Poet of Springfield

THE WEST-GOING HEART (448 pp.)--Eleanor Ruggles--Norton ($5.95).

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 Poet Vachel Lindsay was out of date; chanting about the heartland seemed naive to readers caught by the puzzles of The Waste Land.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 poet, but considerably more than a quaint Illinois versifier.

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 he get a job. In 1906, full of guilt and despair, the 26-year-old drifter began the first of his great walking trips.

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 instructions for bass drum, banjo and flute accompaniment) in her Poetry Magazine:

Booth led boldly with his big bass

drum--

(Are you washed in the blood of the

Lamb?)

The Saints smiled gravely and they

said: "He's come."

(Are you washed in the blood of the

Lamb?)

Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,

Lurching bravos from the ditches dank,

Drabs from the alleyways and drug

fiends pale--

Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers

frail . . .

(Are you washed in the blood of the

Lamb?) . . .

Debt & Disinfectant. This hymn to the Salvation Army founder gave Lindsay his audience; he recited it in Chicago and heard William Butler Yeats give it praise. Suddenly he was roaring about the country, bellowing verse out at colleges and women's clubs. This was to be Lindsay's life; he never stopped touring. During the first years he recited because he loved it, and later, sick with epilepsy and delusions of persecution, he kept on because it was the only way he could earn a living. Darkly he wrote of "cheering audiences, the clatter of banquet tables, the eternal rattle of flat-wheeled Pullman cars, Rotary Clubs in endless rotation ..." After World War I Lindsay began a gyrating descent of illness, debt and unending recitals. It was interrupted briefly by his marriage in 1925 to a 23-year-old Spokane girl, but six years later the poet committed suicide by drinking disinfectant.

In a bitter biography of his friend, Poet Edgar Lee Masters ranked Vachel Lindsay's work above Edgar Allan Poe's. The estimate had more loyalty than sense; still Lindsay's gusty verse had captured the innocence and exuberance of pre-World War I America. Harriet Monroe's evaluation of his best work can be questioned, but it may come closer to the truth: "From Lincoln's own country, a poet of Lincoln's own breed."

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