I ended my last post with this sentence: “I will next take up the question of how three Western writers — Pound, Eliot and Frost — brought in a new poetry for the new century.” I’m not quite ready to do that. Those who have read this blog patiently, hoping for new insights every time, may be disappointed — or may be elated. You may view this post, not as a recapitulation, but as a capitulation to the necessity of cleaning up a house where contractors have been reconstructing our kitchen whilst we traipsed out-of-reach through British Columbia (because our phones don’t work in Canada), and lolled in a small cabin on Gabriola Island in the Salish Sea, me reading Leonard Arrington and the writing of Mormon History[i], followed by Malcolm Lowry’s last novel, October ferry to Gabriola[ii], which I had brought along knowing we would be staying on Gabriola, and which provides a remarkable portrait of his home in Dollarton, north of Vancouver, in chapter 11, “Eridanus” — and Valerie desperate for new reading matter because none of my books interested her, until she started reading Leonard Arrington, etc.
But I wanted to note something some of you may have not noted: since “in verse #43 : hero’s journey,” posted on 24 July 2014, I have been considering just three poets, and their verse: Joseph Smith (in posts 43, 44, 45, 46, 47 and 48); Walt Whitman (in posts 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53 and 54) and Emily Dickinson (54, in June of 2015, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, [not 64, but] 65, 66, 67 and 68, in August of 2016). I have talked about Longfellow incidentally, and a few other American poets, and Hopkins, who essentially failed in his attempt to revive alliterative verse in English. It’s not that other poets of the 19th century don’t interest me, though. It’s just that iambic verse got broken by these three poets on the rack.
I don’t need to defend Whitman and Dickinson and their verse. But for those of you who may have howled “Joseph Smith was no poet — he was a prophet!” I have an answer — one of Smith’s poems. On November 27th, 1832, Joseph Smith sent a letter from Kirtland, Ohio, to W. W. Phelps, the Church’s newspaper editor in Independence, Missouri, in which this poem appears:
Little Narrow Prison
Now Brother William if what I have said is true,
how careful then had men ought to be
what they do in the last days lest they are cut short
of their expectations, and they that think they stand
should fall because they keep not the Lord’s commandments,
whilst you who do the will of the Lord
and keep his commandments have need to rejoice
with unspeakable joy, for such shall be
exalted very high and shall be lifted up
in triumph above all the kingdoms of the world —
but I must drop this subject at the beginning.
Oh Lord when will the time come
when Brother William thy servant and myself
behold the day that we may stand together
and gaze upon eternal wisdom engraven
upon the heavens while the majesty
of our God holdeth up the dark curtain
until we may read the round of Eternity
to the fullness and satisfaction of our
immortal souls? Oh Lord God deliver us
in thy due time from the little narrow prison
almost as it were total darkness
of paper pen and ink and a crooked
broken scattered and imperfect language.[iii]
Longfellow spent his career plundering European literature, searching for models for his sagas, such as “Evangeline” and “The song of Hiawatha” (choosing a Finnish model for the latter). Smith seems to have taken as his model the prophet-poets of the Bible: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the 12 — and the poems attributed to David and Solomon. That’s what I see in this poem. There is a possibility that Smith was blessed with an eidetic memory, and could remember them from one reading; but most of the phrases I recognize, when I track them down, seem to have been re-purposed in his poems, which could be one effect of eidetic memory — or just of a faulty memory.
Whitman was a journalist, and took as his model the prose of the daily newspaper. One thing a journalist cannot bear is a blank page, or column, or even part of a column — just as a radio host cannot bear dead air. Perhaps because of that, Whitman perfected the art of the catalog, following in the steps of Christopher Smart. And since he took all of life as his province, no part of life was out-of-bounds for him. This poem, from the “Children of Adam” section of Leaves of Grass, is a case in point:
A Woman Waits for Me
A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking,
Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking.
Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,
Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk,
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth,
All the governments, judges, gods, follow’d persons of the earth,
These are contain’d in sex as parts of itself and justifications of itself.
Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex,
Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.
Now I will dismiss myself from impassive women,
I will go stay with her who waits for me, and with those women that are warm-blooded sufficient for me,
I see that they understand me and do not deny me,
I see that they are worthy of me, I will be the robust husband of those women.
They are not one jot less than I am,
They are tann’d in the face by shining suns and blowing winds,
Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength,
They know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves,
They are ultimate in their own right–they are calm, clear, well-possess’d of themselves.
I draw you close to me, you women,
I cannot let you go, I would do you good,
I am for you, and you are for me, not only for our own sake, but for others’ sakes,
Envelop’d in you sleep greater heroes and bards,
They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me.
It is I, you women, I make my way,
I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable, but I love you,
I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you,
I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States, I press with slow rude muscle,
I brace myself effectually, I listen to no entreaties,
I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me.
Through you I drain the pent-up rivers of myself,
In you I wrap a thousand onward years,
On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved of me and America,
The drops I distil upon you shall grow fierce and athletic girls, new artists, musicians, and singers,
The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes in their turn,
I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings,
I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I and you interpenetrate now,
I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers of them,
*****as I count on the fruits of the gushing showers I give now,
I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life, death, immortality, I plant so lovingly now.[iv]
This, rather than any homoeroticism, may well explain why Whitman died with a much-divided audience, widely derided, narrowly celebrated. The poem continues to disturb readers, although not for its affirmative view of sex as much as that penultimate stanza, which some commentators regard as a rape fantasy[v] worthy of Ayn Rand. At least one has suggested that Whitman may well have had no experience to base his description on.[vi]
Dickinson took as her model the Protestant hymn texts, and then proceeded to turn out poems that were more like mosaics of observation than hymns. But she didn’t ever abandon the rich associations hymn texts and tunes could bring. Note the commingling of the poetic and divine loves:
That I did always love
I bring thee Proof
That till I loved
I never lived — Enough —
That I shall love always —
I argue thee
That love is life —
And life hath Immortality —
This — dost thou doubt — Sweet —
Then have I
Nothing to show
But Calvary —[vii]
Perhaps I’m just twisted by having spent so much time on Dickinson, but that poem could, it seems to me, stand beside any of the metaphysical poems of John Donne. That ability to bring together into one poem the sacred and the profane matches his holy sonnets. Perhaps it’s the metaphysical that attracts me so to Dickinson.
None of these poets that I have devoted so many pixels to were recognized in their lifetimes; Smith still isn’t recognized as a poet. He should be — especially by Mormon poets.
But hold on, I hear you say: Shouldn’t we Mormon poets be seeking after every poet who has any poem that is virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy?
Your turn.
____________________
[i] Leonard Arrington and the writing of Mormon history / Gregory A. Prince. – Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press, 2016.
[ii] October ferry to Gabriola / Malcolm Lowry ; edited by Margerie Lowry. New York ; Cleveland : World, 1970.
[iii] This text follows Dean Jessee’s transcription of the letter in Personal writings of Joseph Smith. — Revised edition / compiled and edited by Dean C. Jessee. — Salt Lake City : Deseret Book ; Provo, Utah : Brigham Young University Press, c2002, pp. 286-287. I have, however, normalized spelling and supplied my own punctuation, along with the line breaks.
[iv] The text is from https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/woman-waits-me, accessed 22 September 2016, although I have not kept the line divisions as poets.org divided them.
[v] For example, Kurt Anderson, Sean Cole and respondents on the radio program Studio 360 in its series American Icons, in the entry for Leaves of Grass — originally aired Friday, September 27, 2013, available at http://www.studio360.org/story/american-icons-leaves-grass/, accessed 19 December 2014.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Emily Dickinson’s poems, as she preserved them / edited by Cristanne Miller. Cambridge, Mass. : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016; pp. 328-9. The text is on p. 329; opposite it, on p. 328, is a facsimile of the fascicle leaf, showing several alternate readings in Dickinson’s hand.
