Biography Essay

Vachel Lindsay's considerable loss of reputation in American letters is a continuing theme in critical evaluations published during the 1970s and 1980s. Ironically, the theme is illustrated, in part, not only by the meager number of articles written about Lindsay but also by their lack of inclusion in leading journals. Several scholars have lamented the fact that Lindsay's work is not represented in such widely used college text surveys as Grosset & Dunlap's American Tradition in Literature, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, and Macmillan's Anthology of American Literature (in spite of the fact that Macmillan published most of Lindsay's important books). Although one critic (Donald Wesling) has defended Lindsay's exclusion from current anthologies, Lindsay's contemporaries, even detractors such as Ezra Pound and critic Gorham B. Munson, would likely be surprised to learn that scholars in the 1980s consider Lindsay not worth mentioning in purportedly comprehensive surveys...