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J^^ VISION OP TMIS LAND k!i«e'»<niw«**jfj;^fl*Sij#<Srsi««~r^ Studies of VACHEL LINDSAY, EDGAR LEE MASTERS, AND CARL SANDBURG EDITED BY JOHN E. HALLWAS AND DENNIS J. READER An Essays in Literature Book TWC VISION OP TWIS LAND JohnE. HaRwas, an Associate Professor at Western Illinois University, has previously published on these writers; Dennis J. Reader, also an Associate Professor, is the Director of the Western Illinois University Center for Regional Authors, a special library collection that includes a wide variety of material by and about Lindsay, Masters, and Sandburg. TWC VISION OP TI-IIS LAND Studies of VACHEL LINDSAY, EDGAR LEE MASTERS, AND CARL SANDBURG EDITED BY JOHN E. HALLWAS AND DENNIS J. READER An Essays in Literature Book Copyright © 1976 by Western Illinois University Cover photograph: Jeffrey T. Oldham Library of Congress Catalog Card No. : 76-4350 V3 Contents Introduction John E. Haliwas, Dennis J. Reader 7 Photographs 11 The Garden of Illinois Blair Whitney 17 Vachel Lindsay: A Reappraisal Dennis Q. Mclnemy 29 Vachel Lindsay's American Mythocracy and Some Unpublished Sources Marc Chenetier 42 Edgar Lee Masters: The Lawyer As Writer Charles E. Burgess 55 After Spoon River: Masters' Poetic Development 1916-1919 Herb Russell 74 The People, Yes: Sandburg's Dreambook for Today Charles W. Mayer 82 Sandburg's Chromatic Vision in Honey and Salt Richard Crowder 92 Sandburg and the Lincoln Biography: A Personal View Victor Hicken 105 Lindsay/Masters/Sandburg: Criticism from 1950-1975 William White 114 Notes on Contributors 129 Introduction Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg came suddenly to national attention during the second decade of the century as they began to publish their mature poetry. The favorable response to poems placed in Poetry (by Lindsay and Sandburg) and Reedy 's Mirror (by Masters) soon led to the publication of four remarkable books in as many years. Lindsay's General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems (1913) and The Congo and Other Poems (1914) brought to the public an idealistic— often visionary — sort of chant poetry which he called the Higher Vaudeville. Masters' Spoon River Anthology (1915) exposed the inner life of the American small town in free verse monologues that were, for this period, often devastatingly frank. And Sandburg's Chicago Poems (1916) expressed the brutality and raw energy of the big city in long, running free verse lines. These four volumes formed the poetic peak of what later came to be called the Chicago Renaissance. Unfortunately, these early books by the three poets created such an impression that they tended to overshadow later volumes and prevent an open-minded assessment of each poet's development. At Lindsay's famous poetry recitations the audiences clamored for readings of "General Booth" and "The Congo" until the very year of his death; Masters wrote several books of poetry soon after Spoon River Anthology but eventually had to publish The New Spoon River to bolster a sagging reputation; and Sandburg's later books of poetry never achieved the acclaim of Chicago Poems— his status as an American folk hero being largely the product of his Lincoln biography and his performances as a folksinger. As a result, such poetry volumes as Lindsay's Johnny Appleseed and Other Poems, Masters' Invisible Landscapes, and Sandburg's The People, Yes are less well-known than they might have been. A generation ago historian Walter Havighurst referred to Lindsay, Masters, and Sandburg as "The Prairie Poets," and although this label was simply intended to indicate their location in the American heartland, it has a more profound significance than he realized. Because they were raised on the prairies of west-central Illinois during the twilight of the pioneer period, these three writers share some very important influences: the midwestern landscape itself, the pioneer history of Illinois, the developing myth of Abraham Lincoln (later rejected by Masters), the democratic idealism of William Jennings Bryan, the social consciousness of Governor John Peter Altgeld, and the Mississippi River fiction of Mark Twain. Hence, the position - 7 - THE VISION OF THIS LAND of these poets in the American literary tradition is not to be determined by their participation in the Chicago Renaissance—which at best refers only to their rejection of the genteel tradition of American poetry—but by their significance as a group of poets from the same region of the Midwest whose works are deeply penetrated by similar ideals and values. Taken together, the above influences made the poets expressive of the American heritage, and concerned about the development of American society. Hence, the following passage from Masters' "Give Us Back Our Country"— although it does not appear related to the "Mumbo-Jumbo" of the Higher Vaudeville poems, the revelations of the Spoon River epitaphs, or the brashness of the Chicago lyrics— effectively reveals the perspective that produced those works, and provides