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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo, and Other Poems" is a multifaceted exploration of the American experience, weaving together themes of race, identity, and spirituality through a distinctly rhythmic and lyrical style. The titular poem, "The Congo," stands out with its immersive imagery and musicality, drawing inspiration from both African culture and American modernist movements. Lindsay's unique approach merges verbal cadence with visual performance, reflecting the prevailing interest in both the Harlem Renaissance and the broader context of early 20th-century American poetry, while challenging readers to confront the complexities of race and colonialism through a vivid, sensory lens. Lindsay, often referred to as the 'Prairie Poet,' was deeply influenced by his Midwestern roots and his early experiences with theater and visual art. His fascination with African American culture and music, spurred on by the social changes of his time, is palpable throughout his work. His commitment to using poetry as a means of social commentary led him to represent marginalized voices, ultimately shaping his role as a trailblazer in American literature and a precursor to the modern spoken word movement. This collection is a must-read for enthusiasts of American poetry, as it not only showcases Lindsay's innovative style but also serves as an important cultural document. Readers seeking to deepen their understanding of the interplay between art and social issues will find Lindsay's work both compelling and thought-provoking, fostering a greater awareness of the enduring relevance of these themes in today'Äôs society.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Congo, and Other Poems
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Congo, and Other Poems presents a wide-ranging portrait of Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) at a crucial early moment in his career. Published in 1914, the volume is a single-author collection rather than a complete or collected works, and it is organized to showcase both the poet’s public voice and his private meditations. Its five major groupings move from pieces “intended to be read aloud, or chanted” through devotional and miscellaneous arrays, to a concentrated cycle on the moon and a closing wartime sequence dated September 1, 1914. The book’s purpose is to assemble, in one capacious frame, Lindsay’s performative imagination and reflective lyric craft.
Although the collection is exclusively poetry, its modes are strikingly diverse. It includes narrative and character-driven performance pieces, incantatory chants, elegies and dirges, hymnic and prayer-like lyrics, satires, occasional and commemorative poems, ekphrastic works written for sculpture, and tributes to contemporary cinema. There are works directed to or about public figures and artworks, poems designed for children, and cycles that unfold across multiple pieces. The result is not a single uniform genre but a spectrum of text types within poetry: from civic orations to intimate spiritual meditations, from folkish storytelling to experiments in sequence and refrain, all carefully arranged to highlight contrasts and continuities.
A defining hallmark here is the primacy of sound and performance. Lindsay’s first section declares its intention for the speaking voice, and throughout the volume he uses repetition, refrain, and onomatopoeic textures to create drumlike rhythms and choral effects. He often supplies typographical cues that suggest tempo, dynamics, and shifts in stance, encouraging call-and-response or chant-like delivery. Internal rhyme, alliteration, and patterned stresses give many poems a kinetic propulsion that seeks an audience beyond the silent page. This emphasis does not exclude quiet reading; rather, it expands how the poems might live, whether in a hall, a classroom, or the reader’s own cadence.
The book’s subject matter ranges widely across the American social landscape of the early twentieth century. Urban windows, advertising, and factories stand beside prairie weather, rivers, and statues in an ongoing dialogue between modern bustle and regional memory. Lindsay’s attention to new technologies and popular arts appears in pieces engaging automobiles and in poems addressed to film performers, registering the dawning era of mass culture. He also writes for a monumental sculpture of Black Hawk, aligning poetic address with civic art. Humor, satire, and a taste for spectacle mingle with civic aspiration, producing a panorama where entertainment, moral suasion, and public life meet.
Counterbalancing the public pageantry, the sections titled Incense and the moon cycle explore spiritual, visionary, and symbolic terrains. Here the voice turns toward prayer, parable, and ritual language, invoking saints, seasons, and the familial hearth. Themes of conscience, vocation, love, and fidelity appear alongside Easter meditations and knightly allegory. The “Twenty Poems in which the Moon is the Principal Figure of Speech” uses lunar imagery to think about reflection, distance, and change, with subsections that lean toward children’s lore on one hand and introspective mirroring on the other. Together these poems cultivate reverence and wonder, proposing the lyric as a vessel for interior life.
