Preaching The

"Gospel Of Beauty" Essay, Research Paper

Vachel Lindsay’s peripatetic lifestyle was driven in part by financial need: from 1914

onwards, public recitation of his poetry was Lindsay’s most consistent means of income,

and a necessary one after the deaths of his parents (in 1918 and 1922) and particularly

after he married and had children (1925-26). That lifestyle was driven just as much,

however, by Lindsay’s artistic vision: the belief that the artist must preach the

"gospel of beauty" to the masses and that this gospel, embraced by the people,

might transform society. Among other sources, Lindsay’s gospel was inspired by mystical

visions that he experienced first in 1904 and which recurred throughout his life, by the

social gospel of the Campbellite Christian sect in which he was raised, and by Lindsay’s

talents as a graphic artist as well as a writer. The gospel, and Lindsay’s style of

preaching it, had various manifestations throughout his career. In his first attempts to

sell, or give away, his pamphlets, Lindsay’s gospel represents itself at its most

idealistic. At other times, as in "The Child-Heart in the Mountains" and

"Celestial Flowers of Glacial Park," the gospel is simultaneously mystical and

grounded in experience, in Lindsay’s trips to the Rocky Mountains and especially the newly

formed Glacier National Park, Montana. In "The Virginians Are Coming Again" the

vision becomes apocalyptic. The following excerpts relating to "the gospel of

beauty" are drawn primarily from Lindsay’s own letters and journals, and biographies

of the poet.

From Lindsay’s letter to E.S. Ames, a coreligionist in the Campbellite

sect, New York, May 18, 1904; Letters of Vachel Lindsay, ed. Marc Ch.netier, 4:

My ancestors were all men of action, statesmen, rulers of men. It is hard for me to

respect my army, for it is an assembly of ornamental shadows and dreams, when I thought to

have commanded men. And my sermons I must preach only to myself, to exhort myself to be

true to my art and writing. . . .

My ideal for my religious life is that of a religious tramp, a wanderer from Church to

Church, following the leading of "The Gleam," seeking new impressions and vivid

insights into the religious life of all men. I have had many of these in the past, yet

left few on record. The most I can hope for my verse is that it will some day become the

record of my best impressions in the Churches. I shall not force it, I can scarcely

promise. I merely hope. When you see signs of it in my writing, I ask your

congratulations, though it may be a while before they are due.

Account of Lindsay’s first visions, in the summer of 1904; Elizabeth

Ruggles, The West-Going Heart: A Life of Vachel Lindsay, 90:

Lindsay stayed on at home after the wedding [of his sister] and during the summer he

began to have some curious experiences. He called them "visions." He never lost

his head over these visions or tried to explain them as other than the projections of a

strongly visual imagination, but it should be understood that–like William Blake–he

actually saw them.

"It is plausible, I think," he wrote afterward, "that for one who had so

long co-ordinated drawings and poems for drawings, his religious experiences should paint

themselves before him in the air. Being taught by that admiarable practical but

unimaginative master William M. Chase never to draw a thing till I saw it on the blank

paper before me, it was only the terrrible power and blaze of the pictures that came that

made them unusual."

The first time, which was at night, he beheld with his bodily eyes, so clearly that he

could have painted them, the prophets of the Old Testament pass in gorgeous garb through

his bedroom. The second time, by day, he saw the prophets march gravely before the tall

elm tree in the front yard.

He believed his visions were not infallible but to be interepreted however he chose;

they were a part of his artistic captial. Yet they had been sent, like all strong

convictions. It was late, late at night in the awed aftermath of the first of them that he

wrote his mystical poem A Prayer in the Jungles of Heaven.

Lindsay’s first attempt to sell, and then give away his poems, in New

York City; Rica Brenner, Poets of Our Time, 116-17:

Possibly Vachel Lindsay at last felt he should earn his own living. At all events, he

now embarked on a quixotic adventure, that of selling copies of his own poems. From door

to door up and down the West Side of New York he went, trying to peddle his verses for a

few cents apiece. He thought of himself as an ancient troubadour making his way through

the world by his songs. With a good deal of humor he describes his adventures in his

diary.

"Well, I tried a sleepy big shock headed baker first. I tired to give the poem to

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