Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos. –Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
I am like a huge, rough stone rolling down from a high mountain.
-Joseph Smith
In the November 19, 1858 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Times, Walt Whitman wrote a brief publication notice for a new edition of the Book of Mormon, assuring the reader that, “The present edition of the Book of Mormon is an accurate reprint of the 3rd edition under the official sanction of the leaders of the Mormon Church. It is quite a curiosity in its way and should find a place in the library of every diligent book-collector” (Whitley 67-68). Whitman, while no fan of Mormonism due to polygamy (Reynolds 223), still apparently had an affection for the Book of Mormon itself. According to Whitman scholar Edward Whitley:
Whitman believed that the Book of Mormon belonged on U.S. bookshelves because it represented a realization of his hope that the New World would produce religious texts commensurate with the American experience. “Our chief religious and poetical works are not our own,” he lamented, “nor adapted to our light.” Whitman frequently expressed his hope that “native authors” would be “sacerdotal” in their approach to literature and provided his own work as an example of scripture for a new American religions, writing in Leaves of Grass, “I too, following many and follow’d by many, inaugurate a religion.” (Whitley 68).
For Whitley, the Book of Mormon merited Whitman’s notice because it fit comfortably with Whitman’s hope that new American Bibles would be produced for new American religions. It anticipated Emerson’s 1850 call that “We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world” (Emerson). It was a call that Whitman took to heart; in June 1857, Whitman himself declared in his notebooks that his “principal object—the main life work” would be the “great construction of the new Bible—the Three Hundred & Sixty Five” (Reynolds 367). The coming forth of all these other new American “Bibles,” the Book of Mormon included, had apparently inspired Whitman to write one of his own. However, he never followed through with this ambition, “unless,” speculates Reynolds, “the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, containing many new religious poems, can be seen as a kind of Bible” (Reynolds 368). This possible conflation between Leaves of Grass and Bible-writing is endorsed by Whitman himself, who told his confidant Horace Traubel that “I think the Leaves the most religious book among books” (Whitley 72). Nor was he alone in classifying his poetry as religious; by the end of the 19th century, Walt Whitman was already hailed by many of his acolytes as more than a mere poet, but a bona fide prophet.
In 1905, William Hayes was already crediting Whitman with “the warning message of the prophets,” declaring that “He can rise to the heights reached by the great ones, and by that rising he proves that he is one of their number” (Hayes 10). As Whitley has further cataloged for us, “The number of readers who also considered Whitman a prophet in his own right was growing during the late nineteenth century,” noting how “Bliss Perry gave the derisive title of ‘hot little prophets’ to the international group of scholars, writers, and activists whom William James said were ‘quite willing to admit that in important respects Whitman is of the genuine lineage of the prophets’” (Whitley 69). These included Robert Louis Stevenson, who “contended that Whitman’s work was best characterized as prophecy rather than poetry” (Whitley 69). In this prophetic context, Whitman begins to share more than a little in common with the Book of Mormon’s author Joseph Smith Jr. It therefore may be worth exploring how the latter can help inform our understanding of the former.
Whitman was, like Smith, both greeted and mocked as a new American prophet—occasionally alongside Smith at the same time. American author John Jay Chapman explicitly compared the two, claiming that “Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were men of phenomenal capacity, who actually invented a religion and created a community by the apparent establishment of supernatural and occult powers…By temperament and education Walt Whitman was fitted to be a prophet of this kind;” a British critic in 1860 wrote that “Whitman became as famous as the author of the Book of Mormon,” while another, more back-handedly, noted that Whitman “has been received by a section of his countrymen as a sort of prophet…we are not disposed to accept him as one, having less faith in latter-day prophets than in latter-day poets” (Whitley 73). The slight to Smith’s Latter-day Saints was lost on no one. Whitman had written in his 1855 Preface that “the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place” (LoG 24), and apparently both his celebrators and detractors lumped him among these prophets—alongside Joseph Smith.
The possible affinities between Walt Whitman and his fellow countryman Joseph Smith have been largely elided critically. Partially this is because most studies of the religious influences on Walt Whitman have focused primarily on Swedenborgianism and Millennialism—and that rightfully so. Scholars such as David Kuebrich and Kathryn Kruger, among others, have aptly traced the influence of these sects in Whitman’s writings; one need not fly all the way to Mormonism to track the charismatic ideas in Whitman that are far more easily explained by his exposure to Emanuel Swedenborg, Andrew Jackson Davis, and Thomas Lake Harris.
