A Handy Guide for Beggars: Especially Those of the Poetic Fraternity / Being Sundry Explorations, Made While Afoot and Penniless in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These Adventures Convey and Illustrate the Rules of Beggary for Poets and Some Others.

by Vachel Lindsay

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author desires to express his indebtedness to The Outlook for permission to reprint the adventures in the South and to Charles Zueblin for permission to reprint the adventures in the East.

The author desires to express his indebtedness to the Chicago Herald for permission to reprint The Would-be Merman, and to The Forum for What the Sexton Said, and to The Yale Review for The Tramp’s Refusal.

The author wishes to express his gratitude to Mr. George Mather Richards, Miss Susan Wilcox, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Ide and Miss Grace Humphrey for their generous help and advice in preparing this work.

DEDICATION AND PREFACE OF A
HANDY GUIDE FOR BEGGARS

There are one hundred new poets in the villages of the land. This Handy Guide is dedicated first of all to them.

It is also dedicated to the younger sons of the wide earth, to the runaway boys and girls getting further from home every hour, to the prodigals who are still wasting their substance in riotous living, be they gamblers or blasphemers or plain drunks; to those heretics of whatever school to whom life is a rebellion with banners; to those who are willing to accept counsel if it be mad counsel.

This book is also dedicated to those budding philosophers who realize that every creature is a beggar in the presence of the beneficent sun, to those righteous ones who know that all righteousness is as filthy rags.

Moreover, as an act of contrition, reënlistment and fellowship this book is dedicated to all the children of Don Quixote who see giants where most folks see windmills: those Galahads dear to Christ and those virgin sisters of Joan of Arc who serve the lepers on their knees and march in shabby armor against the proud, who look into the lightning with the eyes of the mountain cat. They do more soldierly things every day than this book records, yet they are mine own people, my nobler kin to whom I have been recreant, and so I finally dedicate this book to them.

These are the rules of the road:—

(1) Keep away from the Cities;

(2) Keep away from the railroads;

(3) Have nothing to do with money and carry no baggage;

(4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven;

(5) Ask for supper, lodging and breakfast about quarter of five;

(6) Travel alone;

(7) Be neat, deliberate, chaste and civil;

(8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty.

And without further parley, let us proceed to inculcate these, by illustration, precept and dogma.

VACHEL LINDSAY.

Springfield, Illinois,
November, 1916.