It’s a mistake to insist too much on a distinction between low modernists and high modernists in 20th-century poetry: It’s one of those divisions that has edges so fuzzy we find it hard to say exactly on which side most of the cataloged poets belong.Still, something was clearly happening in the early 1920s, with, for example, the appearance of such work as William Carlos Williams’s “Spring and All” (1923) and Wallace Stevens’s “Harmonium” (1923) — both poets the subject of recent Poems of the Day here in The New York Sun. And though the edges may be uncertain, when we try to make a distinction between the populist low poets of modernism and the intellectual mandarins of high modernism, the centers of those camps are clear enough: Up on the hill, there’s T.S. Eliot. And down in the river bottoms, there’s Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931).Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature, while Lindsay has a name the clings only to the last dendrites of memory — which tells us something about which camp triumphed in the standard telling of literary history. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t let Lindsay slip away entirely. A proponent of sung poetry, he was a man who walked, selling pamphlets of his poetry, from Florida to Kentucky in 1906, to Ohio from New York City in 1908, and to New Mexico from Illinois in 1912. He was loud, and his poetry was sort of Whitmanesque and sort of free verse and sort of a set of rhythmical blasts. “Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle. / Never again will he hoo-doo you. / Never again will he hoo-doo you,” as he wrote in “The Congo” (1914). “Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole! / Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl!” as he wrote in “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” (1913).Or take today’s Poem of the Day, his 1914 “The Leaden-Eyed.” A short poem (Lindsay tended to write long), it’s actually pretty competent blank verse: eight lines of pentameter. But for the poet the formal metrics are entirely unimportant when compared to the sound as the poem is read aloud. This is a poem not to study but to recite — its hard stresses gaining speed until that ending: “Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.”The Leaden-Eyedby Vachel LindsayLet not young souls be smothered out beforeThey do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap,Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
