Vachel Lindsay Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

Except the Christ be born again tonight
In dreams of all men, saints and sons of shame,
The world will never see his kingdom bright.
Stars of all hearts, lead onward thro' the night
Past death-black deserts, doubts without a name,
Past hills of pain and mountains of new sin
To that far sky where mystic births begin,
Where dreaming ears the angel-song shall win.

Vachel Lindsay
Let not young souls be smothered out
Before they do quaint deeds
And fully flaunt their pride.

Vachel Lindsay
God lead us past the setting of the sun
To wizard islands, of august surprise;
God make our blunders wise.

Vachel Lindsay
This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: - To speak of bloody power as right divine, And call on God to guard each vile chief's house, And for such chiefs, turn men to wolves and swine.

Vachel Lindsay
Old Euclid drew a circle On a sand-beach long ago, He bound it and enclosed it With angles thus and so.

Vachel Lindsay
The Grasshopper, the grasshopper, I will explain to you: He is the Brownies' racehorse, The fairies' Kangaroo.

Vachel Lindsay
Spring came on forever,
Spring came on forever,
Said the Chinese nightingale.

Vachel Lindsay
Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black,
Cutting through the forest with a golden track.

Vachel Lindsay
Factory windows are always broken.
Somebody's always throwing bricks,
Somebody's always heaving cinders,
Playing ugly Yahoo tricks.

Vachel Lindsay
Booth died blind and still by faith he trod,
Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.

Vachel Lindsay
Star of my heart, I follow from afar.
Sweet Love on high, lead on where shepherds are,
Where Time is not, and only dreamers are.
Star from of old, the Magi-Kings are dead
And a foolish Saxon seeks the manger-bed.
O lead me to Jehovah's child
Across this dreamland lone and wild,
Then will I speak this prayer unsaid,
And kiss his little haloed head—
"My star and I, we love thee, little child."

Vachel Lindsay
Angels come down, with Christmas in their hearts,
Gentle, whimsical, laughing, heaven-sent;
And, for a day, fair Peace have given me.

Vachel Lindsay
Whenever I begin to write a poem or draw a picture I am, in imagination, if not in reality, back in my room where I began to draw pen-and-ink pictures and write verses in my seventeenth year. Both windows of the room look down on the great Governor's Yard of Illinois. This yard is a square block, a beautiful park. Our house is on so high a hill I can always look down upon the governor. Among my very earliest memories are those of seeing old Governor Oglesby leaning on his cane, marching about, calling his children about him.

Vachel Lindsay
There were three great Virginia poets in the very beginning — George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson. What! you say. We do not even know the names of their publishers. They were not poets!
Well, how do you know? Did you ever really read them? What do you know about it? Their very names will breathe poetry forever.

Vachel Lindsay
Within the town of Buffalo
Are prosy men with leaden eyes,
Like ants they worry to and fro
(Important men in Buffalo.)
But only twenty miles away
A deathless glory is at play;
Niagara, Niagara …

Vachel Lindsay
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

Vachel Lindsay
Change the fabric of your own soul and your own visions, and you change all.

Vachel Lindsay
Most of the good poetry, as I have said, has appeared in pamphlet form before the poet was known to the public. It is utterly impossible to make an income from verse, and one must win his worldly standing, and earn his living some other way. One of the most distinguished of the Middle Western poets supports himself by writing a movie column once a day. I do not know a poet in the Anglo-Saxon world who makes his living by poetry. Every single one of them makes his living in some other way.

Vachel Lindsay
I am still making my living reciting my verses for crowds who refuse to buy my books. I must do this, as all American rhymers must, however sick I may be of the sound of my own voice.

Vachel Lindsay
I will not be a slave to my yesterday. I am creator, not a parrot.

Vachel Lindsay
I have sung my songs to my own tunes for most of the English departments of the state universities of the forty-eight states of the nation, and the English departments of other universities and colleges; and I have been recalled to many of these seven and eight times, which matters are a source of great pride to me. And I have brought out three books where the songs were based on my own pen-and-ink pictures.

Vachel Lindsay
A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black, A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl Make him the quaint great figure that men love, The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.

Vachel Lindsay
The moon? It is a griffin's egg
Hatching tomorrow night …
Yet gentle will the griffin be,
Most decorous and fat,
And walk up to the Milky Way
And lap it like a cat.

Vachel Lindsay
A natural king
With a raven wing,
Cold no more,
Weary no more,
Old, old,
Old, old,
Andrew Jackson.

Vachel Lindsay
Our Christmas shall be rare at dawning there,
And each shall find his brother fair,
Like a little child within:
All hearts of the earth shall find new birth
And wake, no more to sin.

Vachel Lindsay
Be careful what you do,
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,
And all of the other Gods of the Congo,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.

Vachel Lindsay
Yes, I have walked in California,
And the rivers there are blue and white.
Thunderclouds of grapes hang on the mountains.
Bears in the meadows pitch and fight.

Vachel Lindsay
Planting the trees that would march and train On, in his name to the great Pacific, Like Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, Johnny Appleseed swept on.

Vachel Lindsay
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings; with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom.

Vachel Lindsay
I think that my first poetic impulse is for music; second a definite conception with the ring of the universe...

Vachel Lindsay