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    Ruth Crawford'S "Spiritual Concept" 223

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    awfefa
    This document summarizes Ruth Crawford's spiritual views as expressed in her diary from 1927. It discusses how her commitment to Methodism waned after moving to Chicago in 1921 and being exposed to more progressive ideas. By the late 1920s, she had distanced herself from the "personal element" and "too material and literal" attitudes of evangelical Christianity. The document then quotes directly from Crawford's diary where she realizes the close relation between artistic and religious emotion. She believes art and religion both fulfill a need for humans to express something profound within themselves. The last paragraph discusses how Crawford's spiritual views were influenced by Theosophy, Eastern religions, American Transcendentalism, and Walt Whitman - drawing from a diverse

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    Ruth Crawford'S "Spiritual Concept" 223

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    This document summarizes Ruth Crawford's spiritual views as expressed in her diary from 1927. It discusses how her commitment to Methodism waned after moving to Chicago in 1921 and being exposed to more progressive ideas. By the late 1920s, she had distanced herself from the "personal element" and "too material and literal" attitudes of evangelical Christianity. The document then quotes directly from Crawford's diary where she realizes the close relation between artistic and religious emotion. She believes art and religion both fulfill a need for humans to express something profound within themselves. The last paragraph discusses how Crawford's spiritual views were influenced by Theosophy, Eastern religions, American Transcendentalism, and Walt Whitman - drawing from a diverse

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    This document summarizes Ruth Crawford's spiritual views as expressed in her diary from 1927. It discusses how her commitment to Methodism waned after moving to Chicago in 1921 and being exposed to more progressive ideas. By the late 1920s, she had distanced herself from the "personal element" and "too material and literal" attitudes of evangelical Christianity. The document then quotes directly from Crawford's diary where she realizes the close relation between artistic and religious emotion. She believes art and religion both fulfill a need for humans to express something profound within themselves. The last paragraph discusses how Crawford's spiritual views were influenced by Theosophy, Eastern religions, American Transcendentalism, and Walt Whitman - drawing from a diverse

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    21 views1 page

    Ruth Crawford'S "Spiritual Concept" 223

    Uploaded by

    awfefa
    This document summarizes Ruth Crawford's spiritual views as expressed in her diary from 1927. It discusses how her commitment to Methodism waned after moving to Chicago in 1921 and being exposed to more progressive ideas. By the late 1920s, she had distanced herself from the "personal element" and "too material and literal" attitudes of evangelical Christianity. The document then quotes directly from Crawford's diary where she realizes the close relation between artistic and religious emotion. She believes art and religion both fulfill a need for humans to express something profound within themselves. The last paragraph discusses how Crawford's spiritual views were influenced by Theosophy, Eastern religions, American Transcendentalism, and Walt Whitman - drawing from a diverse

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    RUTH CRAWFORD'S"SPIRITUALCONCEPT" 223

    meetings.6 All of this began to change in 1921, when she moved to


    Chicago, which her mother described as having "the advanced
    atmosphere of the third largest city in the world."7 Not surprisingly,
    her own commitment to Methodism waned and by the late 1920S she
    distanced herself from the "personal element" and the "too material
    and literal" attitudes she associated with evangelical Christianity.8
    Unlike Charles Ives or Virgil Thomson, Crawford did not see the
    church music of her youth as a musical resource: her experience with
    religion had been too strict to sustain nostalgia or idealization.

    Diary, 15 November 1927: Concretely since the Schlusnus concert


    [Schlusnuswas a Germanbaritone],abstractlysincethe lastfew months,
    duringwhich I have been unconsciouslypreparingfor the discovery,I
    suddenly realize the close relation of the artistic and the religious
    emotion;art and religionresult both from a need for man to express
    somethingbig in himself.The religiousexpressthis up-flowing,expand-
    ing, engulfing,floweringemotionby trying to createbetterconditions
    aroundthem, helpingpoor and sick people, or else simply by spending
    this not-containable joy that threatens to burst them in worship of a great
    God. ... In the same way the composer of music releases these surging
    painful joys into tones, the sculptor into marble, the painter into color
    and rhythm, the poet into sweeping words. . . . Doing this, they either
    exchange religion for their art, feeling no need for the former, or,
    merging the two in mystic beauty, attain greater heights in ther art,
    become spiritual, not simply "religious"and creators in the highest sense.

    Crawford's spiritual manifesto was based on a group of ideas, not


    all of equal prominence, but nevertheless interactive and supportive of
    one another. Among the most important are Theosophy, Eastern
    religious philosophy, nineteenth-century American Transcendental-
    ism, and the imaginative tradition of Walt Whitman. Thus Crawford
    was drawing on an eclectic legacy of ideas and values that had been
    linked in American intellectual life since the turn of the century,9 to

    6 Diaries from 1912


    through 1914 as well as clippings in scrapbooks describe her
    involvement with the Methodist church. These diaries are in private collections. The
    author is grateful to Michael Seeger and BarbaraSeeger for access to this material.
    7 Letter, Clara Crawford to Ruth Crawford, 22 May 1922. Seeger Estate.
    8 Diary, [2] September1927.
    9 These sources are analyzed as the core of a spiritual tradition in modern art in
    the exhibition catalogue, TheSpiritualin Art: AbstractPainting 189o0-985 (New York:
    Abbeville Press, 1986). This study owes a great deal to that catalogue. The most
    germane essays are Maurice Tuchman, "Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art," 17-62;
    Charles C. Eldredge, "Nature Symbolized: American Painting from Ryder to
    Hartley," I 13-30; and Lynda Dalrymple Henderson, "Mysticism, Romanticism, and
    the Fourth Dimension," 219-38. See also Gail Levin, "Marsden Hartley and

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