Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems

Vachel Lindsay believed poetry should be shouted from rooftops and sung in churches. This collection captures that electric conviction. The title poem, 'The Chinese Nightingale,' is a gorgeous, strange ballad about a singer's grief transforming into something transcendent and strange. Throughout these pages, Lindsay celebrates the democratic soul of America, its diners and trains and ordinary saints, while writing in rhythms borrowed from jazz, gospel, and the cadences of speech itself. He was a poet of the people who walked across America on a 'poetry crusade,' convinced that verse could save the nation. His work demands to be performed, not merely read, and it still crackles with that missionary zeal a century later. For readers who think they don't like poetry, Lindsay might be the one to change their minds.