The collection also stages difficult conversations about race and national myth. The Congo and related poems confront the African diaspora and American racial history through performance techniques that were provocative in their time and are widely recognized today for offensive stereotypes and reductive portrayals. Lindsay’s engagement mixes curiosity, spectacle, and moments of sympathy with patterns of exoticism and paternalism. Poems on Indigenous history, including the piece written for a statue of Black Hawk, likewise navigate between homage and mythmaking. Reading these works now calls for historical awareness and critical scrutiny, acknowledging both their formal innovations and the harm embedded in their representational choices.
The final section, marked by the date September 1, 1914, gathers poems that reckon with the moral crisis of modern war. Figures from history and spiritual tradition are invoked to measure contemporary violence against enduring ethical ideals, and the tone often approaches prophetic exhortation. As a whole, The Congo, and Other Poems remains significant for uniting a bold orchestration of sound with a sweeping survey of popular and civic culture, devotional impulse, and national self-examination. Its variety is a record of ambition and contradiction: a book that presses poetry into public performance and private counsel, and that continues to invite engagement, admiration, and debate.
Historical Context
Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) emerged from Springfield, Illinois, a city saturated with Abraham Lincoln’s memory, into the Progressive Era ferment. The Congo and Other Poems appeared in 1914 with Macmillan in New York, gathering pieces conceived for public recitation and civic exhortation. The atmosphere of reform politics, from settlement houses to antitrust campaigns, nurtured his moralizing tone and populist sympathies. He admired orators such as William Jennings Bryan and the tradition of the Lyceum. In Springfield’s courthouse squares and church halls, Lindsay found audiences for poems that fused patriotism, satire, and visionary critique, an impulse that later culminated in his spectral meditation Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight.
His poetics grew from American performance culture. Between 1904 and 1917 the Chautauqua and Lyceum circuits popularized declamation, while camp-meeting revivalists like Billy Sunday modeled call-and-response and rhythmic exhortation. Ragtime syncopations and remnants of vaudeville and minstrel shows informed Lindsay’s insistence that verse be chanted, stamped, and sung. The opening section, poems intended to be read aloud, transforms the lecture platform into a drumhead, blending street ballad, hymn, and parade cadence. This hybrid oral art, drawing on Whitman’s democratic address and Blake’s prophetic chant, shaped works ranging from The Congo and The Santa Fe Trail to comic bestiary pieces and civic pageants.
The Congo resonates with contemporary debates on race and empire. Reports by E. D. Morel and Roger Casement (1904–1905) on atrocities in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State (1885–1908) entered American newspapers and pulpits, merging humanitarian outrage with primitivist fantasy. At home, Jim Crow segregation hardened even as the NAACP formed in 1909 and the Great Migration gathered force after 1916. Lindsay’s performances drew on black musical idioms and the still-dominant minstrel stage, revealing both fascination and stereotype. Pieces like A Study of the Negro Race and The Jingo and the Minstrel sit within this troubled milieu, exposing Progressive moral zeal entangled with racialized spectacle.
Midwestern memory and monument shaped his frontier imagination. The 1832 Black Hawk War, fought in Illinois and Wisconsin, lingered in regional lore. Sculptor Lorado Taft (1860–1936), Lindsay’s Chicago acquaintance, created the monumental figure popularly called Black Hawk, officially The Eternal Indian, overlooking the Rock River at Oregon, Illinois, unveiled in 1911. Lindsay’s tributes and mock campaigns around artists’ rivalries, including The Black Hawk War of the Artists, unfold against Chicago’s vigorous art world, from the School of the Art Institute to controversies stirred by the 1913 Armory Show. Prairie pageantry, civic statuary, and booster festivals inform his vision of public art.
Rapid urbanization and new media supply the imagery of his city poems. Electric signs lit Broadway’s Great White Way by 1900, Times Square took its name in 1904, and the 1909 Plan of Chicago envisioned ordered metropolitan grandeur. Lindsay’s A Rhyme about an Electrical Advertising Sign, Factory Windows are always Broken, and The Soul of the City Receives the Gift of the Holy Spirit confront spectacle, labor, and municipal aspiration. At the same time nickelodeons spread after 1905, and stars such as Mary Pickford and Blanche Sweet emerged under D. W. Griffith. Lindsay’s 1915 treatise The Art of the Moving Picture paralleled his celebratory film lyrics.
