ABSTRACT

The end of an outer material frontier to explore in the West and Mid-west has helped cause the increasing inner explorations of the spirit. Vachel Lindsay represents a transition: apparently still an outer explorer, an evoker of picturesque place-names and loud American noises in the fashion of an older school; yet in reality an inward voyager of the religious imagination and the aesthetic imagination. Lindsay remains the finest religious poet produced by America's most local native roots. He is the Dante of the Fundamentalists. Even the early Lindsay had not been able to celebrate without tragic qualms (disguised as comic hamming with K's and popcorn stands) this utopian faith in the mass-instinct. After his death, this pure young optimism of the West degenerated into a frustrated and scapegoat-hunting optimism, a soured and hence lynch-mob-minded faith in the avenging People. On the biographical plane Lindsay himself partly succumbed to this process in the final paranoid fantasies accompanying his suicide.