One hardly thinks of Vachel Lindsay as relevant in our times. Still, once in a while, a voice makes itself heard, talking about him as a poet that matters—somehow. Allen Ginsberg, a good many years ago, pointed to Lindsay's pertinent use of sounds and, although he probably did not make enough of what they had most in common (i.e., their belonging to an emphatically American line of bardic seers and their belief in the prophetic nature of poetry), he pulled Lindsay out of the oblivion he had fallen into among practicing poets. More recently, Jerome Rothenberg, in his introduction to Revolution of the Word, deemed part of his work worth salvaging, “the intermedia work combining poetry with dance, film, hieroglyphics”; and indeed, however restrictive and at times inaccurate this description—Lindsay never “combined poetry with film,” for example, in the strictest sense of the terms—its merit is great for it takes Lindsay out of the worn rut of “evangelistic jazz” and “rhythmic preaching” he had been pushed into by critics as little apt to discern the new and fecund in him as they were eager to corner him into a reputation that served their own purposes. The fact is that Lindsay is far from resembling his by now stereotyped image, and in the following pages I would like to consider enough elements to make more manifest one or two of the most neglected or distorted aspects and purposes of his endeavor.