Tramps, Mountains and Unicorns: The Glacier Park Hike of Vachel Lindsay and Stephen Graham
Issued Date: 16 Dec 2014
Abstract
In the late summer of 1921 the British travel writer Stephen Graham and the American poet Vachel Lindsay hiked northwards through Glacier National Park. Both men had in their different literary spheres established a reputation as refugees from modernity, writing books and poems that tried to articulate a vision of alternative societies, where life could be free from the materialism and corruption of western civilisation. The two men retreated to Glacier Park both to discuss their ideas and to seek a natural world where they could find a solace they could not find elsewhere. Both of them wrote books about their sojourn in Glacier Park, presenting it as a place where the mundane could give access to the numinous, and the place itself become an arena for a remaking of the self. Their books and their experiences provide access to a series of important questions ranging from the agency of the material landscape through to the challenge of capturing the spiritual in the language of both poetry and prose.
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References
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———. 1915b. The Congo and other Poems (New York, Macmillan).
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———. 1923. Going-to-the-Sun (New York: Appleton).
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Ruggles, Eleanor. 1959. The West-Going Heart: A Life of Vachel Lindsay (New York:
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(New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.).
Berman, Marshall. 1983. All That Is Solid Melts into Air (London: Verson).
Brown, David. 2004. God and the Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience
(Oxford: Oxford University Press). Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/0199271984.
001.0001.
Camp, Denis. 2011. Uncle-Boy. Online: www.vachellindsay.org.
Casey, Edward S. 1993. Getting Back into Place (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press).
Chénetier, Marc (ed.). 1979. Letters of Vachel Lindsay (New York: Burt Franklin).
Durrell, Lawrence. 1969. Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel (London: Faber).
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1849. Nature (Boston: Thurston, Torry & Co.).
Folz, Bruce. 1995. Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics and the
Metaphysics of Nature (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press).
Gleason, Abbott. 2000. ‘Russkii inok: The Spiritual Landscape of Mikhail Nesterov’,
Cultural Geographies 7.3: 299-312. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/
096746080000700304.
Goldstein, Laurence. 1994. The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History (Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press).
Graham, Stephen. 1912a. A Tramp's Sketches (London: Thomas Nelson).
———. 1912b. Undiscovered Russia (London: John Lane).
———. 1920. Children of the Slaves (London: Macmillan).
———. 1922. Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies (New York: Appleton).
———. 1964. Part of the Wonderful Scene (London: Collins).
Graham, Stephen (ed.). 1915. The Sweet-Centred Name and other Fairy Stories by Fedor
Sologub (London: Constable).
Hughes, Michael. 2012. ‘Stephen Graham and Russian Spirituality: The Pilgrim in
Search of Salvation’, in Anthony Cross (ed.), A People Passing Rude: British
Responses to Russian Culture (Cambridge: Open Books): 163-74.
———. 2014. Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen Graham (Cambridge:
Open Books).
Lane, Belden. 2002. Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American
Spirituality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
Lindsay, Vachel. 1908. ‘The Necessity of Reverence’, speech delivered to the
congregation of Rutgers Presbyterian Church. Online: http://www.
vachellindsayhome.org.
———. 1912. The New Localism: An Illustrated History for Village Statesmen, originally
published in Vision: A Quarterly Journal of Aesthetic Appreciation of Life 4 (April
1912): 3-18. Online: http://www.vachellindsayhome.org.
———. 1913. General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems (New York:
Mitchell Kennerley).
———. 1914. Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (New York: Mitchell
Kennerley).
———. 1915a. The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan).
———. 1915b. The Congo and other Poems (New York, Macmillan).
———. 1916. A Handy Guide for Beggars (New York: Macmillan).
———. 1920. The Golden Book of Springfield (New York: Macmillan).
———. 1923. Going-to-the-Sun (New York: Appleton).
Macfarlane, Robert. 2012. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (London: Hamish
Hamilton).
Massa, Ann. 1970. Vachel Lindsay: Fieldworker for the American Dream (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press).
Masters, Edgar Lee. 1935. Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America (New York: C. Scribners).
Oelschlaeger, Max. 1991. The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Pyman, Avril. 1994. A History of Russian Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press). Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511519611.
Robinson, David M. 2007. ‘Thoreau and Idealism’, in Sandra Harbert Petrulionis and
Laura Dassow Walls (eds.), More Day to Dawn: Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ for the Twenty-
First Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press): 41-59.
Ruggles, Eleanor. 1959. The West-Going Heart: A Life of Vachel Lindsay (New York:
Norton).
Schmemann, Alexander. 1966. The World as Sacrament (London: Darton, Longman &
Todd).
Snyder, Gary. 1990. The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point).
Taylor, Bron. 2010. Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality and the Planetary Future
(Berkeley: University of California Press).
Tietjens, Eunice. 1938. The World at my Shoulder (New York: Macmillan).
Untermeyer, Louis. 1939. From Another World: The Autobiography of Louis Untermeyer
(New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.).
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