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chapter 2 The Ordeal of Vachel Lindsay, or The Cultural Politics of the Spoken Word Who else has, or ever has had, such a voice As his is, Vachel Lindsay’s? —amy lowell, from a critical fable I would give almost anything to escape forever the reciting and chanting Vachel. . . . My whole heart is set on escaping my old self (completely as I may, to be human and frail as we all are). —vachel lindsay, to harriet monroe Although Vachel Lindsay is not well known today, for a time during the ‹rst half of the twentieth century he was one of the most popular poets in the United States. Harriet Monroe, who printed Lindsay’s ‹rst poem in 1913 in her in›uential magazine Poetry, noted of him in 1924: “the obscure aspirant of ten years ago has become probably the best and farthest known of all our American poets of this vocal decade.”1 Lindsay’s reputation came as a result of his success as a poet-performer; as he calculated in 1924, he had recited his poetry to over one million Americans over the course of twelve years; by the time of his death in 1931 that ‹gure roughly would be tripled. In light of his spectacular fade-out—his erasure from cultural memory—Cary Nelson has sought to remind us of Lindsay’s “doomed fantasy of a truly public and participatory democratic poetry.”2 If this fantasy was doomed (for Lindsay, in his lifetime), it was as a result of an emergent mass culture whose terms of worth threatened the sanctity of “Poetry ,” as Lindsay and his peers understood it, and with which it would have to compete for an increasingly distracted and work-weary public. Indeed, Lindsay expressed a deep ambivalence about commercial popular entertainment , carefully distinguishing his art as “high,” even as he traded on 55 “low” amusements like blackface minstrelsy and their cultural capital in order to get across his civic message, to help vitalize the public sphere. In his effort to reenfranchise Americans who felt that poetry no longer spoke to them, he drew on performance modalities that oddly undercut the unity he sought by virtue of their racial and gender politics. Lindsay’s struggle with the problem and promise of public poetry—and his often hostile confrontations with new mass communication and sound-recording technologies —is informed by the modernist moment of which he is a part and the changing role of art and the artist in it. Lindsay’s attitude toward Whitman and his legacy sheds light on his sense of the place of performance poetry in America and the cultural construction of it. Recognizing Whitman as the poet who, before him, had most earnestly sought public acclaim and the mantle of the “people’s poet,” Lindsay calls attention to his own history of live performance and draws a distinction between Whitman and himself on that very score: “Whitman only fancied the crowd. I have met them face to face” (L, 300). Further insisting on Whitman’s limitations as a public poet, Lindsay boasted in 1923 to his girlfriend Elizabeth Mann Wills, “Whitman never saw the America I have seen and loved,” going on to claim that “Whitman in his wildest dreams was only a pretended troubadour. He sat still in cafes—never such a troubadour for audiences as [William Jennings] Bryan or a thousand Chautauqua men. He was an in‹nitely more skillful writer than any other American. But I can beat him as troubadour” (L, 297–98). It is not incidental that the primary purpose of this letter is to court a woman, and it was Whitman’s inability to place a woman at the center of his life and to mythologize her properly, Lindsay felt, that prevented the country from fully absorbing him: So many critics—so many critics have said to me “Be our Walt Whitman.” I suppose those that sincerely and steadily insist the most on my continuing to be a poet say this. They pour all America into my lap and beg me to sing about it. I cannot. And here is a secret:—Well—I always considered Whitman as a man and a citizen a genius, but rather crooked and shabby old man with a streak of perversion. I can forgive this, but it keeps the American people from ‹nding leadership in him. I never mention it out loud. But it spoils him for a model for me. I had rather imitate St. Paul...

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