Nevertheless, in most critical discussions of Whitman’s religious influences, Joseph Smith and Mormonism stubbornly lurk around the peripheries. Typically Mormonism only appears among long rosters of other new Second Great Awakening sects, e.g. when Jeremy Reynolds records in his biography Walt Whitman’s America:
Whitman was in tune…with other dramatic changes in American religion. Surging revivalism, the throes of the market economy, and the rise of mass print culture combined to make nineteenth-century America a remarkably fertile breeding ground for new religions. The Shakers, the Mormons, the Oneidan perfectionists, Phoebe Palmer’s perfectionist Methodists, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the spiritualists, and the Harmonialists all sprang up between the Revolution and the Civil War. (Reynolds 256)
Here, Mormonism is buried amidst a long litany of various new 19th-century sects. But it is also the one sect that Reynold’s then narrows his focus onto almost immediately, as he continues:
Several of the new movements were based on freshly inspired sacred writings meant to supplant or complement the Bible. Most famously, in 1820 a young Vermont man, Joseph Smith, reportedly had directions from Jesus and God to found a new religion; he later claimed he had found golden plates, which he translated as The Book of Mormon, first published in 1830. (Reynolds 257) (emphasis added)
Reynold’s clearest and “most famous” example of a new American Bible is apparently the Book of Mormon (although it was first published in ‘29, not ’30). Indeed, Laurence Buell has argued that Whitman and Emerson’s’ much coveted “new American Bible did not get written” at all, “unless one counts the Book of Mormon” (Buell 183). Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon, then, can provide us a framework by which to better understand Whitman’s own poetic project.
My purpose is not to claim Smith as some sort of antecedent or direct influence upon Whitman, but rather to examine how some of Smith’s literary moves might help illuminate some of the similar moves that Whitman makes in his own poetry. For the purposes of this paper, I am less interested in how each positioned themselves as a prophet (though they did that too), than in how they both sought in their own peculiar ways to serve as American bards. As such, this paper will discuss how they leveraged their positions on the margins of society to serve as national poet via Edward Whitley’s model of the bardic poet; we will then discuss Smith and Whitmans’ own self-descriptions as “roughs,” the bardic nature of the Book of Mormon and what that can tell us about Leaves of Grass, both men’s shared anxieties about translation interrupting their bardic utterances, and finally analyze how Smith engaged in a bardic mode through his famed King Follett funeral sermon, which in turn can help us understand Leaves of Grass.
My engagement with Joseph Smith as a potential candidate for American Bard is based primarily upon Edward Whitley’s 2010 book American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet, which contains perhaps the only sustained examinations of Whitman and Mormonism currently extant. Whitley’s study discusses three oft overlooked 19th-century poets—including the African American James M. Whitfield and the Native American John Rollins Ridge—who leveraged their placement within the margins of U.S. society as a means by which to speak not only for the marginalized, but also for the larger nation as a whole. Whitley argues that these marginalized poets can help clarify Whitman’s own bardic position on the peripheries. The second poet he discusses in his book is the Mormon poet Eliza R. Snow, whom he analyzes as a bard speaking for and in behalf of America by means of her position as a Mormon exiled from America to Utah. It is fascinating that Whitley positions Snow as a potential American Bard, for this same framework can also be applied to her beloved prophet (and first polygamist husband) Joseph Smith.
