Lindsay, a versatile and prolific writer and poet, helped to "keep alive the appreciation of poetry as a spoken art" whose poetry was said to "abound in meter and rhymes and is no shredded prose", had a traditional verse structure and was described by a contemporary in 1924 as "pungent phrases, clinging cadences, dramatic energy, comic thrust, lyric seriousness and tragic intensity". Lindsay's biographer, Dennis Camp, says that Lindsay's ideas on "civic beauty and civic tolerance" were published in 1912 in his broadside "The Gospel of Beauty" and that later, in 1915, Lindsay published the first American study of film as an art form, "The Art of The Moving Picture". Camp notes that on Lindsay's tombstone is recorded a single word, "Poet".