SOURCE: "Vachel Lindsay: Jazz and the Poet," in Poets of America, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1925, pp. 229-45.

In the following essay, Wood traces the thematic and stylistic development of Lindsay's poetry.

The Norman came upon the Anglo-Saxon in one of his frequent moods of penitential groveling, of somber abasement before a Fate breathing blackly. The Norman came with a song on his lips, a laugh in his heart:

The time has been, too; and the Gargantuan mirth of the Channel conquerors drove the bleak deities of their Teutonic cousins to worm into a serfs low lot for long low years. But the worm bored inward: and there have been periodic reappearances of his depressing philosophy and his cerement living. America has been ridden with these ticking borers since Plymouth Rock echoed hollowly to the first iron step. Today we are in the throes of one of the typical...