General William Booth was the founder of The Salvation Army, which has uplifted more downtrodden and lost souls that the whole …
7 COMMENTS
I honour Ezra Pound this side idolatry;- but in Canto LXXXI he claims to have been the first to adopt non-heroic metre as the American norm.
"To break the pentameter, that was the first heave".
But Vachel Lindsay had already demonstrated that there were alternatives to iambic pentameter as an English norm.
You capture Lindsay's edgy dactyls magnificently here – I hope one day you'll consider his 'Chinese Nightingale'.
Well done Vachel Lindsay, and well done Spoken Verse.
Do you know why VL may have used the word 'queer' twice? And given his tone toward Booth and the SA, would it be likely the last line refers to Jesus as the one who wept?
Lindsay wrote that when he was “dead broke, and begging” in Atlanta, Georgia, he slept at the Salvation Army shelter there. Lindsay was, for a period of his life, a part of that lowest level of society that Booth had established the Salvation Army to reach and save from degradation. enotes
I honour Ezra Pound this side idolatry;- but in Canto LXXXI he claims to have been the first to adopt non-heroic metre as the American norm.
"To break the pentameter, that was the first heave".
But Vachel Lindsay had already demonstrated that there were alternatives to iambic pentameter as an English norm.
You capture Lindsay's edgy dactyls magnificently here – I hope one day you'll consider his 'Chinese Nightingale'.
Well done Vachel Lindsay, and well done Spoken Verse.
Do you know why VL may have used the word 'queer' twice? And given his tone toward Booth and the SA, would it be likely the last line refers to Jesus as the one who wept?
I'm sure he used queer in the old fashioned straight sense. Using it to mean homosexual was still only British then.
In the last stanza "he" means Booth, so it doesn't mean "Jesus wept". If that meaning had been intended it would have been better expressed.
Thank you.
Yes, I'm washed in the blood of the Lamb!
This is a good one but I wish Tony Randall's version was available.
Lindsay wrote that when he was “dead broke, and begging” in Atlanta,
Georgia, he slept at the Salvation Army shelter there. Lindsay was, for a
period of his life, a part of that lowest level of society that Booth
had established the Salvation Army to reach and save from degradation. enotes