Vachel Lindsay, the Wandering Poet

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was born on November tenth, eighteen seventy-nine, in a house at six-oh-three South Fifth Street in Springfield, directly across the street from the governor's mansion. He died in that same house on December fifth, nineteen thirty-one. In between, he became the most theatrical poet in American literary history and one of the strangest.

Lindsay believed poetry was not meant to be read silently. It was meant to be performed, chanted, sung. He walked hundreds of miles through the South, through the Midwest, through the Southwest, trading his poetry for food and lodging.

He called it the New Localism: the idea that great art could grow from ordinary American places, not from European capitals. He believed Springfield could be a holy city. His poems were built for voice.

'General William Booth Enters into Heaven' mimics a Salvation Army band. 'The Congo' is a relentless drumbeat of sound that critics argued about for decades. 'Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight' imagines the president's ghost pacing the streets of Springfield, unable to rest while the world tears itself apart.

That poem Lindsay set right outside his front door. He mentored Langston Hughes when Hughes was just starting out. He knew Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters.

He was, for a time, one of the most famous poets in America. The fame faded. The performances exhausted him.

In debt and in poor health, he died by suicide in the house where he was born. The house at six-oh-three South Fifth Street is preserved as a historic site. His grave is at Oak Ridge Cemetery, not far from Lincoln.

The Springfield he believed in, the holy city, he never quite saw. But he never stopped describing it.