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 . . .