(Nicholas) Vachel Lindsay was born in the house where he still lives in Springfield, Illinois, November 10, 1879. His home is next door to the Executive mansion of the State of Illinois; from the window where Lindsay does most of his writing, he saw many Governors come and go, including the martyred John P. Altgeld, whom he has celebrated in one of his finest poems. He graduated from the Springfield High School, attended Hiram College (1897-1900), studied at the Art Institute at Chicago (1900-3) and at the New York School of Art (1904). After two years of lecturing and settlement work, he took the first of his long tramps, walking through Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, preaching “the gospel of beauty,” and formulating his unique plans for a communal art. (See Preface.) During the following five years, Lindsay made several of these trips, travelling as a combination missionary and minstrel. Like a true revivalist, he attempted to wake in the people he met, a response to beauty; like Tommy Tucker, he sang, recited and chanted for his supper, distributing a little pamphlet entitled “Rhymes to be Traded for Bread.”

Lindsay began to create more poetry to reach the public—all of his verse being written in his rÔle of apostle. He was, primarily, a rhyming John the Baptist singing to convert the heathen, to stimulate and encourage the half-hearted dreams that hide and are lost in our sordid villages and townships. But the great audiences he was endeavoring to reach did not hear him, even though his collection General Booth Enters Into Heaven (1913) struck many a loud and racy note.

Lindsay broadened his effects, developed the chant and, the following year, published his The Congo and Other Poems (1914), an infectious blend of rhymes, ragtime and religion. In the title-poem and, in a lesser degree, the three companion chants, Lindsay struck his most powerful—and most popular—vein. They gave people (particularly when intoned aloud) that primitive joy in syncopated sound that is at the very base of song. In these experiments in breaking down the barriers between poetry and music, Lindsay (obviously infected by the echolalia of Poe’s “Bells”) tried to create what he called a “Higher Vaudeville” imagination, carrying the form back to the old Greek precedent where every line was half-spoken, half-sung.

Lindsay’s innovation succeeded at once. The novelty, the speed, the clatter forced the attention of people who had never paid the slightest heed to the poet’s quieter verses. Men heard the sounds of energetic America in these lines even when they were deaf to its spirit. They failed to see that, beneath the noise of “The Kallyope Yell” and “The Sante FÉ Trail,” Lindsay was partly an admirer, partly an ironical critic of the shrieking energy of these states. By his effort to win the enemy over, Lindsay had persuaded the proverbially tired business man to listen at last. But, in overstressing the vaudeville features, there arose the danger of Lindsay the poet being lost in Lindsay the entertainer. The sympathetic and colorful studies of negro spirits and psychology (seen at their best in “The Congo,” “John Brown” and “Simon Legree”) degenerated into the crude buffooneries of “The Daniel Jazz” and “The Blacksmith’s Serenade.”

But Lindsay’s earnestness, keyed up by an exuberant fancy, saved him. The Chinese Nightingale (1917) begins with one of the most whimsical pieces Lindsay has ever devised. And if the subsequent The Golden Whales of California (1920) is less distinctive, it is principally because the author has written too much and too speedily to be self-critical. It is his peculiar appraisal of loveliness, the rollicking high spirits joined to a stubborn evangelism, that makes Lindsay so representative a product of his environment.

Besides his original poetry, Lindsay has embodied his experiences and meditations on the road in two prose volumes, A Handy Guide for Beggars (1916) and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914), as well as a prophetic study of the “silent drama,” The Art of the Moving Picture (1915).