So gracious was he to those whom society had written off as unsalvageable that he was memorialized in a poem by American poet Nicholas Vachel Lindsay. In "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven," Lindsay wrote of the welcome Booth received from walking lepers, lurching bravoes from the ditches, vermin-eaten saints and unwashed legions with the ways of death.
In a long written tribute, the poet Nicholas Vachel Lindsay described a group of young people who had gravitated toward Lindsay in Springfield, Illinois.