" The first impulse kept him close to the wholesome
Hoosier soil. The second is an anticipation of Robert Frost's
theory of speech tones as the basis of verse, as well as a
revival of the bardic practice of reciting one's own poems. For
Riley had much of the actor and platform-artist in him, and
comprehended that poetry might be made again a spoken art,
directed to the ear rather than to the eye. His vogue, which at
his death in 1915 far surpassed that of any living American poet,
is inexplicable to those persons only who forget the sentimental
traditions of our American literature and its frank appeal to the
emotions of juvenility, actual and recollected. Riley's best
"holt" as a poet was his memory of his own boyhood and his
perception that the child-mind lingers in every adult reader.
Genius has often been called the gift of prolonged adolescence,
and in this sense, surely, there was genius in the warm and
gentle heart of this fortunate provincial who held that "old
Indianapolis" was "high Heaven's sole and only understudy.
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