Chapter I: Saw a Man (3)

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).

THE EAGLE THAT IS FORGOTTEN[34]

[_John P. Altgeld. Born December 30, 1847; died March 12, 1902_]

Sleep softly ... eagle forgotten ... under the stone, Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own. “We have buried him now,” thought your foes, and in secret rejoiced. They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred unvoiced. They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, day after day, Now you were ended. They praised you, ... and laid you away.

The others that mourned you in silence and terror and truth, The widow bereft of her pittance, the boy without youth, The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame and the poor That should have remembered forever, ... remember no more.

Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they call The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall? They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones, A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons, The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began, The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man.

Sleep softly, ... eagle forgotten, ... under the stone, Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own. Sleep on, O brave hearted, O wise man, that kindled the flame— To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name, To live in mankind, far, far more ... than to live in a name.

THE CONGO[35]

(_A Study of the Negro Race_)