19 pages • 38 minutes read
Vachel LindsayThe Congo
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1914A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Analysis: Beat and Spoken Word Poetry
Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo” demonstrates the traits of his work that would later emerge in the poetry of the Beat movement and the genre of Spoken Word poetry. Noted Beat poet Allen Ginsberg once called Lindsay “an early Allen Ginsberg,” though he called “The Congo” “totally racist at this point” and “cornball.” Beats like Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jack Kerouac envisioned a poetic lifestyle similar to Lindsay’s: itinerant, bohemian wanderers in pursuit of beauty. Like Lindsay, the Beat Movement espoused a loose poetics based on rhythm rather than meter, and often alliteration over rhyme.
The Spoken Word movement in poetry traces its origins to the Harlem Renaissance and to Vachel Lindsay, who was active during the same period. Lindsay derived a great deal of his style from blues phrasing, from preaching, and from oral storytelling traditions, just as the Harlem Renaissance writers did. Slam poetry competitions in San Francisco, the Nuyorican Poets Café on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry series, and the rise of Hip-Hop on both coasts gave voices to entire movements through the percussive, dramatic poetics seen in Lindsay’s work. These movements differ from Lindsay in their consistent focus on social justice and enfranchisement. While the Spoken Word genre exists for performance and to entertain, these works almost always educate as well.
This Whitmanesque, oracular style of poetry served to encompass poets’ increasingly expansive ideas about American voice. While Lindsay may have been less egalitarian and socially aware than the groups to follow him, he occupies a unique spot in American poetics, poised between conventional academic tone and a more democratic music, one closer to the voice of the people.
Socio-Historical Context: The Jazz Age
The loose metrical structure, the musicality, and cinematic drama of Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo,” as well as many of his other poems, fits the glamor, speed, and excess of the American Jazz Age. But Lindsay’s work predates the era, and by the time the 1920s and high Modernism were in full swing, Lindsay had begun to decline in popularity and in confidence. While “The Congo” employs some of the expansive lines seen a decade later in poems by T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Langston Hughes, Lindsay’s work never reached beyond the excitement of performance toward more philosophical, social, or intellectual epiphanies. What Lindsay did understand before almost any other figure in the arts was the importance of what he believed to be the only truly American genre, America’s gift to the cultural landscape: the motion picture. Lindsay wrote the first definitive film grammar, The Art of the Moving Picture, in 1915. In this prescient work, Lindsay predicts film genres that would not appear for decades. He accurately assumes that the movies will replace vaudeville as the primary popular form of entertainment for the American public. Along with the jazz and blues music Lindsay wanted so much to replicate in his poetry, movies would define the aesthetic of the Jazz Age and reshape American desire. Lindsay’s best work grasps at the zeitgeist ahead, not quite capturing it for his own.
