Lindsay was typecast by his contemporaries as a "jazz poet" an appellation kept alive by his exhausting but financially essential reading tours. This selection of his letters shows his yearning to be a poetic savior, an American original, his instinctive appreciation of the infant movie industry's importance, and the hidden (self-hidden) struggle to escape from the iron hand of his mother. They also reveal the basic shallowness of his intellect and talent, despite a capacity for sensing the new demands made on literature by America and the twentieth century.
In 1925, Vachel Lindsay wrote The Progress and Poetry of the Movies as a sequel to his pioneering Art of the Moving Picture (1915). The present edition of The Progress and Poetry of the Movies, never published in Lindsay's lifetime, contributes to our understanding of the genealogy of contemporary film studies.