Movement across the continent anchors his American rhythm. The historic Santa Fe Trail linked Missouri to New Mexico until railroad supremacy in the 1880s; by 1908 the Ford Model T announced the motor age and the Good Roads movement. Lindsay undertook long walking tours between 1906 and 1912, trading broadsides titled Rhymes to be Traded for Bread, and gathering folklore from Kansas wheat towns to Rocky Mountain camps. Boom-and-bust frontiers lingered, from mining camps to oil gushers after Spindletop in 1901, energizing tall tales like When Gassy Thompson Struck it Rich. Prairie seasons and homestead myth color many lyrics and children’s fables.
Religious experimentation structures the devotional sections. The Social Gospel, articulated by Walter Rauschenbusch in 1907, urged moral renewal of city and industry; Pentecostal fervor surged after the 1906 Azusa Street Revival. Chicago’s 1893 Parliament of Religions popularized comparative faiths that echo in To Buddha and I Heard Immanuel Singing. Lindsay’s Incense poems mingle sacramental language with domestic piety in pieces like The Hearth Eternal and The Perfect Marriage. The temperance wave that led to national Prohibition in 1919 shadows An Apology for the Bottle Volcanic. Moon-centered allegories, indebted to late Romantic and Symbolist moods, provide childlike parables with visionary undertones.
The book closes into the crisis of 1914. Published the year Europe descended into war, its section titled War, dated September 1, 1914, registers American ambivalence during neutrality (1914–1917). Poems such as A Curse for Kings and Above the Battle’s Front fuse Progressive suspicion of oligarchy with pacifist prayer, while Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight imagines the sixteenth president’s sorrow revisiting Springfield. As trench warfare devoured nations until the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Lindsay’s fusion of civic prophecy, mystical consolation, and popular song sought a public rhetoric adequate to catastrophe, closing with an epilogue of fragile blessing and democratic hope.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Congo (A Study of the Negro Race)
A chant-driven portrait of the Congo River, African life, missionary zeal, and Western intrusion, using heavy rhythms, onomatopoeia, and now-dated racial stereotypes to evoke spectacle and conflict.
The Santa Fe Trail
A rhythmic, satiric travel-ode where automobiles, evangelists, and roadside America hurtle across the plains, celebrating and skewering modern speed and noise.
The Firemen's Ball
A small-town pageant of civic pride and flirtation where pomp, comedy, and community ritual whirl through a festive night.
The Master of the Dance
A parable-like ballad of a commanding dancer who leads a crowd through exalting and perilous steps, suggesting the spell and discipline of art.
The Mysterious Cat
A whimsical sketch of an uncanny, aloof cat whose inscrutable poise hints at the supernatural.
A Dirge for a Righteous Kitten
A brief, tender elegy mourning a kitten and sanctifying its small fate.
Yankee Doodle
A vigorous recasting of the patriotic air that parades American bravado while winking at its contradictions.
The Black Hawk War of the Artists (for Lorado Taft's Statue of Black Hawk at Oregon, Illinois)
A ceremonial ode rallying Midwestern artists around Taft’s Black Hawk statue, invoking Native history and the struggle for cultural stature.
The Jingo and the Minstrel
A dialogue in which a militarist and a poet spar over courage, patriotism, and the role of art in national life.
I Heard Immanuel Singing
A visionary lyric where the speaker hears 'Immanuel' singing over the nations, blending biblical reassurance with democratic hope.
Incense: 'An Argument'
A brief preface declaring the section’s aim to fuse worshipful imagination with the modern world.
Incense: City and signlight hymns (A Rhyme about an Electrical Advertising Sign; The Leaden-eyed; The Hearth Eternal; The Soul of the City Receives the Gift of the Holy Spirit)
Poems that transform urban glare, civic fatigue, and communal hearths into sacramental visions of a city seeking renewal.
Incense: Elegies and domestic devotions (In Memory of a Child; Love and Law; The Perfect Marriage; Two Easter Stanzas; The Traveller-heart)
Quiet addresses of mourning, faith, and vows that uphold charity, constancy, and hope.
Incense: Quests, legends, and desert meditations (Galahad, Knight Who Perished; The Amaranth; The Alchemist's Petition; Darling Daughter of Babylon; By the Spring, at Sunset; I Went down into the Desert)
Short allegories and pilgrim-scenes where seekers confront purity, transmutation, exile, and revelation.
Incense: Prairie and star counsel (An Indian Summer Day on the Prairie; The North Star Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son)
Landscape and guiding-star poems that turn Midwestern fields and constellations into mentors of patience and aspiration.
