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Updated: September 14, 2025
Charles H. Spurgeon, should stand before the London public as the champions of contending armies; for Beauty is an end in itself, not a means, and so is Conduct. In the best work of Vachel Lindsay, we find these two qualities happily married, the zest for beauty and the hunger and thirst after righteousness.
As Edmond Rostand looked at a dunghill, and saw the vision Of Chantecler, so Vachel Lindsay looked at some drunken niggers and saw the vision of the Congo.
I should not think of attempting to determine the relative position of Percy Grainger in music and of Vachel Lindsay in poetry; but it is clear that both men possess an amazing vitality. Is it not the lack of vital force which prevents so many accomplished artists from ever rising above the crowd?
The "form" is lyrical, the stuff is narrative, the mode of presentation is often that of purely dramatic dialogue. Take a contemporary illustration of this blending of types. Mr. Vachel Lindsay has told us the origins of his striking poem "The Congo." He was already in a "national-theme mood," he says, when he listened to a sermon about missionaries on the Congo River.
From the folds of the strapped-down top she pulled out Compton Mackenzie's Youth's Encounter, and Vachel Lindsay's Congo. With a curious faint excitement she watched him turn the leaves. His blunt fingers flapped through them as though he was used to books. As he looked at Congo, he exclaimed, "Poetry! That's fine! Like it, but I don't hardly ever run across it. I Say I'm terribly obliged!"
So there are an increasingly large number of readers who are discerning in the dauntless gambols of Vachel Lindsay, not the mask of buffoonery, worn to attract attention, but a real poet, dancing gaily with bronchos, children, field-mice and potatoes. Such unquenchable vitality, such bubbling exuberance, cannot always be graceful, cannot always be impressive.
I'd tell the amazing story of how a piece of Walt Whitman manuscript was lost in Philadelphia on the memorable night of June 30, 1919. I'd tell just how Vachel Lindsay behaves when he's off duty. I'd even forsake everything to travel over to England with Vachel on his forthcoming lecture tour, as I'm convinced that England's comments on Vachel will be worth listening to.
What blissful meetings have been appointed, what scribblings of pain and sorrow, out of those founts of common speech. I remember, too, a certain pleasant vibration when, signing my name one day in the Bellevue's book, I found Miss Agnes Repplier's autograph a little above on the same page. Among our younger friends, Vachel Lindsay comes to mind as one who has done honor to the ink-well.
Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Walt Whitman, John Masefield, Vachel Lindsay are primary men. I have often wondered who would write a poem worthy of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Vachel Lindsay is the only living American who could do it, and I hope he will accept this challenge.
The demos found voice first in the poetry of Walt Whitman who has a successor in Vachel Lindsay, the man who walked through Kansas, trading poetry for food and lodging, teaching the farmers' sons and daughters to intone his stirring odes to Pocahontas, General Booth, and Old John Brown.
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