Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Why has America forgotten Vachel Lindsay?

Posted on Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 3:56 PM

Slate.com published yesterday a story about Vachel Lindsay, who was one of America's most famous poets in the 1920s, when he lived in Spokane. He resided in the Davenport Hotel between 1924 and 1929 and, at some point in there, my old apartment building in Browne's Addition (at least according to a plaque on one of the exterior walls).

Lindsay's imaginative, lyrical poems made him a star (the poet T.R. Hummer reads two of them in the Slate story), but his "The Congo" also made him a racist, a fact that may have led to academics disowning him years later.

He committed suicide in 1931, drinking a bottle of lye.

Find out more about Lindsay (though not much about his life in Spokane) over at Slate.

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