1922 Goldstein 1994

Laurence Goldstein, The American poet at the movies: a critical history, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994, 272 pp.1922,1915

     "The Whitmanian dream of American literature is that space might replace time, that the linkages between place and place-railroads, canals, telegraph lines, bridges-might usurp the time cycles of events as principal facts of everyday consciousness. In claiming that Mae Marsh and her descendants would penetrate every local community and bring them joy and wisdom, Lindsay made their presences one with the "orchard god" Johnny Appleseed, whom he apotheosized in poem and tract as a democratic Christ. The growth of Southern California as a moviemaking center served Lindsay's mythology, for it perpetuated the westering impulse of pioneers who decentered the nineteenth-century sites of American power in favor of the frontier. Lindsay affirmed that "Edison is the new Gutenberg. He has invented the new printing. The state that realizes this may lead the soul of America, day after tomorrow." Los Angeles would achieve in artistic terms what according to Lindsay the Panama Canal had accomplished in 1915; his commemorative poem is titled The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotus. The last westward drive, in Lindsay's own time, had found the most convenient passage to India, and Los Angeles deserved to succeed the European and eastern American cities as the fulcrum of a new world."

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 Kelyn Roberts 2017