Art is a form of exaggeration, and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified ode of over-emphasis.—Oscar Wilde.
Book Discussion
Vachel Lindsay’s Books
The Congo and Other Poems, by Vachel Lindsay. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
It is not too much to say that many of us are watching Vachel Lindsay with the undisguised hope in our hearts that he may yet prove to be the “Great American Poet.” He has come so fast and far on the road to art and sanity since the early days when he drew minute, and seemingly pathological, maps of the territories of heaven, and grinning grotesques of the Demon Rum! He has carved his own way with so huge and careless a hand! And his work, in spite of its strangeness, is so deeply rooted in the crude but stirring consciousness that is America to-day! Surely there is ground for hope.
Like every artist who creates a new form, Mr. Lindsay has had to educate his public. And the task is not by any means accomplished yet. We have had to overcome an instinctive feeling that poetry should be dignified, and to look the fact in the face that it must first of all be telling, and that in cases where these two elements conflict, dignity is a secondary consideration. We have been rudely jostled out of our academic position that poetry must be condensed, poignant, and literary, and we have been shown that by going back to the primitive conception—which included as the principal element the half-chant of the bard—true poetry may be diffuse, full of endless iterations and strangely impassioned over crude and even external objects. So much we have learned, and after the first shock of surprise, learned gladly. It has opened to us whole new reaches of enjoyment. We hope sincerely that we are not yet done with Mr. Lindsay’s educative process.
The Congo is the title poem of his new volume. To describe the poem adequately would require almost as much space as the nine pages it occupies. So it must suffice to say that it is perilously near great poetry, broad in sweep, imaginative, full of fire and color, psychological—and very strange. Much in the same vein are The Firemen’s Ball and The Santa Fe Trail, which appeared originally in Poetry.
Several of the poems in this volume, among them Darling Daughter of Babylon and I Went Down Into the Desert, are already familiar to readers of The Little Review, as they were first published in the June number. The volume contains also a delightful section of poems for children, and a group dealing with the present European war.
Both The Congo and Mr. Lindsay’s earlier volume, General Booth Enters Heaven, are extraordinarily interesting books. Every mind which is truly alive to-day should know at least one of them.