Whitley notes of Snow and all his other “Unlikely Candidates for National Poet” that they “tended to gravitate toward a particular mode of poetic expression…to public commemorative verse—poetry written to observe some moment of cultural or political importance—as a way to interact with an audience of readers who may or may not have been willing to acknowledge their claims as American bards” (Whitley xi). This public commemorative genre, Whitley insists, differs
in crucial ways from the received notion that lyric poems are necessarily dramatic monologues that require the poet to turn his or her back on an imagined audience while contemplating the depths of consciousness in solitude. Commemorative poetry, in contrast, opens up a dialogue with the audience and creates a space for debate over what it means to be the representative voice of the community. (xi)
In Whitley’s configuration, the bardic poet looks not inward (like a lyrical poet) but outward—not away from the mass audience but towards them. The bard become the “representative voice of the community” not by speaking speak at his audience, but with them, and then in behalf of them. Moreover, in Whitley’s model, the bard looks specifically towards the margins, to allow the exiled outsider to speak for themselves, to then address the nation as an insider, though still from an outsider’s perspective; as Whitley explains: “The (mis)recognition effect of commemorative verse can be appropriated and exploited by poets who, knowing full well that they have been deemed unfit representatives of their audiences’ values and norms, nevertheless issue forth in bardic utterance as a way to challenge and redefine the nature of collective identity” (Whitley 17). Whitley’s examples of this appropriation of commemorative verse centers on not only on such outsiders as Whitfield, Ridge, and Snow, but also on Whitman himself as “one of the roughs,” which is defined as “a common criminal who speaks for the common man” (Whitley 89). As Whitley explains it, Whitman, though a white male of privilege relative to Whitfield, Snow, and Ridge, can still position himself among the marginalized, for his “self-identification as ‘one of the roughs’ took advantage of a symbolic economy that put working-class men at the rhetorical heart of Jacksonian democracy while at the same time considering them ‘rough and unbidden’ participants in civil society” (Whitley 2). As a working class “rough,” Whitman, like Whitfield, Ridge, and Snow, presents himself as “a national outsider who leverages his position on the margins of society into a bid for the office of national bard” (Whitley 2). It is not difficult to see Joseph Smith working in a similar model well over a decade before Leaves of Grass, in no small part because Smith likewise referred to himself as “a rough.”
As the epigrams at the head of this paper note, Joseph Smith referred to himself as “a huge, rough stone rolling”; historian Richard Bushman in fact entitled his recent Joseph Smith biography Rough Stone Rolling due to this evocative image. The full quotation from Smith reads:
I am like a huge, rough stone rolling down from a high mountain; and the only polishing I get is when some corner gets rubbed off by coming in contact with something else, striking with accelerated force against religious bigotry…and the authority of perjured executives, backed by mobs, blasphemers, licentious and corrupt men and women—all hell knocking off a corner here and a corner there. Thus I will become a smooth and polished shaft in the quiver of the Almighty. (Smith)
Smith here in 1844, like Whitman over a decade later, repositions a lowly “rough” not as one degraded or lowly, but as one who descends from above, even from “a high mountain;” it is not in spite of but because of his rough status that he transcends to the divine, to become “a polished shaft in the quiver of the Almighty.” Or, as Whitman words it more succinctly, “one of the roughs” is actually “a kosmos,” an all-encompassing universe. Smith’s appropriation of the term “rough” here is significant, because from the beginning, his detractors likewise characterized him as “a rough” in the derogatory sense of “a common criminal,” a charlatan and a con artist, lascivious, immoral, vulgar and crass (which one will note were some of the common charges lobbed against Whitman as well). To this day in the popular Mormon imagination, Smith remains a sort of Abraham Lincoln-type figure raised from obscurity in a log cabin, self-educated, an undefeated backwoods wrestler, forever splitting rails. It is specifically as “a rough” that Smith for Mormons is considered a prophet, one of Whitman’s “gang of kosmos and prophets.”
But how, then, does Joseph Smith “issue forth in bardic utterance as a way to challenge to redefine the nature of collective identity,” as Whitley formulates it? In a very similar manner to Whitman, by publishing a book. For starters, there is that aforementioned “curiosity” which Whitman said should find room “in the library of every diligent book-collector”; for both Smith and Whitman chose to launch their careers through the production of an ambitious, unprecedented, and self-published text—1829’s the Book of Mormon and 1855’s Leaves of Grass respectively—texts that were intended to help effect a sort of national salvation. As Reynolds writes of the Leaves of Grass First Edition, “all the poems reflect a fundamental faith in the power of the poet to restore equilibrium and connectedness…The poet is said to encompass everything and set everything right…His healing power will spread through all society” (Reynolds 338); Kuebrich similarly insists that Whitman explicitly set out in his poetry to forge a “new civic faith” to “protect against political fragmentation and decay” (Kuebrich 3). Smith, likewise, claimed of his Book of Mormon that it “was the most correct of any book on earth…and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book” (Smith 194). These were clearly books of salvation. Both Whitman and Smith, with unqualified self-assurance, put themselves to great expense to publish and disseminate a complex literary work that they sincerely believed the world needed.
