Vachel Lindsay took a walk from his home in Springfield, Ill., over
the prairies to New Mexico. He was in Kansas in wheat-harvest time
and he worked as a farm-hand, and he tells all about that. He tells
about his walks and the people he met in a little book, “Adventures
while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty.” For the conditions of his
tramps were that he should keep away from cities, money, baggage,
and pay his way by reciting his own poems. And he did it. People
liked his pieces, and tramp farmhands with rough necks and rougher
hands left off singing smutty limericks and took to “Atlanta in
Calydon” apparently because they preferred it. Of motor cars, which
gave him a lift, he says: “I still maintain that the auto is a
carnal institution, to be shunned by the truly spiritual, but there
are times when I, for one, get tired of being spiritual.” His story
of the “Five Little Children Eating Mush” (that was one night in
Colorado, and he recited to them while they ate supper) has more
beauty and tenderness and jolly tears than all the expensive sob
stuff theatrical managers ever dreamed of. Mr. Lindsay doesn’t need
to write verse to be a poet. His prose is poetry--poetry straight
from the soil, of America that is, and of a nobler America that is to
be. You cannot afford--both for your entertainment and for the _real
idea_ that this young man has (of which we have said nothing)--to
miss this book.--_Editorial from Collier’s Weekly._