The Congo and Other Poems | Page 3

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*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
This etext was prepared by Alan R. Light ([email protected] ). The original text was entered (manually) twice, and electronically compared to ensure as clean a copy as practicable.
The Congo and Other Poems?By Vachel Lindsay [Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Illinois Artist. 1879-1931.]
[Note on text: Due to the distinctions made by the author?between emphasis by capitalization and emphasis by use of italics, especially in those poems intended to be read aloud,?italicized words, phrases, and sections are marked by asterisks (*). Lines longer than 78 characters are broken, and the continuation is indented two spaces. Also, a great many obvious errors?have been corrected. These are mostly errors in punctuation, often inconsistent with other parts of the text -- a few were typos.]
[More notes: The `stage-directions' given in "The Congo" and those poems which are meant to be read aloud, are traditionally printed to the right side of the first line it refers to. This is possible, but impracticable, to imitate in a simple ASCII text. Therefore these `stage-directions' are given on the line BEFORE the first line they refer to, and are furthermore indented 20 spaces and enclosed by #s to keep it clear to the reader which parts are text and which parts directions.]
[This electronic text was transcribed from a reprint of the original edition, which was first published in New York, in September, 1914.?Due to a great deal of irregularity between titles in the table of contents and in the text of the original, there are some slight differences from the original in these matters -- with the more complete titles replacing cropped ones. In one case they are different enough that both are given, and "Twenty Poems in which. . . ." was originally "Twenty Moon Poems" in the table of contents -- the odd thing about both these titles is that there are actually twenty-TWO moon poems.]
The Congo and Other Poems
By Vachel Lindsay
With an introduction by?Harriet Monroe?Editor of "Poetry"
Introduction. By Harriet Monroe
When `Poetry, A Magazine of Verse', was first published in Chicago in the autumn of 1912, an Illinois poet, Vachel Lindsay,?was, quite appropriately, one of its first discoveries.?It may be not quite without significance that the issue of January, 1913, which led off with `General William Booth Enters into Heaven', immediately followed the number in which the great poet of Bengal, Rabindra Nath Tagore, was first presented to the American public, and that these two antipodal poets soon appeared in person among the earliest visitors to the editor. For the coming together of East and West may prove to be the great event of the approaching era,?and if the poetry of the now famous Bengali laureate?garners the richest wisdom and highest spirituality of his ancient race, so one may venture to believe that the young Illinois troubadour brings from Lincoln's city an authentic strain of the lyric message of this newer world.
It is hardly necessary, perhaps, to mention Mr. Lindsay's loyalty to the people of his place and hour, or the training in sympathy with their aims and ideals which he has achieved through?vagabondish wanderings in the Middle West. And we may permit time to decide how far he expresses their emotion. But it may be opportune to emphasize his plea for poetry as a song art, an art appealing to the ear rather than the eye. The first section of this volume is especially an effort to restore poetry to its proper place -- the audience-chamber, and take it out of the library, the closet. In the library it has become, so far as the people are concerned, almost a lost art,?and perhaps it can be restored to the people only through?a renewal of its appeal to the ear.
I am tempted to quote from Mr. Lindsay's explanatory note?which accompanied three of these poems when they were first printed in `Poetry'. He said:
"Mr. Yeats asked me recently in Chicago, `What are we going to do to restore the primitive singing of poetry?' I find what Mr. Yeats means by `the primitive singing of poetry' in Professor Edward Bliss Reed's new volume on `The English Lyric'. He says in his chapter on the definition of the lyric: `With the Greeks "song" was an all-embracing term. It included the crooning of the nurse to the child . . .?the half-sung chant of the mower or sailor . . . the formal ode sung by the poet. In all Greek lyrics, even in the choral odes, music was the handmaid of verse. . . . The poet himself?composed the accompaniment. Euripides was censured because Iophon had assisted him in the musical setting of some of his dramas.' Here is pictured a type of Greek work which survives in American vaudeville,