The Congo and Other Poems | Page 4

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, where every line may be two-thirds
spoken and one-third sung, the entire rendering, musical and
elocutionary, depending upon the improvising power and sure instinct
of the performer.
"I respectfully submit these poems as experiments in which I endeavor
to carry this vaudeville form back towards the old Greek precedent of
the half-chanted lyric. In this case the one-third of music must be added
by the instinct of the reader. He must be Iophon. And he can easily be
Iophon if he brings to bear upon the piece what might be called the
Higher Vaudeville imagination. . . .
"Big general contrasts between the main sections should be the rule of
the first attempts at improvising. It is the hope of the writer that after
two or three readings each line will suggest
its own separate touch of
melody to the reader who has become accustomed to the cadences. Let
him read what he likes read, and sing what he likes sung."
It was during this same visit in Chicago, at `Poetry's' banquet on the
evening of March first, 1914, that Mr. Yeats honored Mr. Lindsay by
addressing his after-dinner talk primarily to him as "a fellow
craftsman", and by saying of `General Booth':
"This poem is stripped bare of ornament; it has an earnest simplicity, a

strange beauty, and you know Bacon said, `There is no excellent beauty
without strangeness.'"
This recognition from the distinguished Irish poet tempts me to hint at
the cosmopolitan aspects of such racily local art as Mr. Lindsay's. The
subject is too large for a merely introductory word,
but the reader
may be invited to reflect upon it. If Mr. Lindsay's poetry should cross
the ocean, it would not be the first time
that our most indigenous art
has reacted upon the art of older nations. Besides Poe -- who, though
indigenous in ways too subtle for brief analysis, yet passed all frontiers
in his swift, sad flight -- the two American artists of widest influence,
Whitman and Whistler, have been intensely American in temperament
and in the special spiritual quality of their art.
If Whistler was the first great artist to accept the modern message in
Oriental art, if Whitman was the first great modern poet to discard the
limitations of conventional form: if both were more free, more
individual, than their contemporaries, this was
the expression of their
Americanism, which may perhaps be defined as a spiritual
independence and love of adventure inherited from the pioneers.
Foreign artists are usually the first to recognize this new tang; one
detects the influence of the great dead poet and dead painter in all
modern art which looks forward instead of back;
and their
countrymen, our own contemporary poets and painters, often express
indirectly, through French influences,
a reaction which they are
reluctant to confess directly.
A lighter phase of this foreign enthusiasm for the American tang is
confessed by Signor Marinetti, the Italian "futurist",
when in his
article on `Futurism and the Theatre', in `The Mask', he urges the
revolutionary value of "American eccentrics",
citing the fundamental
primitive quality in their vaudeville art. This may be another statement
of Mr. Lindsay's plea for a closer relation between the poet and his
audience, for a return to the healthier open-air conditions, and
immediate personal contacts, in the art of the Greeks and of primitive
nations. Such conditions and contacts may still be found, if the world
only knew it, in the wonderful song-dances of the Hopis and others of

our aboriginal tribes. They may be found, also, in a measure, in the
quick response between artist and audience in modern vaudeville. They
are destined to a wider and higher influence; in fact, the development of
that influence, the return to primitive sympathies between artist and
audience, which may make possible once more the assertion of
primitive creative power, is recognized as the immediate movement in
modern art. It is a movement strong enough to persist in spite of
extravagances and absurdities; strong enough, it may be hoped, to fulfil
its purpose and revitalize the world.
It is because Mr. Lindsay's poetry seems to be definitely in that
movement that it is, I think, important.
Harriet Monroe.
Table of Contents
Introduction. By Harriet Monroe
First Section
Poems intended to be read aloud, or chanted.
The Congo
The Santa Fe Trail
The Firemen's Ball
The Master of
the Dance
The Mysterious Cat
A Dirge for a Righteous Kitten

Yankee Doodle
The Black Hawk War of the Artists
The Jingo and
the Minstrel
I Heard Immanuel Singing
Second Section
Incense
An Argument
A Rhyme about an