It is clear that he is unusually susceptible to crowd excitement. His two best poems, “Bryan, Bryan” and “The Congo,” are born of it. “Bryan, Bryan” is an amazing attempt to recapture and communicate a boy’s emotions as he mingled in the scrimmage of the Presidential election of 1896. Mr. Lindsay becomes all but inarticulate as he recalls the thrill and tumult of the marching West when Bryan called on it to advance against the Plutocrats. He seems to be shouting like a student when students hire a bus and go forth in masks and fancy dress to make a noise in the streets. Luckily, he makes an original noise. He knows that his excitement is more than he can express in intelligible speech, and so he wisely and humorously calls in the aid of nonsense, which he uses with such skill and vehemence that everybody is forced to turn round and stare at him: Oh, the long-horns from Texas, The jay hawks from Kansas, The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus, The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo, The horned toad, prairie-dog, and ballyhoo, From all the new-born states arow, Bidding the eagles of the West fly on, Bidding the eagles of the West fly on. The fawn, prodactyl, and thing-a-ma-jig, The rakeboor, the hellangone, The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig, The coyote, wild-cat, and grizzly in a glow, In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast, They leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West. From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long-- Against the towns of Tubal Cain, Ah--sharp was their song. Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young, The long-horn calf, the buffalo, and wampus gave tongue. In such a passage as this Mr. Lindsay pours decorative nonsense out of a horn of plenty. But his aim is not to talk nonsense: it is to use nonsense as the language of reality. As paragraph follows paragraph, we see with what sureness he is piling colour on colour and crash on crash in order that we may respond almost physically to the sensations of those magnificent and tumultuous days. He has discovered a new sort of rhetoric which enables him to hurry us through mood after mood of comic, pugnacious and sentimental excitement. Addressed to a religious meeting, rhetoric of this kind would be interrupted by cries of “Glory, Hallelujah!” and “Praise de Lord!” Unless you are rhetoric-proof, you cannot escape its spell. Isolated from its context, the passage I have quoted may be subjected to cold criticism. It is only when it keeps its place in the living body of the poem and becomes part of the general attack on our nerves that it is irresistibly effective. In “The Congo,” it is the excitement of Negroes--in their dances and their religion--that Mr. Lindsay has set to words. As he watches their revels, the picture suggests a companion-picture of Negroes orgiastic in Africa, in the true Kingdom of Mumbo-Jumbo--a Negro’s fairy-tale of a magic land: