Being a Restorationist Writer, and the Quest for the Infinite—12

Spirit and Art: Orson Whitney

**I have called this series “Being a Restorationist Writer, and the Quest for the Infinite” for two reasons. One is that I see the experiences of seeking and knowing a relationship with, communicating with, being transformed by, interpreting life in the light of knowledge obtained from, endeavoring with varying degrees of success to live in, the light of the Infinite (though we Latter-day Saints usually don’t call it that; we call it “God” or the “Spirit”) as being, in the view I have presented here, the defining “matter” of the Restorationist writer. The other reason is that the “quest for the Infinite” is a key point of contact for purposes of comparison and contrast of Restoration writers and writers of the world, and for exploring historical relationships between them. That is by way of reminding my readers where I have come from, why I am here, and where I am going with this series. In regard to that first reason, I have commented on, by way of section 93, aspects of the poetic practice of Joseph Smith. I want to say something in this and the three subsequent installments about the theories of Orson F. Whitney, Merrill Bradshaw, and Clinton F. Larson, and somewhat about Clinton Larson’s praxis, because I hope their ideas will remain alive in the Restorationist literary conversation.  Now, then….
**The idea that the Holy Ghost will have something to do with whatever is distinctive or characteristic of Restorationist art was, so far as I know, first stated outright by Orson F. Whitney, who set forth his philosophy of art in three publications: “Home Literature” (in The Contributor, 9 [1888]; the preface to Poetical Writings of Orson F. Whitney (1889); and “Oratory, Poetry, and Prophecy” (a five-part series in Improvement Era, 1926). (The first two were written before he became an Apostle, the third after; but, as he showed no evidence of changing his thinking on the subject after his ordination, I shall attribute all three to “Elder” Whitney.)
**Elder Whitney declared in “Home Literature” (which contains the famous sentence, “We shall yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own”): “The Holy Ghost is the genius of ‘Mormon’ literature. Not Jupiter, nor Mars, Minerva, nor Mercury. No fabled gods and goddesses; no Mount Olympus; no ‘sisters nine,’ no ‘blue-eyed maid of heaven’; no invoking of mythical muses that ‘did never yet one mortal song inspire.’” He expressed confidence that under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost the “Mormon” writer would produce a distinctively “Mormon” work: “Above all things, we must be original. No pouring of new wine into old bottles. No patterning after the dead forms of antiquity. Our mission is diverse from all others; our literature also must be. The odes of Anacreon, the satires of Horace and Juvenal, the epics of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton; the sublime tragedies of Shakespeare; these are all excellent, all well enough in their way; but we must not attempt to copy them. They cannot be reproduced. We may read, we may gather sweets from all these flowers, but we must build our own hive and honeycomb after God’s supreme design” (“Home Literature,” p. 300).
**Prophecy being a gift of the Holy Ghost, the poet who is inspired by the Holy Ghost indeed is by definition, for a moment at least, a prophet, and to Elder Whitney’s mind only such a writer is a true poet. “Poesy is another name for prophecy,” he wrote in “Oratory, Poetry, and Prophecy,” part 5 (Improvement Era, No. 9 [1926]); and “when we have a poet of the highest order, we have a Prophet of the Most High, one standing next to God, and best able, therefore, to comprehend him and make known his purposes.” He invoked in support of that statement the authority of Thomas Carlyle as telling us that “the ancient word ‘Vates’ meant both prophet and poet” and as maintaining “that they are fundamentally the same, ‘in this most important aspect especially, that they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the universe; what Goethe calls the open secret…open to all, seen by almost none.’” So thoroughgoing was Elder Whitney in his identification of “the gift of poesy” with the gift of prophecy that in the preface to Poetical Writings (1889) he insisted that “all poetry is religious” and refused to call by the name poetry anything that is “irreligious, unchaste, unjust, unheroic, untrue in spirit.” In an essay, “Poets and Poetry,” included in Poetical Writings, he quoted with approval (without a source citation) the American author Josiah Gilbert Holland: “Verily the poets of the world are the prophets of humanity. They forever reach after and foresee the ultimate good. They are evermore building the Paradise that is to be, painting the Millennium that is to come, restoring the lost image of God in the human soul. When the world shall reach the poet’s ideal, it will arrive at perfection, and much good will it do the world to measure itself by this ideal and struggle to lift the real to its lofty level.”
**Then Elder Whitney went on to say: “I am not prepared to admit—nor do I suppose Holland meant to say—that the poets of the world are its only prophets, or that they are prophets in the same sense and degree as the inspired oracles of Holy Writ. But I do believe the gift of poesy and the gift of prophecy to be akin to each other; that both are of divine origin, and that they generally go hand in hand. Prophets are almost invariably poets; and poets, in many instances, have been remarkably prophetic. Of the former class attest the writings of David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others—veritable prophets and veritable poets—who, in some of the grandest poetry ever sung have indeed ‘built the Paradise that is to be, foretold the Millennium that is to come.’ ”
**But there is more, a doctrine of “correspondences” that seems to be borrowed without attribution (and I think without full comprehension) from Emerson (see “The Poet”). All of the following quotations are of “Poets, Poetry, and Prophecy,” part 5:

“Anything is poetic that stands for something greater than itself” (p. 857).

“God has built his world, or his systems of worlds, upon symbols, the lesser suggesting and leading up to the greater, pointing the mind from earth to heaven, from man to God, from time to eternity. The poetic faculty recognizes this symbolism. Poesy holds the key to its interpretation” (p. 857).

