SOURCE: "Romanticism and the Frontier," in The American Way of Poetry, Russell & Russell, 1964, pp. 122-34.

In the following essay, originally published in 1943, Wells regards Lindsay as a quintessentially American poet.

The country has produced no one more distinctively American than Vachel Lindsay. One cannot think of him without the Middle Western background, with its amazingly dynamic and uncritical spirit of fifty years ago. He was even more unusual as a man than as a poet and more gifted in the acting or reciting of his verses than in the writing of them. In addition to being a poet, he was a painter, propagandist, mystic, eccentric saint, and Middle Western revivalist in the newly discovered religion of beauty. In a society fond of fantastic and exaggerated conduct, he become fantastic and extravagant in the ex treme. Although he first attained fame about 1912, better than any other poet of his...