can we let his end define his life. Not necessarily.

Here is a chant for a pantomine dance he imagined children performing, written during his heyday.

THE MYSTERIOUS CAT

I saw a proud, mysterious cat,
I saw a proud, mysterious cat
Too proud to catch a mouse or rat —
Mew, mew, mew.

But catnip she would eat, and purr,
But catnip she would eat, and purr.
And goldfish she did much prefer —
Mew, mew, mew.

I saw a cat — 'twas but a dream,
I saw a cat — 'twas but a dream
Who scorned the slave that brought her

cream — Mew, mew, mew.

Unless the slave were dressed in style,
Unless the slave were dressed in style
And knelt before her all the while —
Mew, mew, mew.

Did you ever hear of a thing like that?
Did you ever hear of a thing like that?
Did you ever hear of a thing like that?
Oh, what a proud mysterious cat.
Oh, what a proud mysterious cat.
Oh, what a proud mysterious cat.
Mew . . . mew . . . mew. 

You can read more of his poetry here, and you might want to do this. Vachel Lindsay deserves more attention than his current status suggests. Certainly this is the case in terms of the light Lindsay's life sheds on any definition of American character.