Laurence Goldstein, The American poet at the movies: a critical history, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994, 272 pp., 1915
"[Vachel] Lindsay, like many other writers of the teens and 1920s, held contradictory opinions about the dynamism of a mass society serviced by popular media. On the one hand, he was appalled by the Brownian motion of citizens caught up in a frenzy of getting, spending, and recreating. He saw this hectic activity reflected in the "speeded-up, unreasoning hieroglyphics" of silent film, with its montage of often loosely organized images. As an expression of a materialistic civilization, the movies threatened to degenerate into a "lavish department-store basement gone wrong" and the spectator's mind into "a Ringling circus, a gigantic spectacle but not set in order, not harmonized by a stage manager" (24-25). Whitman had exerted his poetic powers to contain and order the prolific spectacle of commodified behaviors and objects by means of his catalogs and the inspired sequencing of his discrete impressions. But Lindsay saw himself and contemporary poets in danger of being overwhelmed by the anarchic conditions of modernity signified by the moving pictures of the Roaring Twenties."