The Gospel of Beauty in the Age of Consumerism

Gary C. Vitale

(Presented as part of the Vachel Lindsay Symposium, Springfield College in Illinois, 1:30 p.m., November 9, 1999, Presidents Room, Becker Library)


The topic of this part of the symposium is "The Poetry of Faith: Preaching a Gospel of Beauty in the Age of Consumerism."

Good afternoon, I am Gary Vitale, and for the last 25 odd years I have been teaching speech, literature, Shakespeare, drama, and film courses here at Springfield College in Illinois.

I became acquainted with the poetry of Vachel Lindsay while I was doing my undergraduate work at Northwestern University, specifically in an oral interpretation class. When I settled in Springfield, I was anxious to visit the Lindsay Home and find out more about the poet who wrote "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" "The Congo" and "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan."

It may have been on that beautiful fall day at the Lindsay Home that I first understood the direct contradiction between the Age of Consumerism and the Gospel of Beauty. You see, my wife, Jean, and I came to the front door of the home on Fifth Street unannounced. The door was answered by a short woman, who was dressed in a frumpy house frock and floppy slippers, and who wore nylon stockings rolled up just below her knees. Of course, I learned later that this was Miss Elizabeth Graham. We told her that we wanted to visit the home, if it was convenient.

"Well," said Miss Graham in her most challenging voice, "Do you want to learn about Vachel or do you want to look at furniture?" I felt my wife Jean trying to shrink away behind me. She later admitted that she had, indeed, wanted to look at furniture. But I told Miss Graham that we were definitely interested in Vachel, despite a side interest in furniture - which one could chalk up to the Age of Consumerism. With the help of Miss Graham and 78 rpm recordings of Lindsay reciting his own poetry, we were initiated into some of the precepts of the Gospel of Beauty.

From that day on, I was a convert. I joined the Vachel Lindsay Association. And I came to study his poetry and read it aloud on numerous occasions - including with Nicholas Cave Lindsay at the Old State Capital and in special programs for First Night Springfield, the Dana-Thomas House Association, and even Lincoln Memorial Garden.

I believe I have an understanding of the Gospel of Beauty. But the Age of Consumerism is too easy a pejorative label - and a dangerous one because most everybody thinks he knows what it is, if not when it began. After all, "to consume" means "to devour" "to eat." And in that sense all ages are consumer ages. But consumerism means something different.

One of the ways of trying to find out what an "ism" is is to find out who's against it. If you look up consumerism, you'll find that it has three groups of people who are dead set against it: the environmentalists, the animal rights activists, and the vegetarians.

Now, I'm not sure Vachel Lindsay was any of these, and I don't think there is evidence in the Gospel of Beauty that supports them, but let us find out whether Lindsay is against Consumerism by seeing how he agrees with today's environmentalist, animal activist, or vegetarian.

Today's environmentalist is against Consumerism because he believes that what we are consuming, the rate at which we are consuming it, and how we are consuming it add up to a mortal danger to the world. Specifically he doesn't like how we make electricity, how much we make of it, and the stuff we use to make it, which he says is disappearing. He also doesn't like how we power our cars or how we heat our homes. We, presumably, have more than enough power for our needs. Now, we're just producing it to show off - with neon signs and all-night grocery stores and stretch limousines and lighted billboards.

Well, I did find part of a Lindsay poem in which he railed against billboards. This is the second section of "Billboards and Galleons," and although he is writing about Biloxi, Mississippi, in the poem, how prescient his words are for us in Springfield, Illinois, especially recently! (According to Lindsay's own notation, this is supposed to be read as if it were one long sentence, as quickly as possible. I'll give it a try.)

II. Billboards and Galleons [1]

Buzzing autos, like black bees,
Like black bees,
Hurried through the magnolia trees,
Then billboards, to make nations stare,
Came in the vision flashy and vain,
Washed by the midnight sea-born rain,
Washed by the midnight sea-born rain.
They went like cliffs up to the sky,
America's glories flaming high,
Festooned cartoons, an amazing mixture,
Shabby, shoddy, perverse and twistical,
Shamefully boastful,
Shyly mystical.
Politics, with all its tricks, both old parties in a fix.
La Follette scorning them half to death.

