Vachel Lindsay

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) was an American poet from Springfield, Illinois, known for chanted, performance-based verse. After studying art in Chicago and New York, he tramped through the South and West trading poems for food and lodging, an experience he described in prose. General William Booth Enters into Heaven (1913) and The Congo and Other Poems (1914) made him famous, and he toured widely reciting his work with dramatic rhythm and gesture. He promoted what he called the gospel of beauty and civic idealism, and wrote an early book on film. Ill and in debt, he took his own life in 1931.