EverY Soul is a CiRcus

Vachel Lindsay.
Collected Poems.
New York, Macmillan, 1925.
Revised and Illustrated edition. One of 350 copies printed and signed and numbered by the author.

“I am Knocking on the Door of the [American] world with a dream in my hand.”
Vachel Lindsay. Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914)

“Indeed, Lindsay is a modern knight-errant, the Don Quixote of our so called unbelieving, unromantic age.”
Harriet Monroe. Poets and their Art (1932)

By the time he published the colorful revised and illustrated 1925 version of his Collected Poems, Vachel Lindsay was a household name in the United States, having read his poetry to over thousands in his many countrywide hikes (or tramps as he called them) across the United States. Lindsay’s Collected Poems
was first published in an austere and un-illustrated edition in 1923, but the new edition includes reproductions of some of his own drawings as well as new poems. Perhaps Lindsay included these in this edition to give the volume a greater sense of integrity or a more colorful flair. The book is surely more like the poet himself, than the sedate 1923 Collected Poems. Although he became beloved by the American working classes, Lindsay’s work was badly pummeled by many critics and by most other poets (including Pound and Eliot). In 1931 a desperate and despairing Lindsay was to commit suicide by drinking Lysol.

A truly original poet, Lindsay’s volumes of poetry are visionary and eccentric, but only begin to approach the pyrotechnics of his flamboyant, in-person performances. During the Twenties Lindsay embarked on a series of lecture and recitation tours, modeled on his tramps, but more formal, organized and of course, remunerative. Students at Yale were typical of the large, primarily student audiences Lindsay attracted:

“The nice boys from the ivory towers of the best school and the Gothic dormitories
of Yale tittered at first. But as he began to swing into the pervasive rhythms of General
William Booth Enters Into Heaven and The Congo, and as the rich imagery lifted the homely
language into poetry, they warmed, and soon were chanting with him. Yet to them it was
only a show. . . Henry Seidel Canby. American Memoir (1947)

Although Lindsay’s message of spirituality and social concern, of reform and revival was lost in the increasingly materialistic years of the twenties, he was nevertheless, along with Masters and Sandburg, one of the new poets of the Midwest. Like them he championed the everyday and the local, but in his particular way, as a “vain and foolish mendicant” determined to change the world. After hearing him recite in Chicago William Butler Yeats rhapsodized: “What are we going to do to restore the primitive singing of poetry?”