The snappy Saturday Evening Post
Displaying, and advertising most
The noisiest things from coast to coast.
Exaggerated Sunday papers,
Comic sheets like scrambled eggs,
And Andy Gump's first-reader capers,
All on those billboards to the sky.
Who put them there, in the way, and why?
Pictured skyscrapers of the night
Marble-topped, tremendous, white!
There were Arrow-collar heroes proud,
Holding their heads above the crowd,
Looking for love like honeycomb.
There was many an ice-cream vendor,
There were business kings in a daisy chain,
Then movie queens in a daisy chain,
Sugar-faced, unlaced and slender, dreaming of love like honeycomb.

Then all the rascals of the land,
All the damned for the last ten years,
Rising from their doom with tears,
Skeletons, skeletons, leather and bone,
Each dead soul chained to a saxophone -
Watching the roaring storm above,
Looking for honey-dreams and love.
All on those billboards to the sky,
Who put them there, in the way, and why?

Then a railroad map of the U.S.A.
Then a soul-road map of the U.S.A.
Showing all the flowers of the land,
But nowhere, love like honeycomb.
Only signboards, only billboards,
Washed by the midnight sea-born rain,
Washed by the midnight sea-born rain.


Well, that seems to be a strong indictment of billboards - even lighted billboards, but not necessarily an indictment of our squandering natural resources. What's shameful in "Billboards and Galleons" is the loss of beauty, not the loss of oil. It doesn't seem to be the case that Vachel Lindsay disagrees with Consumerism as an environmentalist. In fact, today's Springfield area environmentalists are against the building of an extra lake, while Lindsay whole-heartedly supported the building of the present Lake Springfield, and his support was recognized with the naming of Lindsay Bridge.

If he doesn't disagree with Consumerism as an environmentalist, perhaps he's an animal rights activist. Certainly in "The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken" Vachel Lindsay recognizes the spirit of horse. He writes:


The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken [2]

You were born with the pride of the lords great and olden
Who danced, through the ages, in corridors golden.
In all the wide farm-place, the person most human.
You spoke out plainly with squealing and capering,
With whinnying, snorting, contorting, and prancing,
As you dodged your pursuers, looking askance,
With Greek-footed figures, and Parthenon paces,
O broncho that would not be broken of dancing.

The grasshoppers cheered. "Keep whirling," they said.
The insolent sparrows called from the shed.
"If men will not laugh, make them wish they were dead."
But arch were your thoughts, all malice displacing,
Though the horse-killers came, with snake whips advancing.
You bantered and cantered away your last chance.
And they scourged you with Hell in their speech and their faces,
O broncho that would not be broken of dancing.

Yes, indeed, Lindsay loved animals. In his poems, you will find grasshoppers, spiders, ants, butterflies, goldfish, crows, doves, nightingales, eagles, mice, hyenas, jackals, lions, apes, monkeys, horses, mules, buffaloes, and elephants. But he does not argue, as the animal rights activists do, that any of them are deserving of the same rights and privileges as humans. In fact, the animals in Lindsay's poems are all personified - turned into humans, just as the broncho is. They are in the poems for our benefit, not theirs - to teach us something about living. The broncho, for instance, would not be broken of dancing, that is, of doing something beautiful, instead of something mundane, such as pulling a plow.

No, Lindsay would not oppose consumerism as an animal activist. To consider him an animal activist because he incorporated so many animals in his writing, you would have to consider the fabulist Aesop an animal activist as well.

That leaves the vegetarians. Actually, the vegetarians and the animal rights activists have much the same beef. (You will excuse the pun). The animal rights activists quarrel with the Age of Consumerism on more or less ethical grounds, claiming animals have the same rights as humans and therefore should not be raised to be slaughtered and eaten (the animals, not the humans). Here's where the vegetarians put their oar in, pointing out how much land and power it takes to raise the feed that fattens the livestock that provides the meat that we eat too much of and get sick on anyway.

To give you a good idea of how closely the vegetarians and the animal rights activists are in league with each other, I need only read a recent letter to the editor of the Illinois Times, a sponsor of this symposium.

