VACHEL LINDSAY.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIII, 20 November 1923, Page 3

VACHEL LINDSAY.

(By

William Maas.)

One of the most noteworthy men in the United States to-day is Vaehel Lindsay, a genuine bard, one who composes songs to be sung, rhythms to be danced, sonorous yells to be whisper’d in a muted recitative, and orations to be recited with a natural eloquence. Two volumes at least of Lindsay’s poems have been published in this but a. more definite introduction of the country, and many of his pieces have appeared in various English periodical, poet to English readers is made in a volume of his “'‘Collected Poems” which Messrs Macmillan now publish. It is in many respects a remarkable collection. In bulk it can hardly be much less than Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” It comprises orations, college war-cries, litanies, runes, chants, rhymes for dances, negro melodies, and poems on orthodox or classical lines. To readers of poetry, in this country, tamed by a backwash of culture, the volume may prove at first sight a little forbidding. It is so unlike the prim row of “English Poets” arraryed on our shelves. And in truth it is, as unlike, as an American piniiie and an English' meadow. But as nature was responsible for both, we may take heart and give the book a second glance. In a’ little account of his "Adventures while singing these songs,” Vacha! Lindsay writes, “1 have paid too great a penalty lor having written a few rhymed orations. All I write is assumed to lie loose oratory, or even jazz, though I have never used the word 'jazz’ except in irony.” And. again. "I. am assumed to hate the tdasskis and champion their destruction . . . to love noise and hate This is true. Editors have invariably chosen to print only Lindsay’s im.-t sensational rhymes, not for their merit, but for their unusualness. “This will make our readers blink and wonder what- on earth the fellow's getting at” seems to have been their motive. But when we get Lindsay’s work “unsclented” we can judge lor ourselves. We can see that he is interpreting American life, making a pilgrimage through the land preaching the gospel of beauty, crystallising in song beautiful trait's, heroisms, sentiments, customs: painting song pictures. dance pictures, getting, at the soul of his country, and 1 making it shine resplendently through noise and sham and’ (lanmr and the strident cadences of pleasure, commerce. and meaningless goings to and fro. Lindsay is load of contrasting the ugly hear.! noises of civilisation with the ha'l-!::?ard songs of Nature, but what makes him, with all his roughness and I'aick of form, a real poet, is his great humanity, his true sensibility. I must find room for this one short poem, which makes him, kin with Blake and Shelley : it is intended to decoy readers to a fuller acquaintance with a beautiful spirit:— THE LEADEN-EYED. Let not young souls be smothered out before They do quaint deed- and fully flaunt their pride, It is the world’s (me crime its babes grow dull, Its po ate ( x-lik:-. limp and leadcnNot that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly, Not that they sow. bat that :h> y seldom leap, Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve Not that they (lie. but that tiny die like sheep. • And with this read "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight.”