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Poet Vachel Lindsay reads with one of his relatives.Credit:

In 1914, at the beginning of the first world war, the poet Vachel Lindsay, in Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, portrayed a ghostly Lincoln deploring the conflagration.

My father, a true son of Sangamon County, would despair to know his own boy, with whom he strolled the grounds of Lincoln’s tomb trading lines from Vachel Lindsay, would make such a sloppy error.

Other work has aged even less well, like Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo,” first published in 1912, which includes lines like “‘BLOOD’ screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors.”

Hiram College is home to the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature, which is named for two poets, Vachel Lindsay and Hart Crane.