displayed western cities and western prairies with an epic vigor, with a wide sweep of color, with plain words and sonorous and ringing words, with whispering words of the deepest pathos. He himself seems like an untamed force of nature, despising all maintraveled roads, striking out ever new pioneer paths for his own feet. There is a deep sincerity in him and, in spite of the dauntless and exhilarated love of life he displays, a deep racial sadness. He also possesses a profoundly shrewd wisdom. He can be bitterly ironical, and then, in the turning of a page, surprisingly gentle. He stands at present in the front rank of American poetry for his undaunted independence and his brusque, vivid, vibratingly sensitive poetic personality. He is the folk-singer going down the road with a banjo, and nearer to the true Whitman than any other modern poet. He might speak the very words of Kipling's wanderer:

LAY me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.

Let me pry loose old walls.

Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper to

gether.

Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central

girders.

Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

From Cornhuskers, by Carl Sandburg. Copyright, 1918, by Henry Holt and Company.

OSSAWATOMIE *

I DON'T know how he came,

Shambling, dark, and strong.

He stood in the city and told men:

My people are fools, my people are young and strong, my people must learn, my people are terrible

workers and fighters.

Always he kept on asking: Where did that blood come from?

They said: You for the fool killer,

you for the booby hatch

and a necktie party.

They hauled him into jail.

They sneered at him and spit on him,
And he wrecked their jails,

Singing, "God damn your jails,"

And when he was most in jail

Crummy among the crazy in the dark

Then he was most of all out of jail

Shambling, dark, and strong,

Always asking: Where did that blood come from?

They laid hands on him

And the fool killers had a laugh

And the necktie party was a go, by God.

They laid hands on him and he was a goner.

From Smoke and Steel, by Carl Sandburg. Copyright, 1920, by Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, Inc.

They hammered him to pieces and he stood up.

They buried him and he walked out of the grave, by God,

Asking again: Where did that blood come from?

PEOPLE WITH PROUD CHINS*

I TELL them where the wind comes from,

Where the music goes when the fiddle is in the box.

Kids-I saw one with a proud chin, a sleepyhead,
And the moonline creeping white on her pillow.
I have seen their heads in the starlight

And their proud chins marching in a mist of the

stars.

They are the only people I never lie to.

I give them honest answers,

Answers shrewd as the circles of white on brown chest

nuts.

THEY ALL WANT TO PLAY HAMLET *

THEY all want to play Hamlet.

They have not exactly seen their fathers killed.
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,

Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden

spiders,

Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of flowers-O flowers, flowers slung by a dancing girl in the saddest play the inkfish, Shakespeare, ever wrote;

Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad
like all actors are sad and to stand by an open
grave with a joker's skull in the hand and then
to say over slow and say over slow wise, keen,
beautiful words masking a heart's breaking,
breaking,

This is something that calls and calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know

it is acting to be particular about it and yet : They all want to play Hamlet.

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1932)

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois, and till very recently made his permanent home there. He graduated from Springfield High School, went to Hiram College, studied art in Chicago and in New York, and engaged in lecturing and settlement work. He then departed for Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas and "preached the gospel of beauty." He renewed these trips, distributing Rhymes to be Traded for Bread. He wrote poetry in order to wake the people to certain of his definite and passionate ideas concerning communal betterment, artistically and in many other ways. He sang to convert, suffered the hardships of the apostle, and began a poetic evangelism in which he has never faltered since.

"General Booth Enters Into Heaven" was written in California and published in book form in 1913 with other poems. Before this Lindsay had written and illustrated pamphlets of his own and a magazine to encourage a better Springfield. But the original energy of "General Booth" immediately gained him an Americawide audience, and in 1914 he followed it with "The Congo," one of the most remarkable imaginative poems about the negro race that has ever appeared. He margined his poems with instructions as to how they should be read, declaring himself for the "Higher Vaudeville" imagination. His entirely new experiment attracted wide attention. He wrote "The Kallyope Yell" and "The Santa Fe Trail." He attempted and succeeded in a variety of intensely modern onomatopoetic effects, chanting his own poetry and beginning to appear before audiences. He followed the "Congo" with other remarkable negro poems, one of which is given here. He then branched off into the Orientally fantastical and produced The Chinese Nightingale, and in 1920 The Golden Whales of California. He seems always to write in the most exuberant spirits and with an underlying strong religious feeling inherited from his evangelical forbears. In prose he produced A Handy