l
poets soon appeared in person among the earliest visitors to the editor.
For the coming together of East and West may prove to be the great event
of the approaching era, and if the poetry of the now famous Bengali
laureate garners the richest wisdom and highest spirituality of his
ancient race, so one may venture to believe that the young Illinois
troubadour brings from Lincoln's city an authentic strain of the lyric
message of this newer world.

It is hardly necessary, perhaps, to mention Mr. Lindsay's loyalty to the
people of his place and hour, or the training in sympathy with their
aims and ideals which he has achieved through vagabondish wanderings in
the Middle West. And we may permit time to decide how far he expresses
their emotion. But it may be opportune to emphasize his plea for poetry
as a song art, an art appealing to the ear rather than the eye. The
first section of this volume is especially an effort to restore poetry
to its proper place--the audience-chamber, and take it out of the
library, the closet. In the library it has become, so far as the people
are concerned, almost a lost art, and perhaps it can be restored to the
people only through a renewal of its appeal to the ear.

I am tempted to quote from Mr. Lindsay's explanatory note which
accompanied three of these poems when they were first printed in
'Poetry'. He said:

"Mr. Yeats asked me recently in Chicago, 'What are we going to do to
restore the primitive singing of poetry?' I find what Mr. Yeats means
by 'the primitive singing of poetry' in Professor Edward Bliss Reed's
new volume on 'The English Lyric'. He says in his chapter on the
definition of the lyric: 'With the Greeks "song" was an all-embracing
term. It included the crooning of the nurse to the child... the
half-sung chant of the mower or sailor... the formal ode sung by the poet.
In all Greek lyrics, even in the choral odes, music was the handmaid of
verse.... The poet himself composed the accompaniment. Euripides was
censured because Iophon had assisted him in the musical setting of some
of his dramas.' Here is pictured a type of Greek work which survives in
American vaudeville, where every line may be two-thirds spoken and
one-third sung, the entire rendering, musical and elocutionary, depending
upon the improvising power and sure instinct of the performer.

"I respectfully submit these poems as experiments in which I endeavor to
carry this vaudeville form back toward