Audiobook · read by volunteers
Congo
Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)
Read by Fox in the Stars · 1 chapter · 8 min
About the book
The Congo is a poem meant to be heard, and heard loudly. Vachel Lindsay wrote it as a performance piece, full of pounding rhythm, shouted refrains and sudden hushes, and he marked the text with notes explaining how it should be spoken. Divided into three parts, it moves through images of revelry, of darkness and of a distant promise of hope, using sound almost as music. Lindsay himself called it a kind of higher vaudeville, and audiences remembered his exuberant recitals. The poem has also provoked serious debate because of how it portrays its subject, and a modern listener may well find it both thrilling and uncomfortable. Fox in the Stars reads it in a few minutes, and the poem's pounding refrains are very much at home in a spoken performance.
Introduction
Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) was an American poet from Springfield, Illinois, who made his name by reciting his work in public, often chanting and singing it to captivated crowds. He wanted poetry to return to the spoken word, with the force of a sermon or a ballad, and he travelled widely to perform it. The Congo, which reached book form in 1914, was one of his best-known pieces.
The poem is built on strong rhythms and repeated sounds, and Lindsay supplied marginal directions to guide the performer. He described the work as a form of higher vaudeville, a phrase that tells you how seriously he took showmanship. Its content has also been much discussed. Readers today may be troubled by its racial imagery and by the assumptions of its time, and it is often studied as an example of the poetry and prejudices of early twentieth-century America as well as of the experimental use of sound.
The recording lasts only a few minutes and consists of the single poem, read by LibriVox volunteer Fox in the Stars. It is a good test of how far the voice alone can carry rhythm and mood. Listeners curious about American poetry in the years before the First World War will find it a vivid, if complicated, document. Heard aloud, its pounding refrains and its sudden hushes show exactly what Lindsay meant by performing poetry, and the experience is very different from reading the lines silently on a page.
Public domain
Vachel Lindsay died in 1931: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text