Vachel Lindsay, little regarded today, was an influential poet of the 1910s and '20s, a faux-naif populist and primitive folk-artist and a convinced modernist.   He has been treated usually as an eccentric regionalist and grouped with Edgar Lee Masters or Edward Arlington Robinson, but he had a much different agenda from such prosy narrative poets, who are closer in vision to naturalistic storytellers like Robert Frost, Sherwood Anderson or even Sinclair Lewis.  Lindsay was a lyricist trying to forge a purely musical poetry to work on the same level of intensity as popular music.  While he may have had a stereotypical or skewed understanding of African-Americans and their music, he was sincerely interested in the poetic and emotional content of their lives, much like Stephen Foster a half-century earlier, who constructed a purely mythic Southland peopled by purely mythic d*rkies and who nonetheless became what one eloquent writer on Charles Ives called “the minstrel of Abolition” (Wooldridge 296).
            Other poets of the 1920s saw the new black music as part of modernism and symptomatic of American culture.  Hart Crane and Langston Hughes were contemporaries, and though they seem remote from each other in many ways, both were deeply concerned with defining America and understanding the complexity of modern experience.  Both were marginal characters in the literary world picture,  Hughes because of his ambiguous ethnic background and Crane because of his open homosexuality.  Both were interested in bringing modern forms to poetry—Hughes through African-American musical patterns and Crane through the “frozen music” of modern urban architecture, especially that of his obsessive symbol, the Brooklyn Bridge.  Both tried to find new poetic forms and fresh language for their work. Both were in many ways emblematic of 1920s culture.  Crane destroyed himself before completing much of his grand poetic project, and Hughes lived a long, productive life beyond the Harlem Renaissance, later becoming known as a satiric popular storyteller with a sharp, political insight into the difficult everyday task of living along the color line.
            It is instructive to compare two poems of 1926, the epicenter of the Jazz Age, Crane’s “Black Tambourine” and Hughes’ “The Weary Blues.”  Both are still frequently anthologized and cited, and both represent the two poets’ uses of materials from black culture.  Crane’s poem is brief enough to cite in full:
                        The interests of a black man in a cellar
                        Mark tardy judgment on the world’s closed door.
                        Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle,
                        And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.

                        Aesop, driven to pondering, found
                        Heaven with the tortoise and the hare;
                        Fox brush and sow ear top his grave
                        And mingling incantations on the air.

