Fall 1993, Volume 10.3

Critical Essay

William Mulder

William Mulder (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Utah. During his leaves of absence, he developed the American Studies Research Centre in Hyderabad, India. He is the author of Homeward to Zion (1957), an account of the Mormon migration from Scandinavia. With historian A. Russell Mortensen he edited Among the Mormons: Historic Accounts by Contemporary Observers (1958). Recent articles include "Nauvoo Observed" (B.Y.U. Studies, 1992), and "'Kindred Spirits': The American Landscape in Art and Literature, 1820-1850" (Essays in American Studies 1991).

Henry James once said of himself that it was a "complex fate" to live as an American in Europe. Mormon writers, born in one world (closed and comfortable) and coming to literary awareness in another (open andmake plain to the Saints of God the visions that unroll before my eyes."2 His was the perennial despair of visionaries striving how to say the unsayable. The Bay Psalm Book of colonial New England, defending its literal translations, could assert that "God's altar needs not our polishings," but Jonathan Edwards in the next century, nearly blinded by God's waylaying light, turned to analogy and metaphor, finding in nature "images and shadows of divine things," as, still later, did Emerson and the Transcendentalists, for whom language was "fossil poetry" and every word a "hieroglyph of history." Craft and calling are inseparable for poets and prophets alike.

Sacred writ is not my province here, although the literary study of scripture can be fascinating, as I remember from my undergraduate days