s the old Greek precedent of the
half-chanted lyric. In this case the one-third of music must be added
by the instinct of the reader. He must be Iophon. And he can easily be
Iophon if he brings to bear upon the piece what might be called the
Higher Vaudeville imagination....

"Big general contrasts between the main sections should be the rule of
the first attempts at improvising. It is the hope of the writer that
after two or three readings each line will suggest its own separate
touch of melody to the reader who has become accustomed to the cadences.
Let him read what he likes read, and sing what he likes sung."

It was during this same visit in Chicago, at 'Poetry's' banquet on the
evening of March first, 1914, that Mr. Yeats honored Mr. Lindsay by
addressing his after-dinner talk primarily to him as "a fellow
craftsman", and by saying of 'General Booth':

"This poem is stripped bare of ornament; it has an earnest simplicity, a
strange beauty, and you know Bacon said, 'There is no excellent beauty
without strangeness.'"

This recognition from the distinguished Irish poet tempts me to hint at
the cosmopolitan aspects of such racily local art as Mr. Lindsay's. The
subject is too large for a merely introductory word, but the reader may
be invited to reflect upon it. If Mr. Lindsay's poetry should cross the
ocean, it would not be the first time that our most indigenous art has
reacted upon the art of older nations. Besides Poe--who, though
indigenous in ways too subtle for brief analysis, yet passed all
frontiers in his swift, sad flight--the two American artists of widest
influence, Whitman and Whistler, have been intensely American in
temperament and in the special spiritual quality of their art.

If Whistler was the first great artist to accept the modern message in
Oriental art, if Whitman was the first great modern poet to discard the
limitations of conventional form: if both were more free, more
individual, than their contemporaries, this was the expression of their
Americanism, which may perhaps be defined as a spiritual independence
and love of adventure inherited from the pioneers. Foreign artists are
usually the first to recognize this new tang; one detects the influence
of the great dead poet and dead painter in all modern art which looks
forward instead of back; and their countrymen, our own contemporary
poets and painters, often express indirectly, through French influences,
a reaction which they ar