                        The black man, forlorn in the cellar,
                        Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark, that lies,
                        Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall,
                        And, in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.
It is the same vision of two worlds as in Eliot and Lindsay, the heart-of-darkness Africa which is a sinister shadow or screen behind the world of the modern American black city dweller.  It is a vision of darkness and imprisonment (much like the scene with which Ralph Ellison opens and closes his 1951 novel Invisible Man, self-chosen exile in an underground chamber like an oubliette from Edgar Allan Poe).
            Crane’s poem includes elements of urban squalor (gnats and roaches), a symbol of the minstrel-figure black man (the tambourine, traditional instrument of the minstrel show’s “end men,” used to punctuate jokes), the image of the rotting “carcass” (of what?  or whom?) that emblemizes Africa (like the skulls around Mr. Kurtz’s compound in Heart of Darkness) and the little story about Aesop, our oldest classical fabulist, and his fable of “slow and steady wins the race.”  The first lines of the poem are an epigram that sets up the rest of the images and seem to mean something like The black man, excluded from our world by decree and custom, is even in exile and neglect an implicit rebuke to us.  The following images, disconnected and like a free-association collage, are striking and haunting, especially the line that suggests lost royalty in an ancient, non-squalid Africa—“some mid-kingdom, dark”—which make the forlorn black man an imprisoned ruler, a lost king.  Is he neglected, like Aesop’s grave?  Is he an imprisoned philosopher, like Boethius driven to stoic consolations?  His mind “wanders” in the mid-kingdom of thought, and the word “incantations” suggests magic, perhaps something like vodun, the misunderstood Afro-Caribbean belief—voodoo or hoodoo.
            Like all of Crane’s major work, “Black Tambourine” is suggestive and oblique, in the best high-modern manner.  It contains some stereotyping imagery handled by Lindsay and which echoes through 1920s literature, white and black.  But it also is the product of a highly original mind and sensibility, one not content with blunt prejudices or conventional caricatures.  It is a poem about being “driven” to pondering, of the mind that “wanders” in a mid-kingdom of thought or resignation.  Crane’s work in many ways exemplified the art deco, streamlined culture of his age, but it was also intensely American, as conscious of the backgrounds of American thought as Nick Carraway, when he meditates on the elusive green light and the republic, the end of The Great Gatsby.
            Langston Hughes was focal to the Harlem Renaissance, but like all poets associated with that movement, he was also idiosyncratic and individualistic.  Many of his earliest poems, collected in 1926, dealt with music—jazz and blues and their milieus.  In “The Weary Blues,” Hughes wrote a poem imitative of the form and descriptive of the Harlem of cabarets and all-night music:
                        Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
                        Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
                                    I heard a Negro play.
                        Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
                        By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
                                    He did a lazy sway . . . .
                                    He did a lazy sway . . . .
                        To the tune of the Weary Blues.
                        With his ebony hands on each ivory key
                        He made that poor piano moan with melody.
                                    O Blues!
The first lines here include the obligatory “syncopated tune” as a descriptor, along with a striking visual image of the keyboard—“ebony hands on each ivory key.”  The little refrain “He did a lazy sway” suggests blues refrains.  The poem goes on to some stereotypical dialect (“ain’t” and “gwine”) and then quotes the blues directly:
                                    “I got the Weary Blues
                                    And I can’t be satisfied.
                                    Got the Weary Blues
                                    And can’t be satisfied—
                                    I ain’t happy no mo’
                                    And I wish that I had died.”
This is a typical blues form, with repeated refrain and simple rhyme scheme.  It leads to a conclusion that summarizes the singer, not the song:
                        The stars went out and so did the moon.
                        The singer stopped playing and went to bed
                        While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
                        He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
The ambiguity of the ending refracts something of the ambiguity inherent in the blues—despair and rest mixed together, so that sleeping “like a rock” might be good or might mean that the singer is dehumanized, as implied also by “a man that’s dead.”  Is his singing and playing cathartic, leading to peace, or deadening, leading to anesthesia?  The poem tries to create a microcosm of weariness, of soul-searching, but there is also a joy in the action, too, as an earlier phrase has it:  “He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool./Sweet Blues!”  This is a series of paradoxes or oxymorons:  the music is both sweet and raggy, and “musical fool” is one of those common black-English cool inversions (like “baaaad” for “good”), but it also carries some of the original idea of foolishness—that the blues singer/player is a master musician but also an idiot savant, a holy fool, and the music just comes out “naturally.”
            A more obscure Hughes poem from the same year, “Jazzonia,” is an exploration of jazz as exotica, with varied refrains around the lines “Oh, silver tree!/Oh, shining rivers of the soul!” and  “In a Harlem cabaret/Six long-headed jazzers play.”  In this slender lyric, jazz is treated as a sensuous but rather abstract experience, aside from the detail of the “long-headed jazzers.”  It is the other side of the coin from the seductive squalor of “The Weary Blues.”  The music might be depicted as either sinful or paradisal or perhaps both, at the same time.  Another from the same volume, “Po’ Boy Blues” is just a literal blues lyric, and a fairly good one in the vein of simple country blues:
                        I was a good boy,
                        Never done no wrong.
                        Yes, I was a good boy,
                        Never done no wrong,
                        But this world is weary
                        An’ de road is hard an’ long.
“Weary” seems a keyword for Hughes in his blue mood, as if world-weariness or ennui were the true essence of the blues.
           Some of Hughes’ poems, like much of the work of Harlem Renaissance writers, seems a mixed advertisement for Harlem as a wicked, depraved but stimulating place—a titillating notion that white readers or nightclubbers would find slumming in Harlem an antidote for middle-class lethargy and puritan constrictions and that the illusory sinfulness of places with floor shows like The Cotton Club or Small’s Paradise was important art.  Hughes’ “Harlem Night Club” captures some of this naïve debauchery:
