SOURCE: "Vachel Lindsay: An Appraisal," in Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, edited by Clarence Gohdes, Duke University Press, 1967, pp. 273-81.

In the following essay, Flanagan, an American educator and critic, urges a reappraisal of Lindsay's poetry.

There can be no question that the reputation of Vachel Lindsay has declined sharply since the days when he won fame as a bardic poet and recited "The Congo" to thousands of tense listeners. When Norman Foerster published the first edition of his popular anthology American Poetry and Prose in 1925, he naturally included Lindsay and selected six poems to represent one of the freshest American talents since Poe. A quarter of a century later, F. O. Matthiessen in The Oxford Book of American Verse allotted Lindsay twenty-one pages and chose to include six poems. But in 1965 the situation was quite different. In their anthology entitled American Poetry...