Vachel Lindsay and the Primitive Singing of the New Poetry

Abstract

Vachel Lindsay's theories of primitive verse and the Higher Vaudeville were crucial to modernist ideas about the intersections of race, orality, and the social function of poetry. Through poems like "The Firemen's Ball" and "The Congo," as well as in his pamphlets on the Higher Vaudeville, Lindsay developed a vision of the print speaker as a performer capable of restoring the conditions of primitive poetry and reinvigorating a degenerate whiteness. In this restoration, Lindsay and other architects of the new poetry, including Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson, saw the potential transformation of sociality itself. His theories illustrate how national and racial imaginaries were sustained by the struggles and contradictions of building a democratic poetry.