No. 1 Way to Stop E. Coli [3]

To the editor:

Health officials say the number of potentially fatal illnesses from the recent outbreaks of E. coli bacteria in Illinois and New York that killed two and sickened more than 700 is likely to rise even further.

In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control, millions of people will get sick and more than 6,000 people will die from eating contaminated meat this year.

The problem doesn't stop with E. coli. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that as much as 90 percent of all chicken flesh is contaminated with salmonella, campylobacter, and other deadly bacteria. Pork is often contaminated with trichia worms, salmonella, staphylococci, and clostridia. And meat is linked to the three biggest killers in this country - heart disease, cancer, and stroke.

The only way to ensure that meat won't kill you is to throw it out. For a free vegetarian starter kit, call PETA's toll-free hotline...

[Signed ]A PETA correspondent.

PETA, in case you did not know, stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a militant animal rights activist group.

Yes, I suppose throwing out all our meat would solve the problem of contamination by E. coli, but it seems a little like cutting off your nose to cure your postnasal drip.

Well, if we can't find out how Vachel Lindsay's Gospel of Beauty contradicts the Age of Consumerism by looking at the anti-consumerists - such as environmentalists, animal activists, and vegetarians, we can always go to the experts: My students. Whenever I want answers to questions, I usually ask my students.

Before the Humanities 183 and 184 courses were recently changed, I was one of two instructors who taught them here at the College. In those courses, as they were originally described in our catalogue, students were asked to consider how human values have been changed by an expanding technology and our easy access to material goods - two marks of the Age of Consumerism. Especially, we wanted students to consider how these things had shaped their own values. Of course, we wanted students to see the wisdom of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, one of their readings, whose first chapter is called "Economy" and who asks his readers to "Simplify, simplify, simplify." We also wanted the students to feel the sense of loss that John Galsworthy writes into his short story "Quality." Galsworthy describes the passing away of the Gessler Brothers' boot shop, a shop that took pride in making boots individually for each customer, without a need for standard shoe sizes. Making boots that way took a very long time. We felt confident that students would find our present Age of Materialistic Consumerism lacking - lacking much that was important.

Imagine our surprise when we received test essays like these:

"...if something is faster than the other," wrote one student, "I always choose the quickest. I accept and value material goods. I have always love[d] to go shopping for expensive, exotic clothes. Material goods to me are a necessity to everyday living. There is no way I could get through a day without my curling iron, make-up, radio, and - of course - television." [4]

Another student wrote: "One thing I value in life ... is instant results...it's a waste of time to have to wait for something to be made or sent to me...I wouldn't like to wait for someone to put together a pair of blue genes [sic] for me; I like going into a store and get[t]ing them, buying them, and taking them home in the same day. . . Waiting for a pair of boots would drive me crazy, so a shop like Gessler's would not be somewhere I would go.

"...with answer machines in banks I can push buttons and get the money I want instantly; I don't have to go through the tediousness of going to the teller window and explaining everything to him or her. Being able to pick up a phone and calling someone I need to talk to is more convenient than having to write or see them in person." [5]

Another student summed up the natural processes of life as being three in number: "...eating, shopping, and sleeping." [6]

If there was ever a doubt as to what Consumerism means, these students clarified it. But as they define it, Consumerism is not just burning our oil, or killing our cows, or eating beef instead of beans. Consumerism is being philosophically satisfied with buying and using, of reducing our very beings to what we can buy and own - quickly and often. That is what Lindsay would against.

The poet William Wordsworth said it in the first line of his sonnet: "The world is too much with us - getting and spending..."

And Vachel Lindsay wrote these lines in "On the Building of Springfield": "We should build parks that students from afar would choose to starve in, rather than go home." "...would choose to starve in, rather than go home"? For what? Why? What could be in those parks that we should build in Springfield that would make students want to starve in, rather than go home to a good meal? What could be in them except something so beautiful that it would have the power to subdue a vital human need - the need for food?