In accordance with Whitley’s model, both Leaves of Grass and the Book of Mormon effect this salvation by speaking from the margins. Leaves of Grass is written by a rough about roughs to roughs, a rough book to “read…in the open air every season of every year of your life” (LoG 11), yet with the purpose of helping these roughs realize that they themselves, humble though they may be, are, like a blade of grass, “no less than the journeywork of the stars” (LoG 217). The Book of Mormon similarly purports to be the ancient record of “a lonesome and a solemn people, wanderers, cast out from Jerusalem, born in tribulation, in a wilderness, and hated of our brethren” (BoM Jacob 7:26), nonetheless designed to help the Lost Tribes of Israel recognize themselves, “come unto Christ and be perfected in him” (BoM Moroni 10:32). This is a book written by the exiled, speaking out from the long-forgotten peripheries, with a message of transcendence. These both are the works of bards seeking to “challenge and redefine the nature of collective identity” of the forgotten peripheral. Furthermore, the Book of Mormon is a compendium of history and prophetic utterances, most often presented in the form of sermons. That is, the Book of Mormon (and this is not nearly emphasized enough either within or without Mormondom) is intended to be read out loud, before an audience, and that in a manner that emphasizes the centrality of the voice of the marginalized. The Book of Mormon, in Whitley’s framework, is fundamentally bardic.
For example, one of the premier sermons within the Book of Mormon is known as the King Benjamin discourse; at first glance, this Benjamin speaks as the King, the preeminent insider, hardly an American bard of the roughs at all. But the focus of his discourse is not on the king, but on the poor, the homeless, the forgotten, demanding that “ye will suffer not that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain” (Mosiah 4:16); Benjamin rails against self-justifications for despising and ignoring the poor, saying, “Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand…for his punishments are just—But I say unto you, O man, whoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent” (Mosiah 4:17-18). The poor marginalized are here resituated by this prophet-bard away from the margins and into the center of the national consciousness, as Benjamin speaks for and in behalf of them. Elsewhere in the Book of Mormon, a prophet named Jacob similarly decries his people’s search for wealth, oppression of the poor, and mistreatment of their families. Some of these prophets really are from the margins themselves, including one named Samuel, a Lamanite (a racial minority in the Book of Mormon), who is viciously attacked with stones and arrows as he preaches to the largest metropolis of Zarahemla about the imminent coming of Christ. Repeatedly throughout the Book of Mormon, itinerant vagabond prophets are rising from the margins to “challenge or redefine the nature of collective identity” amongst their people, to speak both in their behalf and with them, to call upon them to better integrate into their midst “the poor, the hungry, the needy, and the naked, and the sick and the afflicted” (BoM Mormon 8:39), those who have been marginalized and rejected by the main body of society. This is a bardic mode likewise participated in by Whitfield, Snow, Ridge, and most especially Whitman, who declares “I am the hounded slave,” and affirms of the slave at auction that “Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for him/For him the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant/For him the revolving cycles truly and steadily rolled” (LoG). Like the Book of Mormon, Leaves of Grass accomplishes its bardic project not just by including the margins, but by emphasizing them. Per Whitley’s model, they take those who have been ignored and translate them into greater national centrality.
I choose the word “translate” deliberately, for neither Smith nor Whitman claim to provide ex nihilo new literary creations, but to provide translations of previously inaccessible knowledge. This infatuation with translation is significant in part due to the 19th-century U.S. preoccupation with new biblical translations generally. As critic W.C. Harris writes:
Whitman was not the only American who found it necessary, either by revising the Authorized Version (the King James Version) or by writing an entirely new Bible, to produce an American Bible and so claim the United States, the New Israel, as the site upon which new covenants—Biblical as well as federal—would be fulfilled. The unprecedented formation of new sects between 1830 and 1850 [including Mormonism], most of which claimed an idiosyncratic understanding of Scripture not mediated by dogma, contributed significantly to the decentering of the Authorized Version and, consequently, to the democratization of the transcendental term. (Harris 175)
Significantly, Joseph Smith participates in all of the above; in addition to delivering new scripture with the Book of Mormon (which claims to be both a translation and “an entirely new” scripture), he also produced his own retranslation of the old King James Bible itself, which likewise helps decenter the authority of the Authorized Version. Moreover, his Book of Mormon also claims the United States as the site of new covenants, for it purports to be a translation written by ancient Israeli diasporic refugees guided by the hand of God to the ancient Americas. Here, God makes a covenant with these exiled Israelites that the Americas would be consecrated to them as a promised land. The Book of Mormon, then, participates in this 19th-century project of new scriptural translations that claims the United States as the site of New Israel by means of new Bibles and new translations.
