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    The Congo and Other Poems
    The Congo and Other Poems
    The Congo and Other Poems
    Ebook161 pages1 hour

    The Congo and Other Poems

    By Vachel Lindsay

    3.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1970
    The Congo and Other Poems

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    Reviews for The Congo and Other Poems

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      What a difference a century makes. The title poem, The Congo, was probably considered daring and innovative in 1913. As the poem deals with the effect of a primitive inheritance on the African-American soul and contains lines like "Mumbo jumbo will hoodoo you", my guess is that today Lindsay would be villified and boycotted. There's some nice stuff in this collection. He wrote well for children. I hadn't realized that "The moon's the north wind's cookie" was once of his and his whole 22-poem sequence on the moon is very nice. The last section of the book is patriotic and dreadful. World War I began in August of 1914 and Lindsay wrote 4 or 5 poems expressing his outrage over German-Austrian aggression. He must have written them quickly to make his publishing date and it shows. His heart's in the right place, but the poetry's not very good.
    • 4/5
      I frankly find the title poem pretty awful --both racist and silly. However, I dearly love General Booth Enters Heaven and Bryan. The Booth poem reminds me of Booth's saying he would play the tambourine with his toes if it brought one more soul to haven, and Lord Manfield's statement that the Salvation Army was the one truly Christian group in Britain. "Bryan" may not be fair to McKinlay, who was much more than Hanna's other suit of clothes, but it wonderfully conveys the excitement of the Bryan campaign.
    • 4/5
      There is no question that Vachel Lindsay held standard opinions of his time, including casual racism and triumphalist Christianity. He also had a incredible ear for the music of the English language. Why we forgive some artists their lack of insight (Ezra Pound) and not others (Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay) I have never understood, but that's the way it is. Thank goodness for Dover Press, which keeps these folks in print and available for cheap, giving us a chance to change our minds. I will say that if you haven't heard Vachel Lindsay reading his poems, you'll miss a lot just reading them. He introduces the cadences of a lot of music to his reading. The book has some stage directions, but it's better if you hear it done right. There was an L.P. of his performances around in the 50s. Maybe someone has made that available in a digital form.
    • 3/5
      A poet so good almost forgotten! A pioneer of understanding of races seems to be brand-marked as a racist, because of Congo, perhaps.A very strange man and a very fine poet. Musical rythms everywhere - I do not like the jazz of this hotel very close to a song from Carmen (Bizet)

    Book preview

    The Congo and Other Poems - Vachel Lindsay

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Congo and Other Poems, by Vachel Lindsay

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: The Congo and Other Poems

    Author: Vachel Lindsay

    Release Date: July 23, 2008 [EBook #1021]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONGO AND OTHER POEMS ***

    Produced by Alan R. Light, and David Widger

    THE CONGO AND OTHER POEMS

    By Vachel Lindsay

    [Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Illinois Artist. 1879-1931.]

    With an introduction by Harriet Monroe Editor of Poetry

    [Notes: The 'stage-directions' given in The Congo and those poems which are meant to be read aloud, are traditionally printed to the right side of the first line it refers to. This is possible, but impracticable, to imitate in a simple ASCII text. Therefore these 'stage-directions' are given on the line BEFORE the first line they refer to, and are furthermore indented 20 spaces and given bold print to keep it clear to the reader which parts are text and which parts directions.]

    [This electronic text was transcribed from a reprint of the original edition, which was first published in New York, in September, 1914. Due to a great deal of irregularity between titles in the table of contents and in the text of the original, there are some slight differences from the original in these matters—with the more complete titles replacing cropped ones. In one case they are different enough that both are given, and Twenty Poems in which.... was originally Twenty Moon Poems in the table of contents—the odd thing about both these titles is that there are actually twenty-TWO moon poems.]

    THE CONGO AND OTHER POEMS

    Introduction. By Harriet Monroe

    When 'Poetry, A Magazine of Verse', was first published in Chicago in the autumn of 1912, an Illinois poet, Vachel Lindsay, was, quite appropriately, one of its first discoveries. It may be not quite without significance that the issue of January, 1913, which led off with 'General William Booth Enters into Heaven', immediately followed the number in which the great poet of Bengal, Rabindra Nath Tagore, was first presented to the American public, and that these two antipodal poets soon appeared in person among the earliest visitors to the editor. For the coming together of East and West may prove to be the great event of the approaching era, and if the poetry of the now famous Bengali laureate garners the richest wisdom and highest spirituality of his ancient race, so one may venture to believe that the young Illinois troubadour brings from Lincoln's city an authentic strain of the lyric message of this newer world.

    It is hardly necessary, perhaps, to mention Mr. Lindsay's loyalty to the people of his place and hour, or the training in sympathy with their aims and ideals which he has achieved through vagabondish wanderings in the Middle West. And we may permit time to decide how far he expresses their emotion. But it may be opportune to emphasize his plea for poetry as a song art, an art appealing to the ear rather than the eye. The first section of this volume is especially an effort to restore poetry to its proper place—the audience-chamber, and take it out of the library, the closet. In the library it has become, so far as the people are concerned, almost a lost art, and perhaps it can be restored to the people only through a renewal of its appeal to the ear.

    I am tempted to quote from Mr. Lindsay's explanatory note which accompanied three of these poems when they were first printed in 'Poetry'. He said:

    Mr. Yeats asked me recently in Chicago, 'What are we going to do to restore the primitive singing of poetry?' I find what Mr. Yeats means by 'the primitive singing of poetry' in Professor Edward Bliss Reed's new volume on 'The English Lyric'. He says in his chapter on the definition of the lyric: 'With the Greeks song" was an all-embracing term. It included the crooning of the nurse to the child... the half-sung chant of the mower or sailor... the formal ode sung by the poet. In all Greek lyrics, even in the choral odes, music was the handmaid of verse.... The poet himself composed the accompaniment. Euripides was censured because Iophon had assisted him in the musical setting of some of his dramas.' Here is pictured a type of Greek work which survives in American vaudeville, where every line may be two-thirds spoken and one-third sung, the entire rendering, musical and elocutionary, depending upon the improvising power and sure instinct of the performer.

    "I respectfully submit these poems as experiments in which I endeavor to carry this vaudeville form back towards the old Greek precedent of the half-chanted lyric. In this case the one-third of music must be added by the instinct of the reader. He must be Iophon. And he can easily be Iophon if he brings to bear upon the piece what might be called the Higher Vaudeville imagination....

    Big general contrasts between the main sections should be the rule of the first attempts at improvising. It is the hope of the writer that after two or three readings each line will suggest its own separate touch of melody to the reader who has become accustomed to the cadences. Let him read what he likes read, and sing what he likes sung.

    It was during this same visit in Chicago, at 'Poetry's' banquet on the evening of March first, 1914, that Mr. Yeats honored Mr. Lindsay by addressing his after-dinner talk primarily to him as a fellow craftsman, and by saying of 'General Booth':

    This poem is stripped bare of ornament; it has an earnest simplicity, a strange beauty, and you know Bacon said, 'There is no excellent beauty without strangeness.'

    This recognition from the distinguished Irish poet tempts me to hint at the cosmopolitan aspects of such racily local art

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