VACHEL LINDSAY, POET OF TOWN; AND CITY TOO
[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
by permission, and are taken from the following works: The Congo, and
General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, Published by the Macmillan
Company, New York.]
A STUDY OF CHRISTIAN INFLUENCES IN VILLAGE AND CITY; ON TEMPERANCE,
MISSIONS, AND RACES
Vachel Lindsay is not only a poet but he is also a preacher. I do not
know whether he is ordained or not, but in a leaflet that he recently
sent me, he says, "Mr. Lindsay offers the following sermons to be
preached on short notice and without a collection, in any chapel that
will open its doors as he passes by: 'The Gospel of the Hearth,' 'The
Gospel of Voluntary Poverty,' 'The Holiness of Beauty.'"
His truly great book, "The Congo," that poem which so sympathetically
catches the spirit of the uplift of the Negro race through
Christianity, that weird, musical, chanting, swinging, singing,
sweeping, weeping, rhythmic, flowing, swaying, clanging, banging,
leaping, laughing, groaning, moaning book of the elementals, was
inspired suddenly, one Sabbath evening, as the poet sat in church
listening to a returned missionary speaking on "The Congo." Nor a Poe
nor a Lanier ever wrote more weirdly or more musically.
[Illustration: VACHEL LINDSAY]
The poet himself, Christian to the bone, suggests that his poetry must
be chanted to get the full sweep and beauty. This I have done, alone
by my wood fire of a long California evening, and have found it
strangely, beautifully, wonderfully full of memories of church. I think
that it is the echo of old hymns that I catch in his poetry. Biblical
they are, in their simplicity, Christian until they drip with love.