【英文原著类】The Congo and Other Poems(刚果).pdf

The Congo and Other Poems
The Congo and Other
Poems
By Vachel Lindsay
1
The Congo and Other Poems
Introduction.
By Harriet Monroe
When `Poetry, A Magazine of Verse', was first published in Chicago in
the autumn of 1912, an Illinois poet, Vachel Lindsay, was, quite
appropriately, one of its first discoveries. It may be not quite without
significance that the issue of January, 1913, which led off with `General
William Booth Enters into Heaven', immediately followed the number in
which the great poet of Bengal, Rabindra Nath Tagore, was first presented
to the American public, and that these two antipodal poets soon appeared
in person among the earliest visitors to the editor. For ing together
of East and West may prove to be the great event of the approaching era,
and if the poetry of the now famous Bengali laureate garners the richest
wisdom and highest spirituality of his ancient race, so one may venture to
believe that the young Illinois troubadour brings from Lincoln's city an
authentic strain of the lyric message of this newer world.
It is hardly necessary, perhaps, to mention Mr. Lindsay's loyalty to the
people of his place and hour, or the training in sympathy with their aims
and ideals which he has achieved through vagabondish wanderings in the
Middle West. And we may permit time to decide how far he expresses
their emotion. But it may be opportune to emphasize his plea for poetry as
a song art, an art appealing to the ear rather than the eye. The first section
of this volume is especially an effort to restore poetry to its proper place --
the audience-chamber, and take it out of the library, the closet. In the
library it has e, so far as the people are concerned, almost a lost art,
and perhaps it can be restored to the people only through a renewal of its
appeal to the ear.
I am tempted to quote from Mr. Lindsay's explanatory note which
panied three of these poems when they were first printed in `Poetry'.
He said:
"M