Poetry in the Middle West

In the years following the Civil War, poetry, except for the work of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and two or three minor poets, was at low ebb. The age was one of prose. Early in the 20^th century, however, poetry once again came into its own.

In 1912, Harriet Monroe (1860-1936) founded the little magazine Poetry: a Magazine of Verse, in Chicago, which by the turn of the century had become a great city, home of innovative architecture and cosmopolitan art collections. She sought to encourage struggling poets everywhere and to train readers in the art of reading verse. The first issue of Poetry quoted Whitman for its motto: " To have great poets there must be great audiences, too. " The founding of Poetry was a timely act, for, as Harriet Monroe soon found out, there were a number of unknown poets who needed just such an outlet for their work. Poetry magazine discovered excellent new writers in its own backyard, the Middle West, never until then known for its poets. It published the first or early work of nearly every distinguished modern American poet and marked the American Renaissance of poetry.

The three great poets of the Midwest discovered by the magazine were Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, who grew up in Illinois and shared the midwestern concern with ordinary people. They are known for the Chicago School of Poetry that challenged the east coast literary establishment. Its appearance was a watershed in American history that showed that America's writers could be born not only in the somewhat artificially refined and educated east, but also in the real hard-working interior of the Midwest.

One the great Mid-Western poets was Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950), known primarily for Spoon River Anthology (1915), a series of poems in free verse. Each poem is a report on the life of a character now buried in the village graveyard, told by himself. As each person reveals himself, he helps build up the picture of an entire Illinois village. About 250 people are there: " The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter," many of them related to each other. Members of about 20 families speak of their failures, dreams, and sexual and village life in free-verse monologues. Not all the poems are good, but some are excellent, and the total effect of the book is strong and surprisingly modern.

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was another Poetry discovery. He was a celebrant of small-town midwestern populism and creator of strong, rhythmic poetry designed to be declaimed aloud. His works form a curious link between the popular, or folk, forms of poetry, such as Christian gospel songs on the one hand, and advanced modernist poetics on the other. ' The Congo and Other Poems ' (1914) secured him fame, especially the title poem, A Study of the Negro Race, with its jazz rhythms and its strong refrain. Racist by today's standards, this poem celebrates the history of Africans mingling jazz, poetry, music and chanting. At the same time he immortalized such figures of American history as Abe Lincoln in a more stately poem Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight (1914) and Johnny Appleseed. Almost as popular is also General William Booth Enters into Heaven (1913). An extremely popular public reader of his day, Vachel Lindsay foreshadowed mid-20^th century 'beat' poetry readings accompanied by jazz.

The third striking discovery by Poetry was Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). Trying to write briefly about Carl Sandburg is like trying to picture the Grand Canyon in one black-and-white snapshot. Poet, historian, biographer, novelist, musician, essayist, Sandburg, son of a railroad blacksmith was all these and more. A journalist by profession, to many Sandburg was a later day Walt Whitman, writing expansive, evocative urban and patriotic poems and simple, childlike rhymes and ballads.

Like Masters and Lindsay, Sandburg made poetry out of the materials of the Midwest. He first won a prize with Chicago (1914), still his best-known poem and since then travelled about reciting and recording his poetry in a lifting voice that was a kind of singing. At heart he was totally modest, despite his national fame. What he wanted from life, as he once said, was ' to be out of jail, to eat regular, to get what I write printed, a little love at home and a little nice affection hither and yon over the American landscape and to sing every day. '

The importance of Whitman's influence on modern American poetry is unmistakably shown in Sandburg's lines. Sandburg also used the sprawling unmetered and unrhymed line, and he too was the spokesman for all the American people, reproducing the vivid slang and idiom of the Midwest. Like the martyred Lincoln, whom he portrayed in a great biography, Sandburg affirmed a faith in the democratic process and in the people for whom it operates. " The people will live on," he asserted confidently in The People, Yes (1936), his book of democratic chants.

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