Poetry on foot

Even during the Great Depression, people were willing to pay $5 a person to be part of the packed audience that listened to Vachel Lindsay in Washington, D.C.

It was the poet’s final performance, said Vachel Lindsay Home Site Administrator Jennie Battles, and people were willing to spend money most people didn’t have at the time.

By then, Lindsay was used to the attention. He’d been the first American poet invited to speak at Oxford, and his poem “The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotus” about the Panama Canal had been read before Congress.

But before Lindsay became an internationally recognized poet, all he’d wanted to do was become a doctor.

Lindsay was born in Springfield on Nov. 10, 1879, to Dr. Vachel Thomas Lindsay and Esther Catharine Frazee Lindsay. This was where he went to school, became a star on Springfield High School’s track team, and observed his father’s work in the hopes of one day replicating it on his own.

But after three years of premedical studies at Hiram College, Lindsay learned that writing, not medicine, was his true calling.

From 1901 to 1903, Lindsay studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago, but Battles said he didn’t like the way art was taught. So Lindsay convinced his parents to let him transfer to William Chase’s New York School of Art, where instructor Robert Henri suggested Lindsay pursue poetry instead.

Lindsay began to take his poetry seriously, and decided to travel around the country to encourage others to do the same.

In 1906, Lindsay traveled 600 miles from Florida to Kentucky on foot selling his poems in exchange for food and lodging. In 1908, after a brief return to New York, Lindsay again traveled by foot from Pennsylvania to Ohio. He made his final expedition in 1912 with his newly published collection of poems, “Rhymes to Be Traded For Bread.”

He traveled from Springfield to New Mexico on foot, before taking a train to California. During this time Lindsay wrote “The Congo,” a poem that used onomatopoeia to replicate the sounds of drumbeats. He also wrote “General William Booth Enters into Heaven,” a poem he wrote in 1913 in memory of the Salvation Army general.

Lindsay’s name, notably, was published in Poetry alongside two other famous poets of the time, Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters.

Lindsay enjoyed continued success until 1922, when his mother passed. Afterward, his health and morale declined, until he eventually committed suicide by drinking a bottle of lye on Dec. 5, 1931.

He is buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery near President Abraham Lincoln.

Today, Lindsay’s Springfield home at 603 S. Fifth St., is open and available for tours. The home contains the majority of the original furnishings from Lindsay’s time, and also contains books of his poetry. Call 524-0901 for tour hours.

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Vachel Lindsay

Born: Nov. 10, 1879

Died: Dec. 5, 1931

Claim to fame: poet, writer, artist. Among his best-known poems is “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.”

Little-known fact: Lindsay competed as a walker at the state track and field meet during his senior year at Springfield High School.

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Vachel Lindsay

Born: Nov. 10, 1879

Died: Dec. 5, 1931

Claim to fame: poet, writer, artist. Among his best-known poems is “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.”

Little-known fact: Lindsay competed as a walker at the state track and field meet during his senior year at Springfield High School.