As Harris explains it, this preoccupation with new translations informs Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as well. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman writes: “The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me/The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue” (LoG 207). Here Whitman, seeks to translate the pains of hell into something new, much like how he translates a “rough” into a “kosmos.” Incidentally, translation in the Book of Mormon signifies a human being that is is transformed into a celestial being. In this dual register of the word “translate” that signifies both to make legible and to ameliorate, we can read in Whitman a desire to translate “the pains of hell…into a new tongue” as part of his project to transform the “rough and unbidden” into the “rhetorical heart” of the democracy.
Yet with this proliferation of new translations comes the very real anxiety that meaning will be lost in translation—and what’s more, that some things cannot be translated at all, which undermines the very ability of the bard to communicate or be understood, and impedes his capacity to be absorbed by his country “as affectionately as he has absorbed it” (LoG 25). As Whitman says of the untranslatable, “I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid/It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.” (LoG 246). More explicitly, he likewise writes of Civil War casualties, “I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women” (LoG 193), but he can’t. A part of everyone will always remain fundamentally inaccessible to his understanding, and impenetrable to his bardic utterance, untranslatable. Smith’s Book of Mormon, too, is deeply preoccupied with the intrinsic limits of translation. Throughout the Book, various prophets confess that they cannot record the “Hundredth part” (BoM Jacob 3:13, Words of Mormon 1:5, Helaman 3:14, 3 Nephi 5:8, 3 Nephi 26:6, Ether 15:33) of what they wish to describe—that is, like Whitman, they worry that their book cannot encompass and absorb all. Repeatedly throughout the Book of Mormon, people “hear a voice…and understand it not” (BoM 3 Nephi 11: 4), are “baptized with fire, and…know it not” (BoM 3 Nephi 9:20), and “hear it not” (BoM Moroni 2:3). Book of Mormon Prophets complain to God that “Thou hast made our words powerful and great, even that we cannot write them” (BoM Ether 12:23-25), that “neither am I mighty in writing, like unto speaking” (BoM 2 Nephi 33:1); they fear that their bardic utterance will be lost in the translation, even just in the translation from oral to print. The bard’s very trust in his speech undergirds his fears that what he speaks cannot ever truly be recorded or communicated.
For both Whitman and Smith, then, the solution to this quandary is to embrace the inaccessible and untranslatable within every person as that which performs translations in the first place. “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable” (LoG 247) boasts Whitman; likewise, Smith’s Book of Mormon assures that “words of God” will be “written in your hearts” (BoM Mosiah 13:11), as the untranslatable thing becomes the repository and recorder of all other translations. In this model, the bard less translates than he invokes the similarly untranslatable in his audience—and it is the mode within which both Smith and Whitman operate. This unspeakable part produces the new Bibles by operating as the same source as the old Bibles. The function of Leaves of Grass and the Book of Mormon, then, is not to communicate the untranslatable, but provide the reader with access to the untranslatable within themselves.
For example, in a famous sermon, Smith translates a German Bible to prove a theological point, only to then interrupt his own thought with: “I thank God that I have got this old [German] book; but I thank him more for the gift of the Holy Ghost. I have got the oldest book in the world; but I [also] have the oldest book in my heart, even the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Smith 349). Smith is here assuring his audience that, through their similar access to the Holy Ghost, they possess the same access to correct Biblical translations that he has, irrespective of their linguistic training. Smith centers his audience on their own ability to translate his words in a manner that will be legible and comprehensible to themselves; he “challenges and redefines” his audience’s collective identity, by placing them into a more direct contact with deity—now they are no longer the outcast, but the confidantes of God himself. He further assures his audience, “You say honey is sweet and so do I. This is good doctrine. It tastes good. I can taste the principles of eternal life, and so can you” (Smith 355). For Smith, trust in one’s own comprehension can be as basic as trusting one’s own bodily senses.
