Vachel Lindsay
Br STEPHEN GRAHAM.
THE poet in a sad era died of heart failure. He lived by singing and sang ever louder as the clouds grew darker. The greatest American poet of this age died in the house where he was born, in the city he idealized, in poverty. Too often he invited his young audience to listen " while the lions roar." America could not take care of him. When the Lindsay boom had passed he became a characteristic back number of the Jazz Age, an old gramophone record : He lost his intellectual and adult following. Only the schools and the colleges of America remained with him.
There was a dead period in Lindsay's writing, and that seemed to confirm the opinion that he was merely the poet of an hour. His last long effective poem was " Johnny Appleseed," published several years ago in the Spectator. This dead period followed two events in his life, a bitter disillusionment in love and the death of his devoted mother. He seemed to lose his inspiration and did not catch it again till he had married and saw his children dancing before him. But during the last two years he has written several beautiful poems equal to the best that he composed during the early period of his life. I heard him recite them last year. They were children's fantasies, written for his own children, derived from their games and whimsies and dances in the old house in Springfield. He was in New York. No one in particular wished to see him. He had fallen from his great estate. Even the schools and the colleges seemed to be falling away from him. His agent, himself involved in financial diffi- culties, was pathetically apologetic. Lindsay was in debt and felt lucky when he picked up fifty dollars through the publication of one of these inimitable new poems. There was a strain of sadness in him which I never encountered when we were tramping together. But he said in answer to my congratulations: " Well, I shall be content to start at the foot of Parnassus and climb it again in the steps of my children."
Vachel Lindsay was not characteristic of modem America. He never hymned business or mechanical progress or saw happiness in material prosperity. He resisted the false glamour of the big cities. He disliked the " square-toed," the men with the " roller-top minds." Asked what he would do with a million dollars he once said: " I would change them to dimes, dump them in the State House yard, and let anyone come and take away as niuch as he wanted." As a boy he came deeply under the influence of John Ruskin, whom he translated into the American slogan : " Good art is democracy ; bad 'art is mob law." He believed that commercial life as we know it is a jungle, and that mankind could not go on living in that jungle. His faith was in the high schools, the younger generation craving poetry and the out-of- doors. " Babbit, your day is surely past," he wrote. " The Virginians are coming again." And by Virginians he meant men and women with leisure and spaciousness in their lives, with the code of good manners of the old South.
In polities he called himself a Jeffersonian Democrat, but in truth he did not correspond to any category of politician. He craved national leadership and was left entirely cold by Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. Bryan and Roosevelt were his heroes. " Roosevelt was the first president to open the doors of the White House to the artist and the writer on at least equal terms with bankers and politicians." He hated the dirty side of America and the alliance between the bar- room and the political boss, and it was for that reason more than for any belief in teetotalism as such that he worked for the Anti-Saloon League. In recent years he had wine in his house and drank it with his guests. Per- haps also marriage mellowed him and compromised his Puritanism. He had even been a non-smoker. It was surprising to sit with him in his home, drinking red wine and smoking cigarettes.
He found Elizabeth, his wife, in the Rockies ; a pretty and capable college girl, more than twenty years younger than himself, modern and sophisticated, Ile adored her to a point that was almost embarrassing to a guest. Elizabeth and the two children were the delight of his life. He taught Nicholas and Susan to dance to his poems and to recite them too. And he wrote poems for them. Wherever he went, away from home, reciting, he took the portrait of his wife and those two with him. Remarkable children 1 Both should be heard of in the future, and I should not be surprised if it were both in the world of literature. They and the poems are Vachel Lindsay's legacy to the world.
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