Vachel Lindsay

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was an American poet who sought to restore poetry's oral and musical qualities. He is remembered for taking verse to the stage, where he recited poems in a style close to singing, at a time when most poetry was read silently on the page.

The son of a wealthy doctor, Lindsay studied medicine at Hiram College in Ohio from 1897 to 1900, but he had no real calling for it. He preferred drawing and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and later at the New York School of Art. Around 1905, while in New York, he turned seriously to poetry. He printed his own pamphlets and set out on long walking trips across the country, selling his verses or trading them for food and lodging. The best known of these pamphlets, Rhymes To Be Traded for Bread, cast him as a modern version of the medieval troubadour.

Most of his poems, many written in free verse, were meant to be heard. He declaimed them with sweeping gestures, somewhere between a revivalist preacher and a carnival barker, and he favored rhythms that recalled drums and popular music. His most famous poem, 'The Congo', shows this approach most clearly, relying on onomatopoeia and, in some passages, nonsense words that imitate percussion. In the 1910s he became widely known, and the magazine Poetry published several of his patriotic poems.

Lindsay also wrote about film, then a young art form. His book The Art of the Moving Picture (1915) is generally regarded as one of the first works of film criticism. After his death his reputation faded, partly because his poetry attracted little academic attention. His legacy is that of a poet who championed reading aloud and who encouraged younger writers such as Langston Hughes. His portrayals of African and African American people remain a subject of debate.