Whitman similarly positions one’s soul as the direct contact point with God. He declares in his 1855 Preface that a nation “can have the best authority the cheapest…namely from its own soul” (LoG 6); he assures his audience that “Any one and every one is owner of the library who can read the same through all” (LoG 19), and encourages all to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul” (LoG11). Like Smith with his honey analogy, Whitman will only accept that which tastes good, for “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth” (LoG 23). Moreover, the test of both men’s doctrine is not only that which “tastes good” or “satisfies the soul,” but one that expands the soul to encompass all other things. Smith’s Book of Mormon says “the word hath swelled your soul…and your mind doth begin to expand” (BoM Alma 32:34), while Whitman declares we are “expanding, always expanding/Outward and outward and forever outward” (LoG 240). Expansion is the theme of the translator here, as the roughs expand into a kosmos, and the “rough and unbidden” are repositioned from the margins to not only the center, but to encompass all other things. In this manner do Whitman and Smith leverage their marginal status in their bid to become national bards.
Neither the Book of Mormon nor Leaves of Grass are content to “open a dialogue” with only their contemporaries, but likewise to engage in conversation with readers that are yet to be born. The Book of Mormon’s various prophets claim that, “Behold, I speak unto you as though I spake from the dead; for I know that ye shall have my words” (BoM Mormon 9:30), speaking like “the voice of one crying from the dust” (BoM 2 Nephi 33:13), addressing those not yet present, or even yet born. Similarly, Whitman in “Song of Myself” declares to his futures readers, “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow under the grass I love/If you want to see me again look for me under your bootsoles…I stop somewhere waiting for you” (LoG 247). The personas of both Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Smith’s Book of Mormon speak up from the ground, sprout up from the dirt and the dust, to achieve a sort of surrogate immortality by means of their yet-unborn generations of future readers. In this manner do both books fulfill the task of the bard in opening a dialogue with their audience, “leveraging their status” from not only the margins but down to the dirt itself; but from the dust and dirt, they encompass not just all of space but all of time.
But before proceeding, I here must be careful not to draw a false-equivalency between the Book of Mormon and Leaves of Grass, which is not my intention. The former is a collection of long-form narratives, sermons, and histories written in a largely somber King James pastiche; the latter is a work of innovative, energetic, unrhymed poetry. Stylistically, philosophically, and tone-wise, the Book of Mormon and Leaves of Grass are vastly different books. My point is not to naively classify the Book of Mormon as some sort of source or antecedent to Leaves of Grass;rather, my point is to demonstrate how this same negotiation between the marginalized and the whole nation, which Whitley identifies as being so key to this particular mode of American bardship, is present in Joseph Smith’s writings, which in turn can help us to better understanding Whitman’s own bardic project.
Negotiation between the peripheries and the whole is not the only tension that the bard experiences in this model; there is also an oddly similar tension in both men’s sexual politics. Both were celebrated and attacked as Free Lovers, like unto the contemporaneous Oneida Community. For though Whitman was embraced by the Oneidas and shared their belief in sexual experience as a conduit for accessing the divine, he was nonetheless “deeply ambivalent about the free lovers” (Reynolds 222). Ironically, Whitman resisted accusations of supporting Free Lovers specifically by casting similar aspersions on the Mormons. Writes Reynolds:
[Whitman] viewed marriage as the very basis of all civilization. “When that goes, all goes,” he wrote, emphasizing that “the divine institution of the marriage tie lies at the root of the welfare, the safety, the very existence of every Christina nation.” He was firmly opposed to any kind of sexual experimentation that threatened marriage. As his friend Charles Eldridge recalled, “Anything like free love was utterly repugnant to his mind, and he had no toleration for the Mormons.” (Reynolds 223)
The irony here is that Whitman’s claims for marriage as the basis of Christian civilization is still recited and emphasized by the LDS Church today, which proclaims that “the family is central to the Creator’s plan” (“The Family”). That is, a curious undercurrent of puritanical conservatism undergirds the sexual radicalism of both Whitman and Smith’s religions. Bushman notes that adulterers were swiftly excommunicated by Smith; this earned him hardened enemies who accused Smith of hypocrisy in punishing their sexual promiscuousness while he himself practiced polygamy (Bushman 441-2). Yet for Smith, though it sounded like splitting hairs to his enemies, the distinction was clear: Smith was married to the women he slept with, while the adulterers were not, and this to him was the all important thing. Whitman, similarly, was often accused of obscenity and deviancy in his explicit discussion of sexual love, even as he encouraged only married sexual love. These sexual politics might be the most telling element so far of how both Whitman and Smith function at once in the margins and in the mainstream—their sexual practices were considered radical, even as their sexual philosophies can be classified as conservative. The American bard in Whitley’s model is positioned both outside and inside the nation at once, and rarely is that dual nature more clearly foregrounded than in their respective sexualities (which is a possible topic meriting of future research).
