 The Vachel Lindsay birthday observance will be from 10 a.m. to 4
p.m. Saturday at the Vachel Lindsay Home State Historic Site, 603 S.
Fifth St.The Vachel Lindsay Repertory Group will perform at 10:30
a.m. Poet Walter Lipe will present a reading at 11:30 a.m., and poet
and writer Sandra Kuizin McKenna will perform at 12:30 p.m. Starting
at 1:30 p.m., Bill Furry and Guests will perform poetry, memories
and music from Lindsay's life and times, and Job Conger will offer
poetry readings and songs at 2:30 p.m.
James Hawker, artist in residence, will be at the Lindsay Home
that day to chat with visitors about his photographic exhibit
"Kafka's Resort," which will remain on display in the home through
early December.
Staff and volunteers will be in the rooms to share the history of
the home. Birthday cake, warm spiced cider and coffee will be served
inside a heated tent in the back garden of the home, which will also
feature children's activities.
The event is co-sponsored by the Vachel Lindsay Association.
The
Vachel Lindsay Home State Historic Site, administered by the
Illinois Historic
Preservation Agency, is the birthplace and longtime residence of
poet, author and artist Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, 1879-1931. It is
open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. for free public
tours.
___
A brief biography of Vachel Lindsay
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, a major American poet, was born Nov. 10,
1879, at 603 S. Fifth St. in Springfield to Dr. Vachel Thomas
Lindsay and Catharine Frazee Lindsay. He graduated from Springfield
High School and studied at Hiram College in Ohio, the Chicago Art
Institute and the New York School of Art.
Lindsay made three famous walking tours of the United States, in
1906, 1908 and 1912, covering more than 2,800 miles. On these
journeys, Lindsay traded poems for food and shelter, earning him the
title of "The Prairie Troubadour."
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Lindsay was catapulted to fame with the 1913 publication of his poem
"General William Booth Enters Into Heaven." Two years later his poem
"The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotus," calling for tolerance
between Western and Eastern cultures, was printed by the U.S.
Secretary of the Interior and sent to both houses of Congress in
connection with the opening of the Panama Canal. His "Congo" and
"Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight" are well-known by generations of
readers. Lindsay lectured at many universities, including Oxford,
Cambridge and the University of Illinois. He performed his poetry in
every state in the nation at the time. Lindsay was named
poet-in-residence of Gulf Park College in Gulfport, Miss., in 1923
and of the city of Spokane, Wash., in 1924.
He married Elizabeth Conner of Spokane in 1925. Lindsay, his wife
and two children returned to his Springfield home in 1929, where he
died on Dec. 5, 1931, in the bedroom directly above the room where
he was born.
Lindsay called himself a "rhymer-designer" and created drawings
to accompany his poems. He was a leading voice in the American "New
Poetry" movement, with a total published work of some 20 volumes of
poetry and prose. Lindsay and other major poets and artists of his
day championed a new language to express new subjects, such as civil
liberties, civic excellence, and humanitarian and aesthetic values.
He wrote poems of vehement protest against spiritual and
environmental blight.
Lindsay's Springfield home was his creative center, and he
returned there many times during his career. He cited his hometown
and state more than 500 times in his publications. "The things most
worthwhile are one's own hearth and neighborhood," he said.
In recent years, Lindsay's works increasingly are enjoying a
renaissance of international interest. His prophecies of individual
and global concerns are striking an even more responsive chord now
than they did when written 90 years ago.
Lindsay also enjoyed the respect of his colleagues. Sinclair
Lewis called Lindsay "one of our great poets, a power and a glory in
the land." Author, poet and Illinois native Carl Sandburg said, "I
rate (his poems) among the supremely great American poems."
[Text from file received from
the Illinois Historic
Preservation Agency]
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