{{Smith seems to have taken as his model the prophet-poets of the Bible: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the 12 — and the poems attributed to David and Solomon. That’s what I see in this poem. There is a possibility that Smith was blessed with an eidetic memory, and could remember them from one reading; but most of the phrases I recognize, when I track them down, seem to have been re-purposed in his poems,}}
Dennis is onto something big there. When the propositions packed into those sentences finally register on us, with all their implications, the brighter day will dawn. It has to do with tradition, regarding which I just stumbled upon this in the introduction to _Anthology of Chinese Literature from Early Times to the Fourteenth Century_, which I bought months ago and only this morning opened as bathroom reading: “Originality in letters was prized in China as elsewhere, but it was a quality to be refined and made aware by rigorous training. The profundity of a writer’s understanding of the tradition and the delicacy of his reference to it would inform his own advances, which without such guidance would be mere antlike scurryings.” Pound and Eliot never said it better.
So, here’s my question: Did Joseph Smith think of himself as a poet, or think of what he was writing as poetry? Certainly it’s not necessary to confine ourselves to his own understanding of what he was doing (else what’s interpretation for?). But I think we may need to acknowledge that in looking at Joseph as a poet, we may be finding things in his words that he did not deliberately put there.
I don’t know that it matters whether he thought of himself as a poet. In fact, if he did not, that may have been all to the good, for when he did think of himself as writing “poetry” he gave us that re-versified version of Section 76 (I am assuming that he wrote it), which, though it may contain interesting doctrinal insights, is doggerel. He was at his best when he simply, if unconsciously, was what he was, a poet-prophet who did not, could not, separate his work as poet from his work as prophet. And that he might not have consciously noticed everything he put into his words–of course; we make, or should try to make, new discoveries of meaning in great works with every reading. Every time I turn back to my own stuff, it is new to me.
One of the reasons I settled on these three writers is that in their beginnings, none of them thought of themselves as poets. For Joseph Smith, there was never that conscious striving to be a poet. He had other concerns. For Walt Whitman, there was that long period of time as he worked on the initial edition of *Leaves of grass* when he wondered whether what he was writing was a novel, or a play, or reportage. I think even then he thought of himself for a long time as a reporter — perhaps until his elegies for Lincoln. For Dickinson, there was that period when she was writing verses and wondering, and then asking Higginson, whether “my Verse is alive.” She eventually decided he couldn’t answer her, and found her answer in her own society.
Any good poet is often surprised by “things in his words that he did not deliberately put there.” That’s because language is a shared property of a community of people, and that people react differently to different expressions. Frost is a fine example: what people take from “Mending Wall” is “Good fences make good neighbors,” almost certainly not what Frost wanted people to focus on. Or from “The Road not Taken” the lines “I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” There’s a whole book about that misperception, by David Orr, called *The Road Not Taken : Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong*.
It is generally agreed on, among scholars of Hebrew, that the Prophets are writing in verse, and that their work was selected for preservation, probably by priests working in Babylon, because it was beautiful verse. Some scholars believe the bulk of that poetry was written in the exile, because they don’t believe in prophecy. But that’s a matter for another post, and perhaps for another blogger.
I understand that the general perception generated by poets is that poetry is a craft, and everything is deliberately put into a poem. That’s why T. S. Eliot said, in *The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism*:
“One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”
When summarized, as it often is, as “Good poets borrow; great poets steal,” we have yet another example of immature poets imitating. Of course we must acknowledge that Joseph Smith was not consciously writing poetry: he was, after all, dictating almost everything he produced. So Jonathan’s statement “else what’s interpretation for?” is not only accurate, but necessary in understanding what I’ve been doing with this blog. I would summarize it as “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp — what else is metaphor?”