The Congo

Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo” demonstrates the traits of his work that would later emerge in the poetry of the Beat movement and the genre of Spoken Word poetry. Noted Beat poet Allen Ginsberg once called Lindsay “an early Allen Ginsberg,” though he called “The Congo” “totally racist at this point” and “cornball.” Beats like Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jack Kerouac envisioned a poetic lifestyle similar to Lindsay’s: itinerant, bohemian wanderers in pursuit of beauty. Like Lindsay, the Beat Movement espoused a loose poetics based on rhythm rather than meter, and often alliteration over rhyme.

The Spoken Word movement in poetry traces its origins to the Harlem Renaissance and to Vachel Lindsay, who was active during the same period. Lindsay derived a great deal of his style from blues phrasing, from preaching, and from oral storytelling traditions, just as the Harlem Renaissance writers did. Slam poetry competitions in San Francisco, the Nuyorican Poets Café on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry series, and the rise of Hip-Hop on both coasts gave voices to entire movements through the percussive, dramatic poetics seen in Lindsay’s work.