But Joseph Smith was also bardic in a more straight-forward sense, in that he delivered sermons to broad audiences, and that in a manner that, in full accordance with Whitley, “tended to gravitate toward [the] particular mode of poetic expression” of “public commemorative verse…as a way to interact with an audience of readers who may or may not have been willing to acknowledge their claims as American bards,” one which “opens up a dialogue with the audience and creates a space for debate over what it means to be the representative voice of the community,” and “can be appropriated and exploited” by those who “issue forth in bardic utterance as a way to challenge or redefine the nature of collective identity.” One such Smith sermon, his most famous one, fulfills all these criteria—and more significant for our purposes, is the one that may actually connect him directly to Whitman. It is the King Follett sermon.
Harold Bloom calls the sermon “one of the truly remarkable sermons ever preached in America” (Bushman 533). David Kuebrich, in his 1989 study on the religious influences on Whitman Minor Prophecy, centers his lone Mormonism reference on the sermon, speculating that, “Whitman’s notion that human souls would eventually become gods could have been derived from the Mormons. This idea is found in ‘The Book of Abraham’ which Joseph Smith published in 1842 and also in Smith’s famous funeral sermon for King Follett delivered in Nauvoo, Illinois, shortly before the Mormon prophet’s assassination” (Kuebrich 25-26). In the King Follett sermon, then, we have a rare moment where Smith the bard might have had actual influence on Whitman the bard as well.
For when Smith delivered the King Follett sermon, it was as a bardic figure, one who appropriated a public commemoration—in this case, the funeral of a popular local man nick-named King Follett—in order to open a dialogue with an audience that may no longer have been entirely willing to accept his prophetic claims. Delivered in 1844 scarcely three months before his assassination, Smith addressed the near-entirety of the Mormon city of Nauvoo, IL, which included many who at the time lately believed him to be either a false or a fallen prophet, that he no longer had a right to speak to them or for them, and were even actively planning his coming death. This was Whitley’s model in a nutshell, for Smith at this moment knew “full well” of these men that he had been “deemed an unfit representative of their…values and norms.” This was a moment when Joseph Smith needed more than ever to “open a dialogue with the audience” and “challenge or redefine the nature of collective identity”, to establish his prophetic bona fides and his right to speak bardically on behalf of his audience. Smith thus “appropriated and exploited” this public space to issue forth his “bardic utterance.” Now, to be clear, the King Follett sermon is not a poem; my argument is not that Smith was a bardic poet nor that the sermon is a bardic poem, but rather that Smith operated in a bardic mode during this sermon, in a conversational style reminiscent of Whitman’s later unrhymed poetry first published 11 years later.
Smith throughout this impromptu sermon literally opens a dialogue with his audience; as he expounds on his Biblical passages, he addresses specific members of his audience by name (“Mark it, Elder Rigdon!” he calls out at one point), and when he offers his translation of the Martin Luther Bible, he calls on the Germans in the audience to affirm the quality of his translation (they respond with a resounding “Yeah!”). Through this open conversation, Smith seeks to redefine the nature of mankind’s relationship with deity, delineating them less as a mere religious community and more as a collective of Gods-in-embryo. This concept of the potential godhood of humanity likewise resonates in Whitman’s poetry—that is, if Whitman’s disciples are to be believed. As Hayes writes of Whitman in 1905:
We are more fortunate than we imagined. There is not one loving Christ by many, not one gentle Buddha only. The world is rich in Christs and Buddhas. They belong to all countries and to both sexes, these men and women whose kiss of affection sweetens our lives, these cheer-bringing Gods whose all-enclosing charity is the greatest thing in the world. (Hayes 10-11).