a keynote for the present collection of essays: But let the vision of this land appear; Let duty to the heritage that is ours Come to the minds of leaders: then the people. Waiting like winter fields for April time. Will rise and shake their banners like the com. But overemphasis upon the famous early volumes of Lindsay, Masters, and Sandburg, by readers and critics alike—to the point of ignoring their poetic development and misjudging their significance — is not the only reason why they failed to become figures of lasting prominence in twentieth-century literature. Consider for a moment the transparent relationship of the three to Walt Whitman: Masters was his admiring biographer; Sandburg emulated his poetic line, language, and voice (that of the "en-masse"); Lindsay continued the hope of the poet as "divine literatus," the new reformer or secular priest. These close intellectual and emotional ties to Whitman, and hence to a remote era, suggest why today in this country there is a general sense that events, and certainly attitudes, have passed them by. As everyone recognizes, it is Missourian T. S. Eliot's wasteland and not Vachel Lindsay's golden Springfield that speaks most for twentieth-century America— and for twentieth-century American poetry in particular. Eliot recorded what he found in the new century while Lindsay quixotically sought to purify it. Like Whitman, if without his poetic genius, Lindsay was a public poet with a public program for social improvement, and his platform popularity, as Sandburg's, would have been envied by a Whitman who had always aspired to be an influential orator. Masters, as well, piles up the terms "vision" and "dream" and "light" so often in even Spoon River Anthology—a work usually regarded as a collection of complaints and cynicism— that he freely exposes his romantic, reformist, Whitmanesque heritage. In a real sense, the long foreground of the American wasteland— so antithetical to the American Edenic garden—was officially announced by the massive contradiction of a civil war within a democracy. Nothing could ever again seem quite new about the New World after that event, and as the virgin continent began rapidly to fill up with men and machines, the purest sources of our native mythic ideals remained trapped somewhere behind the taU fence of 1861. After that year few serious American poets dared or desired to replace Whitman as celebrator of democracy's best potentials. This post-Civil War INTRODUCTION period was remarkable for its continual corruption, a time of excessive materialism (Mark Twain's famous phrase was "the gilded age") that stretched virtually unbroken until the great depression of the 1930's. The correlative literary movements that dominated these decades were "realism," which portrayed the improbability of heroic achievement, and "naturalism," which proclaimed free will as impossible in a world controlled by external forces. Among those few poets of substance who did desire to resurrect the American vision, most were born in what was still the nineteenth century— as were Masters, Sandburg, Lindsay, and Ohio-born Hart Crane. They included in their vision those mjrthic components recognizable from much earlier times, along with the attendant cultural heroes (who were also their own personal heroes): Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Whitman himself. The thematic thread runs, historically, from frontier self-reliance to democracy's radical individualism to the archetypal citizen in "Song of Myself' and finally to Lindsay's The Litany of Washington Street, Masters' The New World, and Sandburg's The People, Yes. In this mjrthic tradition America itself—the land itself—travels the long road from New World paradise to the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, through the nostalgia of post-Civil War Local Color regionalism, and eventually to Sandburg's New Salem, Masters' beloved Spoon and Sangamon River valleys, and Lindsay's midwestern New Localism. While such a pastoral ideal is axiomatically unfriendly to technology and material progress, Sandburg at least—like Whitman and Hart Crane- pointedly includes in his celebration the magnetism and gross power of urban America. Because they stand outside the main current of twentieth-century poetry, and relate to populist traditions rather than to personal and consciously intellectual values, these three authors are now relatively foreign to us. They have failed Whitman's own well-known measure of a poet's success, given at the end of his 1855 Preface: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." Quite apart from the merits of their art —which is various—these three writers have fallen from favor because the role of the public poet has fallen from fashion. But perhaps the cycle is slowly turning back; perhaps a new American conservation-consciousness can include preserving worthy traditions and ideals, can develop an awareness of "culture ecology" to parallel its awareness of ecology in nature.

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