Above the American Renaissance by Bush Harold K.; Yothers Brian; & Brian Yothers & Harold K. Bush

Author:Bush, Harold K.; Yothers, Brian; & Brian Yothers & Harold K. Bush
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press

The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,

No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the laborers’ gang?

Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?

Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you,

Each has his or her place in the procession.45

This utopian procession is part democratic political ceremony, part spiritual pilgrimage in which the holiness of each of the participants has already been achieved.

Celebration of the common person is central to both Leaves of Grass and the Book of Mormon, but the books’ democratic commitments sit uneasily with their prophetic projects. That tension is easily discernible in the Book of Mormon. On the one hand, the book depicts dozens of characters who share the prophetic gifts of major figures such as Lehi, Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni; on the other, it suggests that the prophetic gift is limited to men. Its six hundred closely printed pages contain almost 250 named characters, only six of whom are women. Prophets in the Book of Mormon are invariably male, and they are part of a hierarchical system in which the prophet’s gift is inferior to that of the most favored of God’s agents, the seer. The seer—and there can be only one in any generation—is the man who has possession of the “interpreters,” which are “two stones . . . fastened into the two rims of a bow . . . and . . . handed down from generation to generation, for the purpose of interpreting languages; . . . and whosoever has these things is called seer.” The two “interpreters” are not named in the Book of Mormon, but they correspond exactly to the Urim and Thummim that Smith received along with the golden plates. In a famous passage, Nephi’s brother Joseph prophesies that a seer shall arise in the latter days to come, “and his name shall be called after me; and it shall be after the name of his father.”46 In other words, this seer Joseph will have a father of the same name—a prophecy that Latter-day Saints take to be realized in Joseph Smith, Jr. The Book of Mormon veers between an inclusive conception of prophetic power as potentially available to any (male) believer and celebration of the unique, world-changing seer.

Leaves of Grass proclaims the democratic inclusiveness of its prophetic vision more obviously and insistently than the Book of Mormon does. “I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, / And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,” exclaims the speaker of “Song of Myself.” The grass grows “among black folks as well as white,” he says earlier in the same poem. Throughout “Song of Myself,” the poet-seer insists that prophetic power is available to all, without exception. The speaker’s insistence on his readers’ equality with him verges on the strident: “I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the

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