A poet on foot
Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1879. His family expected him to become a physician like his father, but he turned to visual art and studied in Chicago and New York. He drew illustrations and devised lettering as well as writing verses. The house in Springfield remained a point of return throughout his travels.
On walking journeys he offered printed poems in exchange for a meal or a night’s lodging. Public recitals later put that direct exchange with listeners on a larger stage. General William Booth Enters into Heaven imagines the founder of the Salvation Army arriving to a noisy accompaniment. Lindsay also took the new medium of film seriously, publishing The Art of the Moving Picture in 1915.
A song above the ironing table
In The Chinese Nightingale the sound of Chang working at night gives way to a bird’s song and the repeated voices of a dream. The rhythm transforms the workplace long before the scenery changes. Its imagined China also reflects racial stereotypes available to an American writer of the period. The collection ranges beyond that poem to religion, war and motion pictures. The Macmillan copy in the library is dated 1919 and carries a 1917 copyright.
