world shall know
he is afoot: the Great Elian of Springfield is unleashed--let alewives
and deacons tremble!

Ungenerous hosts have cozened Vachel by begging him to recite his poems
at the beginning of each course, in the meantime getting on with their
eating; but despite the naivete of his eagerness to sing, there is a
plain and manly simplicity about Vachel that delights us all. We like to
know that here is a poet who has wrestled with poverty, who never wrote
a Class Day poem at Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at
all, and who lets the barber shave the back of his neck. We like to know
that he has tramped the ties in Georgia, harvested in Kansas, been
fumigated in New Jersey, and lives contented in Illinois. Four weeks a
year he lives as the darling of the cisalleghany Browning Societies, but
he is always glad to get back to Springfield and resume his robes as the
local Rabindranath. If he ever buys an automobile I am positive it will
be a Ford. Here is _homo americanus_, one of ourselves, who never wore
spats in his life.

But even the plain man may see visions. Walking on crowded city streets
at night, watching the lighted windows, delicatessen shops, peanut
carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free lunch counters piled with crackers
and saloon cheese, and minor poets struggling home with the Saturday
night marketing--he feels the thrill of being one, or at least
two-thirds, with this various, grotesque, pathetic, and surprising
humanity. The sense of fellowship with every other walking biped, the
full-blooded understanding that Whitman and O. Henry knew in brimming
measure, comes by gulps and twinges to almost all. That is the essence
of Lindsay's feeling about life. He loves crowds, companionship, plenty
of sirloin and onions, and seeing his name in print. He sings and
celebrates the great symbols of our hodgepodge democracy: ice cream
soda, electrical sky-signs, Sunday School picnics, the movies, Mark
Twain. In the teeming ooze and ocean bottoms of our atlantic humanity he
finds rich corals and rainbow shells, hospitality, reverence, love, and
beauty.

This is the sentiment that makes a merry pedestrian, and Vachel has
scrutineered and scuffled through a dozen states, lightening larders and
puzzling the worldly. Afoot and penniless is his technique--"stopping
when he had a mind to, singing when he felt inclined to"--and begging
his meals and bed. I suppose he has had as many free meals as any
American