A WINGED BOOK OF VISIONS
Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was the most intensely romantic U.S. poet of his generation. Harriet Monroe of POETRY called him "the most gifted and original poet we ever printed. " His "Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket" and "The Eagle That Is Forgotten" have long been favorites of rebel workers everywhere. America's premier poet-vagabond, often homeless, he was renowned for his crusading cross-country walking tours "On the Road to Nowhere. " The Prairie State's notorious "jazz poet" and "futurist" troubadour was also the nation's first major performance poet (his riotous readings were hugely attended),a prolific cartoonist and zinester, and one of the first to write seriously about movies.
Less well known is the fact that Lindsay was also a radical critic of the white supremacy, greed, misery, brutality, ugliness and emptiness inherent in U.S. capitalist culture. His only novel, THE GOLDEN BOOK—now back in print after seventy-nine years of shameful neglect—is a relentless dreamer's all-out assault on the stupidity and bigotry of Main Street USA. Lindsay's Luciferian lyricism, incantatory and even shamanic; the carnivalesque enthusiasm and humor that he called the "higher vaudeville"; and of course that zany, jubilant, self-contradictory mysticism that was all his own are amply evident in this radically nonconformist dream of the future.
In THE GOLDEN BOOK, the coffee houses, movie theaters, streets and parks of Springfield in the "Mystic Year" 2018 are the setting for a valiant struggle to transform a village dominated by shady politicians, lynch-mobs, commercialism and cocaine into a new paradise. This major American utopia is drawn from Lindsay's full orchestra of inspirations: John Brown's abolitionism, Debsian socialism, Johnny Appleseed, Campbellite millenialism, Jane Addams' Hull House, Confucius, Chuang Tzu, Buddha, St. Francis, Black Hawk, Tolstoy, W. E. B. Du Bois, Isadora Duncan, Louis Sullivan, the Women's Trade Union League, and many others.
Lindsay's aim was to charm and inspire people into creating a new society of Beauty, Generosity, Justice, Wonder and Joy, in which poetry would be lived and danced by all. THE GOLDEN BOOK offers no blueprint, but rather a poet's possibilities dreamed at the "cross streets of vision. " Here is a unique and defiantly imaginative utopia which, in the words of the dancer-heroine Comrade Avanel, is "born from the black soil of Illinois... and from the Red Indian and the Afro-American and all the tribes of the earth."
Ron Sakolsky's superb introduction, the most detailed examination yet of Lindsay's "Johnny Appleseed utopianism," explores THE GOLDEN BOOK as a radical response to the Springfield Race Riot of 1908; relates the book to the utopias of Fourier, Ruskin, Bellamy, and others; and traces Lindsay's involvement in Chicago radicalism in the 1910s, as well as his affinities with anarchism, feminism, Black liberation, the IWW, and such poet radicals as Blake, Lautreamont, the surrealists, Langston Hughes and the Beats.
*
Preface by WIlliam Furry (vii-ixpp)
Introduction by Ron Sakolsky (xi-cxvipp)
First published in 1920 by The Macmillan Company