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Vachel Lindsay began high school in 1893 at age fourteen. He attended Springfield High School in Springfield, Illinois, where his classmates remembered him as "self-conscious" and "sensitive." Many of them also said that Lindsay "tried hard to be sociable." His good friends were known to have teased him by calling him "Rachel." However, what is best known about Lindsay's high school days is his walking, his poetry and his art work. Around Springfield High School he earned the title "Champion Walker." His passion for walking first began in 1897 when he joined the track team and excelled as one of its members, winning the mile walk for the school. He loved the sport and once said of himself, "Walking has been a mania with me. I walked myself into a kind of 'intoxication.'" This "mania" may not have seemed very important to his writing at the time, but it would later prove to be a great asset to his career when he introduced his poetry to people on his cross-country tramps. From the very beginning of his high school years, Lindsay demonstrated great strength in both art and English classes. He excelled way beyond the given reading ability for someone his age. In fact, by the time he was fifteen years old, he had read, on his own, the works of such great writers as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe. It was during Lindsay's high school years that his writing talent was first discovered. The first evidence of this came in his sophomore year when he wrote an essay on the literary character, "Brutus." Another great essay on the Grand Jury System was written during his junior year. He received such a high mark on this essay that he was asked to give an oration at the laying of the cornerstone for the building of the new Springfield High School. Up to this point, Lindsay had been writing many original poems but had not shown them to anyone. Finally, during his senior year, he began showing his
poetry to Ms. Susan Wilcox, his English teacher, Although Ms. Wilcox was Lindsay's English teacher, this was not the most important role she would have in his life. As she got to know her student, the two of them developed a great friendship that would give Lindsay the comfort and shelter he needed during the rougher points in his career. Wilcox quickly became someone that he trusted. She was the first person to whom he showed his poetry, and this, alone, says a great deal about how close the two of them were. Later in life he called her, "my best and most understanding friend." Throughout Lindsay's lifetime, he traveled many places across the country, but wherever he went, he still kept in touch with Ms. Wilcox on a regular basis. There was a correspondence between the two of them through letters and postcards. Many of these original manuscripts have been found and are kept in the Illinois State Historical Library.
Sources Vachel Lindsay , Edgar Lee Masters 1935 A City Is Not Builded In a Day , Frances S. Ridgely, Vachel Lindsay Association 1968 Cue Magazine, City Water, Light, and Power |
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and she compared his style to that of Edgar Allan Poe. She
began to encourage and support Lindsay's dream of a writing
career after finding out the extent of his talents. During
his senior year, Miss Wilcox asked Lindsay about his plans
for the future. He replied, "If I were an orphan I should be
an artist, but I'm not, so I'm going to college to be a
doctor." On June 10, 1897, when Vachel Lindsay graduated
from SHS, he left for Hiram College in Ohio.