Vachel Lindsay believed in beauty as a power - as a power for good. He believed in the efficacy of beauty and in its necessity. Much is made of his tramps through America, trading "rhymes for bread." Of course his purpose was to spread his Gospel of Beauty. But why do it in that way? What was he trying to prove? What did he discover? Simply this: That something beautiful can be traded - that it has real tangible value - the same value as something produced through materiel and physical labor; that poetry is as viable a commodity in our society as wheat is, or corn is, or pork bellies; that art is not superfluous - not something extra or added - but art is integral to our lives. [7]

How well he succeeded in convincing himself or others of this is open to question. If the truth were known, some of those Kansas wheat farmers he idolized suffered his poetry so that he would give them his back for the wheat harvest. Only then did he earn his bed and bread. Nevertheless, his poetry and his life sing with the importance that beauty has - or should have -in our world of power and commerce and materialism. The buffalo - that source of meat and shelter and clothing for the plains Indians - was not just a big powerful animal. The buffalo was flower-fed. The buffalo got its importance and its power from that age-old symbol of beauty - the flower.

The Flower-fed Buffaloes [8]

The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
In the days of long ago,
Ranged where the locomotives sing
And the prairie flowers lie low:
The tossing, blooming, perfumed grass
Is swept away by the wheat,
Wheels and wheels and wheels spin by
In the spring that still is sweet.
But the flower-fed buffaloes of the spring
Left us, long ago.
They gore no more, they bellow no more,
They trundle around the hills no more:
With the Blackfeet, lying low,
With the Pawnees, lying low,
Lying low.

It is not so much that the Gospel of Beauty is against Consumerism as it is that it is for beauty. And something beautiful for Vachel Lindsay must have, I believe, at least three qualities:

* A positive force - a spiritual power that you knew when you were young, when you were closer to the natural. But this was never a negative force, stopping such things as commercial development. It was a positive force that would make such development fit in with the natural.

* The second quality that would make something beautiful for Lindsay was a commonness that would be recognized by the simplest, least educated, and hardest working of people. Lindsay's belief in populist ideals suffuses all of his writing.

* And the final quality that would make something beautiful for Lindsay is a mysteriousness, a magic quality that worked in the realm of the other-worldly, the realm of fairies and goddesses and temples in the sky. Not even he was sure how the magic of the beautiful worked. But he knew it did. He believed it did - or that it would, eventually.

All three of these qualities come together in his poem, "The Ghosts of the Buffaloes."

The Ghost of the Buffaloes

Last night at black midnight I woke with a cry,
The windows were shaking; there was thunder on high.
The floor was atremble, the door was ajar.
White fires, crimson fires, shone from afar.
I rushed to the dooryard. The city was gone.
My home was a hut without orchard or lawn.
It was mud-smear and logs near a whispering stream;
Nothing else built by man could I see in my dream. . .

Then. . .
Ghost-kings came headlong, row upon row.
Gods of the Indians, torches aglow.

They mounted the bear and the elk and the deer,
And eagles gigantic, aged and sere.
The rode long-horn cattle; they cried "A-la-la."
The lifted the knife, the bow, and the spear.
They lifted ghost-torches from dead fires below.
The midnight made grand with the cry "A-la-la."
The midnight made grand with a red-god charge,
A red-god show,
A red-god show,
"A-la-la, a-la-la, a-la-la, a-la-la."

With bodies like bronze, and terrible eyes
Came the rank and the file, with catamount cries,
Gibbering, yipping, with hollow-skull clacks,
Riding white bronchos with skeleton backs,
Scalp-hunters, beaded and spangled and bad,
Naked and lustful and foaming and mad,
Flashing primeval demoniac scorn,
Blood-thirst and pomp amid darkness reborn.
Power and glory that sleep in the grass
While the winds and the snows and the great rains pass.
They crossed the gray river, thousands abreast;
They rode in infinite lines to the west.
Tide upon tide of strange fury and foam,
Spirits and wraiths, the blue was their home,
The sky was their goal where the star-flags are furled,
And on past those far golden splendors they whirled.
They burned to dim meteors, lost in the deep.
And I turned in dazed wonder, thinking of sleep.

