The Golden Book of Springfield — Vachel Lindsay

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was an American poet who is considered a founder of modern singing poetry, as he termed it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted. He was born and grew up in Springfield, Ill., studied medicine at Ohio's Hiram College from 1897-1900, which he left to attend the Art Institute of Chicago, and then continued his art studies at the New York School of Art. Art remained an interest throughout his life and he went on to illustrate some of his own poetry. While in New York in 1905 he turned to poetry in earnest, later trading his self-printed poems for food and lodging on a series of treks on foot covering many hundreds of miles through various States. In 1913 he had his first poem printed in Poetry magazine, with his best-known work The Congo appearing in 1914, and at this point he became well-known. Part of his success and great fame was due to the singular manner in which he presented his poetry - as a performance accompanied by movements and gestures, often punctuated by shouts and whoops. His identity as a performance artist and use of American midwestern themes earned him the title of "Prairie Troubador" in the 1910s, but despite being one of the best-known poets in the US in the last 20 years of his life, after his death by suicide he fell into obscurity. Written from 1904-18 and published in 1920, The Golden Book of Springfield is Lindsay's only extended narrative work of prose fiction. Classified as a work of utopian fiction, it is the story of his hometwon of Springfield in 1918 and 2018, when residents work to transform it into a utopian paradise-city.