Laurence Goldstein, The American poet at the movies: a critical history, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994, 272 pp., 1920s, 1915,
"Vachel Lindsay was reaching the height of his powers when he began to consider the movies as something more than mere recreation. In 1912, at age thirty-two, he tramped the western states trading poems for bread and absorbing with his meals the spiritual hunger of fieldhands, small-town shopkeepers, factory workers--all the simple folk Whitman had claimed as his constituency. While in Los Angeles Lindsay wrote the poem that established his reputation, General William Booth Enters into Heaven. This tribute to the founder of the Salvation Army was published in the fourth number of Harriet Monroe's magazine Poetry in January of 1913 and became the title work of Lindsay's first important volume later that year. After the fall of 1914, when The Congo and Other Poems appeared from Macmillan, and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty from Mitchell Kennerley, Lindsay was a star of the first magnitude. Shortly before his suicide in 1931 he would look back nostalgically at "that famous 1912 New Poetry Fire kindled by the good and great Harriet Monroe" (1), at Edgar Lee Masters, who would be his first biographer, at Edna St. Vincent Millay's premier volume Renascence, at Ezra Pound's and Amy Lowell's sponsorship of Imagism, at Robert Frost's first appearance in England and Carl Sandburg's muscular poems about Chicago. But better known than any of these was Lindsay himself, who would be featured by the ever-vigilant Sinclair Lewis in his novel Free Air (1919) as the epitome of American poetic genius and invited throughout the jazz age to declaim his poems in manic performances across the country."
"Of all this contemporaries in the poetry world, Lindsay was singular in one respect: "I am the one poet who has a right to claim for his muses Blanche Sweet, Mary Pickford, and Mae Marsh." (2) Lindsay was infatuated with the movies, like the rest of America, and without a thought for the indecorousness of doing so he incorporated them into his work and into his public image. He wrote poems about the actresses named above, and about John Bunny, and about the "restless Kinetoscope vigils" he kept with acquaintances on the road. (3) In 1915 he published the first book of film theory in the English language, The Art of the Moving Picture, which was reprinted in 1916 before a second edition appeared in 1922. D.W. Griffith appreciated Lindsay's praise and invited the poet to be his guest at a screening of Intolerance. In letters of that period Lindsay discerns his influence on that work of "Epic Poetry," as he called it, though film critics, beginning with Eisenstein, pointed to more obvious sources like Victorian melodrama, the novels of Dickens, and, if poetry must be mentioned, Shakespeare. As college courses gradually adopted Lindsay's pioneering commentary, he continued to discourse on the subject, briefly as the first film reviewer for the New Republic. He authored a second book of film criticism, never published, in which he applied his theories to films like The Thief of Bagdad, Scaramouche, Peter Pan, The Covered Wagon, Monsieur Beaucaire, and Merton of the Movies. Lindsay claimed with justice that he was the one poet of the silent period who could speak with authority about the two mediums. When in 1925 the University of California asked him to teach a course in Los Angeles, he proposed "Movies and Poems." (4) Who else of his contemporaries could have taught such a course?"
"Film was routinely condemned by artists and intellectuals for its inane story lines and its vulgar appeal to the lower classes. A typical case against film that attracted Lindsay's attention and influenced his arguments in The Art of the Moving Picture was an essay by Walter Prichard Eaton, a newspaperman and afterward a professor of theater at Yale. Titled Class-Consciousness at the Movies, the essay argued that films were limited in quality because of the low educational level and unrefined taste of the proletarian audiences. Eaton compared the crude sensationalism of films with current theatrical works, which could and did assume a more literate and sophisticated public. He pronounced the film play "infinitely inferior" and "spiritually stultifying." (5) In the same spirit Ezra Pound noticed the new medium long enough to castigate mass vulgarity in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) as a "prose kinema" that militated against the sculpted beauty of great literature. "The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace," sneered the inventor of Vorticism. Sympathetic to photography, Pound drew the line at moving pictures, except as he could use their undeniable narrative possibilities as a stick to beat narrative poets with. In the heyday of "flickers," the movie seemed to the heirs of Matthew Arnold, the self-appointed custodians of a rich humanistic tradition, closer to anarchy than culture."