And the wind crept by
Alone, unkempt, unsatisfied,
The wind cried and cried -
Muttered of massacres long past,
Buffaloes in shambles vast . . .
An owl said: "Hark, what is a-wing?"
I heard a cricket carolling,
I heard a cricket carolling,
I heard a cricket carolling.

Then . . .
Snuffing the lightning that crashed from on high
Rose royal old buffaloes, row upon row.
The lords of the prairie came galloping by.
And I cried in my heart "A-la-la, a-la-la,
A red-god show,
A red-god show,
A-la-la, a-la-la, a-la-la, a-la-la."

Buffaloes, buffaloes, thousands abreast,
A scourge and amazement, they swept to the west.
With black bobbing noses, with red rolling tongues,
Coughing forth steam from their leather-wrapped lungs,
Cows with they calves, bulls big and vain,
Goring the laggards, shaking the main,
Stamping flint feet, flashing moon eyes,
Pompous and owlish, shaggy and wise.
Like sea-cliffs and caves resounded their ranks.
Time upon tide of strange fury and foam,
Spirits and wraiths, the blue was their home,
The sky was their goal where the star-flags are furled,
And on past those far golden splendors they whirled.
They burned to dim meteors, lost in the deep,
And I turned in dazed wonder, thinking of sleep.

I heard a cricket's cymbals play;
A scarecrow lightly flapped his rags,
And a pan that hung by his shoulder rang,
Rattled and thumped in a listless way,
And now the wind in the chimney sang,
The wind in the chimney,
The wind in the chimney,
The wind in the chimney,
Seemed to say: -
"Dream, boy, dream,
If you anywise can,
To dream is the work
Of beast or man.
Life is the west-going dream-storm's breath,
Life is a dream, the sigh of the skies,
The breath of the stars, that nod on their pillows
With their golden hair mussed over their eyes."
The locust played on his musical wing,
Sang to his mate of love's delight.
I heard a cricket carolling,
I heard a cricket carolling,
I heard a cricket say: "Good-night, good-night,
Good-night, good-night . . . good-night."

That is the Gospel of Beauty -
A beauty that is powerful, having a power for good,
A beauty that is common, natural, of the soil,
A beauty that is mysterious, magical, whose workings we may never truly understand.
But most of all, a beauty that is important to our lives, vital to the very stuff of being human.
It is as the poet John Keats said, 60 years before Vachel Lindsay was born:

Beauty is truth; truth, beauty.
That is all ye know on earth,
And all ye need to know.

Notes

[1] Section 2, lines 75-123. The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay, complete and with Lindsay's drawings, edited by Dennis Camp. Vol. 2, 521-23. Spoon River Poetry Press. Peoria: 1984.

[2] Stanza 2 and 3, lines 9 - 24. The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay, complete and with Lindsay's drawings, edited by Dennis Camp. Vol. 1, 313-14. Spoon River Poetry Press. Peoria: 1984.

[3] "Letters" Illinois Times. September 23-29, 1999, p. 3.

[4] Student test essay. Humanities 184: An Exploration of Human Values. Springfield College in Illinois. 1988.

[5] Student test essay. Humanities 184: An Exploration of Human Values. Springfield College in Illinois. 1983.

[6] "[Realism] should discuss the natural processes of life, such as eating, shopping, and sleeping." Student test essay. English 225: Drama as Literature. Springfield College in Illinois. 1988.

[7] "There is only one way to convince the citizens of the United States that you are in dead earnest about an idea. It will do no good to be crucified for it, or burned at the stake for it. It will do no good to go to jail for it. But if you go broke for a hobby over and over again, the genuine fructifying wrath and opposition is terrific." - Vachel Lindsay. "Adventures While Preaching Hieroglyphic Sermons" from Collected Poems. Reprinted in The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay, complete and with Lindsay's drawings, edited by Dennis Camp. Vol. 3, 967. Spoon River Poetry Press. Peoria: 1984.

[8] The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay, complete and with Lindsay's drawings, edited by Dennis Camp. Vol. 2, 510. Spoon River Poetry Press. Peoria: 1984.

[9] The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay, complete and with Lindsay's drawings, edited by Dennis Camp. Vol. 1, 310-313. Spoon River Poetry Press. Peoria: 1984.