SOURCE: "Overtly Romantic Modernists," in Religious trends in English Poetry, Volume V: 1880-1920, Columbia University Press, 1962, pp. 486-536.

In the following excerpt, Fairchild examines religious aspects of Lindsay's poetry.

Another Chicago School reviver of the spirit—not, in this case, of the art—of Walt Whitman was the folk-minstrel and missionary of democratic "beauty," (Nicholas) Vachel Lindsay. Though between 1912 and about 1916 he was regarded in this country as one of the leading "new poets," he was an innovator only in his attempt to get poetry out of "unpoetic" subjects and to make himself the mouthpiece of the latent creativity of the American farmer and small-townsman. He had a considerable natural talent, a big tender heart, no taste, and no brains. He was too proud of the fact that he had never grown up. Even more than Sandburg he was torn between his realism and his sentimentalism. And while...