                        Dark brown girls
                        In blond men’s arms.
                        Jazz-band, jazz-band,--
                        Sing Eve’s charms!
                                    * * * * *
                        Jazz-boys, jazz-boys,--
                        Play, plAY, PLAY!
                        Tomorrow . . . . is darkness.
                        Joy today!
The strained typography tries to reproduce the music’s feeling of accelerating crescendo, and the imagery of “black and tan” entertainment must have been shocking or provocative for the time. 
            Another experimental Hughes poem from 1926, suggesting a pastiche of  e.e. cummings’ typographical jeux d’esprit, the surrealist comic strip Krazy Kat and humorist Don Marquis’ charming Archy and Mehitabel tales,  is “The Cat and the Saxophone (2 a.m.).”  It is worth seeing whole for its typographic layout and its antiphonal rendering of two texts—the chorus (in capitals) from Spencer Williams’ jazz hit “Everybody Loves My Baby” (1924) and a poetic text or context in which it is embedded, a form foreshadowing mixed-media Concrete Poetry of the 1960s:
                        EVERYBODY
                        Half-pint,--
                        Gin?
                        No, make it
                        LOVES MY BABY
                        corn.  You like
                        liquor,
                        don’t you, honey?
                        BUT MY BABY
                        Sure.  Kiss me,
                        DON’T LOVE NOBODY
                        daddy.
                        BUT ME.
                        Say!
                        EVERYBODY
                        Yes?
                        WANTS MY BABY
                        I’m your
                        BUT MY BABY
                        sweetie, ain’t I?
                        DON’T WANT NOBODY
                        Sure.
                        BUT
                        Then let’s
                        ME,
                        do it!
                        SWEET ME.
                        Charleston,
                        mamma!
                        !
Without directly mentioning either a literal cat or a literal saxophone, Hughes suggests the ambience of jazz, linked with the cartoonish notion of feline caterwauling in the small hours (like the novel sound of the saxophone, as much an emblem of early jazz as the electric guitar was for early rock and roll, a shorthand for jazz itself, as is evident below in Robert Hillyer’s satiric portrait).  The moment is at the height of the Charleston craze, which also became a metaphor for the idea of jazz and the Jazz Age.  Spencer Williams’ music, as recorded by Clarence Williams and Louis Armstrong in 1924, uses a heavy Charleston-stoptime beat behind the words Hughes quotes, to extend the poem’s metaphor into another medium.
            The dialogue in the poem is as clipped and staccato as the song lyrics, and the lingo is hip—“daddy,” “sweetie,” “honey,” “mamma”—and sexy-affectionate.  Is “mamma” the “cat” of the title and “daddy’ the “saxophone”?  The two voices are distinct but also archetypal, the hedonistic flapper-jellybean figures of John Held, Jr., or of the muralists of Harlem, who painted them into their nightclub scenes.  The energetic music in the background also adds a dimension to the description.
            Much later in his career, Hughes observed the rise of bop and modern jazz with amusement and approval, seeing the new music as revolutionary in both cultural and political ways.  He used the platform of his “Simple” (Jess B. Semple) stories as one outlet for these commentaries in the 1940s and ‘50s.  He also wrote poems harking back to his 1920s jazz meditations.  One is “Flatted Fifths,” which characterizes the colorful, eccentric bop musicians concisely through their own scat rhythms:
                        Little cullud boys with beards
                        Re-bop be-bop mop and stop.
He notes the exotic novelty of the music, which is like “sparkling Oriental wines/rich and strange,” and ends with the same image of the very young and childlike bopsters:
                        Little cullud boys in berets
                                    oop pop-a-da
                        horse a fantasy of days
                                    ool ya koo
                        and dig all plays.
The bop-scat passages expressively represent the melodic line of the music, including the pig-Latinized “ool ya koo,” for “cool.”  The poem has little content beyond a sensuous description of the music, but it recalls Hughes’s fascination with jazz sounds and rhythms of twenty years earlier.
            To return to the other side of my comparison, Hart Crane, it is worth examining a short segment of the never-completed The Bridge—section VI, “Quaker Hill,” which is presided over by female muses Isadora Duncan and Emily Dickinson.  The brief meditation surveys history and the present from a split vision of idealism and realism—Duncan’s often-naïve and vague idealism vs. the hard-edged mundane details of Dickinson’s verse, seeking a “transmuting silence with that stilly note/Of pain that Emily, that Isadora knew!”  Embedded in a set of philosophical questions is an ironic description of the 1920s like something from F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.L. Mencken, John O’Hara, T.S. Eliot or Sinclair Lewis at their most urbane and acerbic:
                        . . . I have seen death’s stare in slow survey
                        From four horizons that no one relates  . . .
                        Weekenders avid of their turf-won scores,
                        Here three hours from the semaphores, the Czars
                        Of golf, by twos and threes in plaid plusfours
                        Alight with sticks abristle and cigars.

                        This was the Promised Land, and still it is
                        To the persuasive suburban land agent
                        In bootleg roadhouses where the gin fizz
                        Bubbles in time to Hollywood’s new love-nest pageant.
                        Fresh from the radio to the old Meeting House
                        (Now the New Avalon Hotel) volcanoes roar
                        A welcome to highsteppers that no mouse
                        Who saw the Friends there ever heard before.
The contrast between the hedonism of the '20s and the somber silence of the Quaker history forms a commentary on the Jazz Age and its pace of frantic modernism.  The scene both attracted and repelled Crane as he tried to create a context for the wondrous achievement of the Bridge, an intersection of modern thought and technology and the long, slow history of America.  The details here—the golfing craze, the presence of ubiquitous but illegal roadhouses and their proscribed-but-available highballs, the land boom and expansion of city to suburb, the mention of radio and movies—all depict the intense new age Fitzgerald called “this side of paradise.”  Crane was never as direct a commentator on the Jazz Age as Langston Hughes, but the presence of the jazz culture is behind his poetry like a shimmering backdrop scrim against which all is perceived.

Concludes in Part 3, next issue...

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