Word: vachel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...West-Going Heart, by Eleanor Ruggles. A warm biography of Vachel Lindsay, whose boomlay-booming verse was once the rage of the lecture circuit...
Long before his death in 1931. Poet Vachel Lindsay was out of date; chanting about the heartland seemed naive to readers caught by the puzzles of The Waste Land. In the age of Eliot. Lindsay was remembered chiefly as the eccentric and faintly embarrassing author of two throbbing poems, the boomlay-booming Congo and General William Booth Enters into Heaven. Yet 15 years earlier, few had doubted that he was a genius. Author Eleanor Ruggles (Prince of Players: Edwin Booth) avoids outright judgment, but the sum of her sympathetic, somewhat sentimental biography seems correct: Lindsay was less than a major...
Springfield-born Vachel Lindsay never really escaped the influence of his parents; his country-doctor father paid his keep until he was 34, and his mother, a tireless church worker (Disciples of Christ) and temperance lecturer, bound him so closely that he remained a tormented celibate into his mid-40's. Vachel tried first to be a doctor and later an artist, but at Hiram College he made good conversation and bad grades. He wandered to New York, wrote verse, painted, and sent passionate letters of contrition when his hard-pressed parents suggested that...
Booth Led Boldly. Vachel began in Jacksonville, Fla., provisioned with a packet of poems and no money. For two months he wandered to the Northwest, trading poems and talk for food, announcing to startled householders that "I am the sole active member of the ancient brotherhood of the troubadours." Back in Springfield, townspeople snickered; later he was to say, "People thought I fought for fame, but I only fought my way through from being the town fool and the family idiot.'' It was a long fight; Lindsay was 33 when Harriet Monroe printed General Booth (with its parenthetical...
...thee is onion-constructed in hot gabardine"), by a scraggly bard named Bob Kaufman-2,500 copies already in print. Why the popularity? The beat blather certainly is not literature. But it can be amusing, and at its best, more fun to recite in the bathtub than anything since Vachel Lindsay's The Congo. Sample from Bomb (4,000 copies in print), by Gregory Corso, 28, a curly-haired youngster whose earlier Gasoline (95?) has gone into three printings, 6,000 copies...