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Debt & Disinfectant. This hymn to the Salvation Army founder gave Lindsay his audience; he recited it in Chicago and heard William Butler Yeats give it praise. Suddenly he was roaring about the country, bellowing verse out at colleges and women's clubs. This was to be Lindsay's life; he never stopped touring. During the first years he recited because he loved it, and later, sick with epilepsy and delusions of persecution, he kept on because it was the only way he could earn a living. Darkly he wrote of "cheering audiences, the clatter of banquet tables, the eternal rattle of flat-wheeled Pullman cars, Rotary Clubs in endless rotation ..." After World War I Lindsay began a gyrating descent of illness, debt and unending recitals. It was interrupted briefly by his marriage in 1925 to a 23-year-old Spokane girl, but six years later the poet committed suicide by drinking disinfectant.
In a bitter biography of his friend, Poet Edgar Lee Masters ranked Vachel Lindsay's work above Edgar Allan Poe's. The estimate had more loyalty than sense; still Lindsay's gusty verse had captured the innocence and exuberance of pre-World War I America. Harriet Monroe's evaluation of his best work can be questioned, but it may come closer to the truth: "From Lincoln's own country, a poet of Lincoln's own breed."