Mr. Lindsay's Jazz Po ems "Tue Dastet Jazz any Amen Pons."
By Vachel Lindsay. Bell, 48, 6d.
nes.
Everyone who has heard Mr. Lindsay recite his own verses—he was reciting during the week, I believe, at the Poetry Bookshop—has enjoyed one of the lost amazing and amusing novelties of the hour, (Mr. Robert Lynd writes, in the "Daily News"). Mr. Lindsay attempts to bring into verse something of the excitement of a negro preacher. He wallows in excitement. He loves words for their exciting colour or their exciting sound rather than for their uieaning. He uses them as madly as the comedians of a jazz-band use their instruments. Ho insists. at all costs on making a wonderful noise. He makes his noise with a purpose, however. He has the passion of a street-corner evangelist. The red rhetoric of salvation is mingled with the pagan riot of his song. The result is a new cert of nonsense verse, but nonsense verse that—at least when ho recites it—has a strange power of touching the emictions.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.