ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most striking feature of Vachel Lindsay’s glowing description of the American poetry scene during the first few decades of the twentieth century is the way Ezra Pound, Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, and Amy Lowell peacefully coexist in the same paragraph. There is no sign here of the bifurcation between high art and popular culture that characterizes canonical modernism. Lindsay’s letter takes for granted that these poets appear in the same periodicals and enjoy a collective audience. He also, significantly, describes this movement in terms of commodification and the poets’ interactions with a larger public: new books of poetry are “popping,” apparently both off presses and bookstore shelves; Pound broadcasts a new style of poetry as Poetry’s foreign correspondent; Lowell tells Massachusetts where to get off, presumably in her controversial speeches before local poetry societies and university audiences; Masters’s verse novel is serialized; and so on. Lindsay only references a specific poem when he notes that Sandburg won Poetry’s annual cash prize for his poem “Chicago.”
