The world said: 'Child hearts,
You must keep till the summer.
It is not allowed
That your hearts should be red.'"
And Lindsay concludes:
"Were I god of the village
My servants should mate them.
Were I priest of the church
I would set them apart.
If the wide state were mine
It should live for such darlings,
And hedge with all shelter
The child-wedded heart."
"The child-wedded heart." It is, in spite of a frequent violence of manner, the apotheosis of this poet. Is it unnatural that such a genuinely ascetic and childhood-yearning spirit should over-compensate by flying from the extremes of hushed intimacies and whispered dream-stuff to the limits of brassy declamations? This very backward-turning hunger drives Lindsay to his best achievements. He shines brightest not in the role of prophet, politician, or jazz-conductor but in the far more homely part of country chronicler, the reminiscent collector of the strange minutiae that compose the background of ruralism. It is the inspired reporter that, after a turgid beginning, builds so powerful a climax in Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan (that amazing compound of mid-western vigour and American Esperanto) or turns (in John L. Sullivan, the Strong Boy of Boston) an almanac of 1889 into a glittering, humorous panorama. One willingly forgets both parlour minstrel and missionary for the downright vitality of such summaries. In its very crudities The Golden Whales of California reflects an impulse that is as autochthonous—and poetic—as the half-withheld disclosures of New Englanders like Frost and Robinson or the free and easy confidences of Westerners like Sandburg and Masters. But, to develop this expression beyond his present equipment, Lindsay will have to repudiate the very audience that welcomes him most heavily. There are larger things ahead of him.
