The Congo and Other Poems

I frankly find the title poem pretty awful --both racist and silly. However, I dearly love General Booth Enters Heaven and Bryan. The Booth poem reminds me of Booth's saying he would play the tambourine with his toes if it brought one more soul to haven, and Lord Manfield's statement that the Salvation Army was the one truly Christian group in Britain. "Bryan" may not be fair to McKinlay, who was much more than Hanna's other suit of clothes, but it wonderfully conveys the excitement of the Bryan campaign.

There is no question that Vachel Lindsay held standard opinions of his time, including casual racism and triumphalist Christianity. He also had a incredible ear for the music of the English language. Why we forgive some artists their lack of insight (Ezra Pound) and not others (Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay) I have never understood, but that's the way it is. Thank goodness for Dover Press, which keeps these folks in print and available for cheap, giving us a chance to change our minds. I will say that if you haven't heard Vachel Lindsay reading his poems, you'll miss a lot just reading them. He introduces the cadences of a lot of music to his reading. The book has some stage directions, but it's better if you hear it done right. There was show more an L.P. of his performances around in the 50s. Maybe someone has made that available in a digital form. show less

What a difference a century makes. The title poem, The Congo, was probably considered daring and innovative in 1913. As the poem deals with the effect of a primitive inheritance on the African-American soul and contains lines like "Mumbo jumbo will hoodoo you", my guess is that today Lindsay would be villified and boycotted. There's some nice stuff in this collection. He wrote well for children. I hadn't realized that "The moon's the north wind's cookie" was once of his and his whole 22-poem sequence on the moon is very nice. The last section of the book is patriotic and dreadful. World War I began in August of 1914 and Lindsay wrote 4 or 5 poems expressing his outrage over German-Austrian aggression. He must have written them quickly show more to make his publishing date and it shows. His heart's in the right place, but the poetry's not very good. show less

A poet so good almost forgotten! A pioneer of understanding of races seems to be brand-marked as a racist, because of Congo, perhaps.

A very strange man and a very fine poet. Musical rythms everywhere - I do not like the jazz of this hotel very close to a song from Carmen (Bizet)