“The greatest poem in existence is the Gospel of Christ. Adam’s offering of the sacrificial lamb, in the similitude of the Lamb of God, who was to take away the sins of the world; the Hebrew Passover, with its wealth of prophetic symbolism, also pointing to the Lamb of God, the Great Deliverer of whom Moses, meekest of men, was typical; the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, in which the broken bread and poured wine or water represent the body and blood of the world’s Redeemer; the ordinance of baptism, instituted in the likeness of his burial and resurrection; all these are poems—poems in action and form, parts of the great Gospel Poem, whose author is God, even the Son of God” (857 – 58).

“The Universe, composed of things great and small, the smaller symbolizing the greater, is one vast poem. Filled with types and foreshadowings, the seen and heard bearing witness of the unseen and unheard, it is a mighty prophecy, ever fulfilling and ever awaiting further fulfillment. To read this poem, to interpret this prophecy, requires a poet of the highest order” (p. 859).

On the smaller scale of a mere composition of words, nothing so vast as the entire Universe, what Elder Whitney calls a poem is a “jewel of thought” contained within a “casket” that exhibits as “beautiful means of embellishment” such incidental devices as rhythm and rhyme (in Poetical Writings).

**Well. Where to start? To this Restorationist writer in the early twenty-first century, who learned his first lessons about how to think about poetry from the proto-Surrealist Rimbaud and the Surrealist Breton, and his second lesson from the Anglo-American Formalist of the mid-twentieth century John Ciardi, followed by many lessons from Ciardi’s fellow A-AFs and other lessons from Robert Alter and Clinton F. Larson, and who at an advanced age (Larson died in ’94; there’s a clue to how advanced in age I am) is still seeking his own way as a Restorationist poet and critic, Elder Whitney is of little help—but not of no help. I do not find a center in Elder Whitney’s thought, beyond the basic insight that Restorationist poetry will be marked by some evidence of the influence of the Holy Ghost. (And BTW, that absence of a center is evident in other LDS writers on the subject of art, including Professor Loren Wheelwright and Elder Boyd K. Packer; more on that later [maybe]). His definitions of what can be called a “poem” include something that has “form,” a “thought” encased in a “casket” that is “jewelled” by rhyme and meter, a vision of the Millennial kingdom that is to come, something that can be called a “symbol,” and an interpretation of the symbols that are “written” into the creation by the Creator; and examples of poems include the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, the gospel, and the entire universe. A definition that encompasses all of that is not useful as a guide to practical criticism, and Elder Whitney does not demonstrate the application of any one of his definitions in any kind of a practical criticism—I would like very much to know what value he saw in the works of, say,  Anacreon, Horace, Juvenal, Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare and how he saw them as foreseers of the Millennium that is to come, and to know whether he would consign, say, Catullus, Sappho, and Ovid, and Chaucer and Shakespeare in their earthier moments, to non-poet-hood.
**The separation of “thought” from formal “embellishments” ignores the essential manner by which I understand poems to “mean” (and therefore a whole dimension of meaning in the scriptures, a topic I have taken up in Six Poems by Joseph Smith, Waking Lion Press, 2014). Moreover, the insistence that the thought be “true,” the dismissal of “formal” elements as mere ornamentation, and the absence of anything like a practical criticism based on Elder Whitney’s definitions and criteria, that might have given the Saints some critical “touchstones,” may be a root cause of the reduction of popular Mormon critical vocabulary to “appropriate” versus “inappropriate.” What Clinton Larson called the “genteel tradition” in Mormon letters, which entails a reluctance to confront unpleasant and difficult facts of human existence (in a way from which the biblical writers never shied), and a willingness to overlook poor craftsmanship when it serves as a “casket” for worthy “thought” or when its author holds an ecclesiastical position above the rank of stake president, all may be traceable to Elder Whitney. (If I had to give examples of failures of the Mormon critical faculty that are consequences of our genteel tradition, I might have to mention the standing ovations back in the seventies for Saturday’s Warrior, the sentimental and arguably sometimes hurtful “parents kind and dear” in our favorite Primary song, and the canonization in the hymnal of  “I Believe in Christ,” but that might get me trouble I do not want, and so—genteelly—I will refrain from giving such examples.)
**(And another aside here. Back in the 80s, Brother Larson organized and MCed a Mormon Writers’ Convention at BYU. On the cover of the program handout he placed a line drawing of a person in a Roman toga, with a laurel wreath around his head, standing at a podium and writing with a quill pen on a scroll. He thought that was hugely funny—Mormon writers’ convention—get it?)
**I wish that Elder Whitney had turned to the Bible for examples of the stature of the poets that he foresaw emerging in Zion, to Isaiah and the psalmists, say, rather than to Milton and Shakespeare; and that he had recognized that we already have had something like an Isaiah and a psalmist in Joseph Smith; and that, instead of defending poetry and poets in Zion in terms of Romanticist “spilt religion” (T. E. Hulme’s term) and of Emersonian  and French Symbolist (and ultimately Swedenborgian) “correspondences,” Elder Whitney had seen the implications for a literary theory in Zion of D&C 93; 124:99; 82:14; and Moses 6:63. One heavily influenced by the French- and English-language Modernists might wish that he had made the transition, long before made by the French, from seeing the poem as metaphor rather than as rhetoric, as “being,” not “saying.”
**On the other hand, Elder Whitney may have caught a glimmer of a more adequate understanding of the meaning of “form” when he said that ancient “forms” will not serve the purposes of Zion’s poets; he stumbled onto something, though he didn’t fully recognize it, when he connected poem with symbol; and he did sense that the poet has a vital place in Zion  and that the experiences made available by the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost would somehow be the basis for a distinctive Restorationist literature. As to the teaching function of the poet, I can concur, with the qualification that the poet “teaches” indirectly, almost incidentally, by presenting new ways of apprehending reality, ways that may or may not be espoused by his community as metaphors for reality.
**Merrill Bradshaw, generations later, took us further in what I think was the right direction; on that next time.
**Thoughts?