Word: vachell
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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 Poet Vachel Lindsay was out of date; chanting about the heartland seemed naive to readers caught by the puzzles of The Waste Land.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...
...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...
Before opening night, this sort of plot was regarded by Broadway wiseacres as something that belongs in the theatrical graveyard. But when the opening-night curtain fell, most critics were ecstatic. "Marvelous," said the New York Times's Brooks Atkinson. "If Mark Twain could have collaborated with Vachel Lindsay, they might have devised a rhythmic lark like The Music Man, which is as American as apple pie and a Fourth of July oration." Cheered the Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr: "The brightest, breeziest, most winning new musical to come along since My Fair Lady enchanted...
...Vachel Lindsay, for example, can be heard in the new favorite, "Jim Dandy...