According to Haye’s readings of Whitman, all can be a Christ, all can be a Buddha; as Whitman himself writes, “We affirm there can be unnumbered supremes” (LoG 14). But Hayes here claims for Whitman a doctrine first taught explicitly by Smith, who declares in the King Follett sermon:
Here, then, is eternal life—to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, as do those who sit enthroned in everlasting power. (Smith 346-347)
Smith has here claimed all the world to be the many Christs and many Buddhas that Hayes over a half-century later celebrates in Whitman’s poetry. This is God anticipating Whitman in the 1855 Leaves of Grass, promising through Smith that, “What we enclose you enclose. What we enjoy you may enjoy” (LoG 14), that you too will “encompass worlds and volumes of worlds” (LoG 213). Like Whitman, Smith in effect declares, “By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms” (LoG 211), with the corollary being that Smith offers to all the potential for godhood on the same generous terms that he has accepted it. This is not necessarily to claim Smith as a source for Whitman’s theosis ideas, as Kuebrich speculates; rather, this is to claim that Smith here is operating, like Whitman later would, in a complex bardic tradition that resituates the undesirables (whether that be the Mormons in Smith’s case, or the Working Class “roughs” in Whitman’s case) away from the margins and towards the center in the most dramatic form possible, namely, by equating them with godhood.
Smith during this impromptu sermon becomes, then, not just a religious leader or even a prophet speaking for and in behalf of a besieged religious minority, but the representative voice of a group of proto-gods, a people chosen by God the Father precisely because of their marginalization. In fact, they already resemble God. As Smith declares:
God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret. If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds this world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by his power, was to make himself visible—I say, if you were to see him today, you would see him like a mean in form—like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man. (Smith 345)
God according to Smith is a glorified human being. The same crude bodies that compose us also compose God, and therefore is not crude at all—both a blade of grass and a human being really are the journeywork of the stars in Smith’s model. This concept of God as literally embodied and possessed of the same genesis as human beings gives fresh resonance to Whitman’s declaration that, “I have said that the soul is not more than the body/And I have said that the body is not more than the soul/And nothing, not God, is greater to one that one’s self is” (LoG 244)—or, as Smith similarly declares, “The mind or the intelligence which man possesses is coequal with God himself” (Smith 353). In the bardic utterances of both Smith and Whitman, there is an uncommon equality and intimacy between God and mankind, one where, as in the 1855 “Song of Myself,” Whitman can describe “God” as “a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night and close on the peep of the day/And leaves for me baskets covered with the white towels bulging the house with their plenty” (LoG 29). The roughs, the exiled, the unwanted and the lowly in this framework are not only resituated from the margins, but become the comfortable bedmates of God himself.
As Bushman comments of the sermon, “The King Follett doctrines can sound profoundly American. Every man a god and a king fulfilled heavenly aspirations to a degree unknown in any other religion” (Bushman 537). Bushman here at once identifies the sermon as both utterly unique yet also utterly a product of its place and time—much the same could be said of Whitman. In effect, both Smith and Whitman declare that “I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself/They do not know how immortal, but I know” (LoG 194)—or at least, they did not know until Whitman and Smith told them. Mankind here is quite literally “Divine…inside and out” (LoG 211). This lenses not only resituates Smith within a bardic context, but also helps to explain how Whitman can be a both poet and a prophet, both “a rough” and “a kosmos,” one who is “Absorbing all to myself and for this song” (LoG 199). He is able to ask of his spirit, “When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be filled and satisfied then?/And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond” (LoG 242). The untranslatable portion of the soul in this model continues to expand out to not only enfold all things, but transcend them—to not only encompass and absorb all, but to rise above all. The marginalized in this model move from the lowliest to the center, then to expand and envelop all things, then to finally rise above all things as well and enter eternity. Says Smith, “We are looked upon by God as though we were in eternity. God dwells in eternity, and does not view things as we do” (Smith 356). Whitman, likewise, “sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement….he sees eternity in men and women” (LG 9). By resituating their peoples into eternity, they affirm the centrality and indestructability of the roughs and the marginalized; they challenge and redefine their collective identity, and justify the bard’s authority to speak for a nation that otherwise questions their acceptability.
Joseph Smith, in both his sermons and his scriptures, sought not only to speak from the margins towards the center, and not even just to resituate the marginalized into the center; he sought to swell the marginalized to expand, envelop, absorb, and transcend all things around them. If he was not exactly a poet, then we was still most certainly functioning as a bard. He provides another lenses by which to examine Walt Whitman’s project as an American bard, as one who not only speaks in behalf of the marginalized, but also seeks to expand the “average” and the “roughs” to similarly encompass and transcend all things, to recognize themselves as a “kosmos” at last. We can thus examine by means of Smith how the prophetic was not separate or tangential to Whitman’s poetry, but was already enveloped and embedded within his poetic ambitions to serve as national poet. That is, there was already something innately bardic about Smith’s prophecies, just as there was likewise already something innately prophetic about Whitman’s poetry.
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