Laurence Goldstein, The American poet at the movies: a critical history, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994, 272 pp., 1922, 1915
"Where [Walt] Whitman called the United States the greatest poem, offering himself as equal to the task of apprehending and articulating its structure, [Vachel] Lindsay states as "my general proposition that the United States is a great movie . . . All American history past, present and to come, is a gigantic movie with a Pilgrim's Progress or hurdle race plot." The significance of such statements can hardly be overestimated. If history is imagined as a purely visual structure [an Egyptian hieroglyph], then the bardic ambition of Whitman and Lindsay must yield to the "fine director's hand" capable of rendering that history in its appropriate form."
"The Whitmanian dream of American literature is that space might replace time, that the linkages between place and place-railroads, canals, telegraph lines, bridges-might usurp the time cycles of events as principal facts of everyday consciousness."
". . . On his last unsuccessful reading tours on the East Coast [Vachel Lindsay] went to the movies compulsively, in every town and village, rejoicing in the thought that somewhere in the West a new imagination of history was being created . . . "