1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 315–16.

2. See The Anchor Bible: The Song of Songs, ed. and trans., with commentary, Marvin H. Pope (New York: Doubleday, 1977), as an example of the problem of generic identification.

3. See E. D. Hirsch Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 68–126, for a detailed description of the importance of accurate generic definition in the process of interpretation. See also Hans Robert Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provocation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), pp. 173–83.

4. Book of Mormon Compendium (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1968), pp. 152–53. Although Professor Sperry may be right in his unsubstantiated argument that “this is a true psalm in both form and ideas,” he seems to have misunderstood the basic poetic structure of this passage, at least insofar as his arrangement of lines and stanzas allows inference. Reynolds and Sjodahl in George Reynolds and Janne M. Sjodahl, Commentary on the Book of Mormon, ed. Philip C. Reynolds, 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1955), 1:264–71, describe the passage as “A Song of Nephi” and call attention to some of its poetic qualities. The proximity of the passage to Hebrew poetry is also emphasized. At times the analysis is rather superficial, and many of the central lyric elements seem to have been misunderstood.

5. “It was as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as to seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.” (“A Defense of Poetry,” in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. [New York: Gordian Press; London: Ernest Benn, 1965], 7:114.)

6. This view of poetry is based on insights of the Prague School aestheticians and structuralist approaches to poetry. Jan Mukarovsky argues, for example, that “in poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself” (“Standard Language and Poetic Language,” in A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, ed. and trans. Paul L. Garvin [Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1964], p. 19). Roman Jakobson makes a similar point: “The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language. . . . Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. This function, by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.” (“Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok [Cambridge: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960], p. 356.)

7. See Ruth apRoberts, “Old Testament Poetry: The Translatable Structure,” PMLA 92 (1979): 987–1004. Matthew Arnold was also aware of the translatable potential of Old Testament poetry: “And the effect of Hebrew poetry can be preserved and transferred in a foreign language, as the effect of other great poetry cannot. The effect of Homer, the effect of Dante, is and must be in great measure lost in translation, because their poetry is a poetry of metre, or of rhyme, or both; and the effect of these is not really transferable. A man may make a good English poem with the matter and thoughts of Homer or Dante, may even try to reproduce their metre, or to reproduce their rhyme; but the metre and rhyme will be in truth his own, and the effect will be his, not the effect of Homer or Dante. Isaiah’s, on the other hand, is a balance of thought, conveyed by a corresponding balance of sentence; and the effect of this can be transferred to another language.” “Introduction to Isaiah of Jerusalem,” in The Works of Matthew Arnold, 15 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1970), 11:333–34.

8. Theodore H. Robinson, The Poetry of the Old Testament (London: Duckworth, 1947), p. 21. See also Stanley Gevirtz, Patterns in the Early Poetry of Israel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), and George Buchanan Gray, The Forms of Hebrew Poetry (1915; reprint ed. with a Prolegomenon by David Noel Freedman, New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1972). James Muilenburg provides a useful description of the value and limits of form criticism and Gattungforschung in “Form Criticism and Beyond,” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 88, pt. 1 (March 1969), pp. 1–18. James L. Kugel’s The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) did not appear soon enough to be considered in this study.

9. All biblical quotations are from the King James Version.

10. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” stanza 52, Leaves of Grass, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley, vol. 9 of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 89.

11. See Joseph Barbier, Le Vocabulaire le Syntaxe et le Style des Pòemes Reguliers de Charles Péguy (Paris: Editions Berger-Levrault, 1957), especially pp. 434–56 for a discussion of Péguy’s use of parallelism. See Jon M. Tolman, “A. F. Schmidt and C. Péguy: A Comparative Stylistic Analysis,” Comparative Literature Studies 11 (December 1974): 277–305, for a discussion of Schmidt’s use of parallelism and Péguy’s influence on him.

12. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1957), p. 6.

13. “Poetic Diction,” in The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphrey House and completed by Graham Storey (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 83–84. For a discussion of the import of parallelism in poetry from a linguistic point of view, see Roman Jakobson, “Grammatical Parallelism and Its Russian Facet,” Language 42 (1966): 399–429. See also Paul Kiparsky, “The Role of Linguistics in a Theory of Poetry,” Daedalus 102 (Summer 1973): 231–44.

14. The stanza divisions used in this analysis are, of course, not in the printed text of the Book of Mormon, nor are they even suggested. They are, rather, divisions that the structure of the passage itself seems to dictate and have been used here to facilitate analysis. The line numbers refer to lines within the stanza. The terms line and member are used more or less synonymously. In the course of this discussion, several passages will be described as exhibiting introverted or chiastic parallelism. The term and concept of chiasmus have been widely discussed and have invited considerable speculation in certain circles; in the context of what follows, chiasmus is to be understood only in the sense of a rhetorical figure similar to antimetabole which has been used by writers—both religious and secular—since antiquity. The essential feature is an abba pattern in which the second part of the structure is balanced against the first but in reverse order as in the poetic line “Flowers are lovely, love is flowerlike.” In the “Psalm of Nephi,” it will be noted, chiastic structures are much more extended. (See the article on chiasmus in Alex Preminger, ed., Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, enlarged ed. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974], p. 116.)

15. These embedded chiastic patterns could also well be considered in terms of the rhetorical principle associated with ring composition, a technique with a long and extensive history in which the final element in a series reflects or echoes the first in some way, the penultimate the second, and so on. This procedure was first investigated by W. A. A. van Otterlo in Untersuchungen über Begriff, Anwendung und Entstebung der griechischen Ringkomposition, Mededelingen der Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeling Letterkunde, NS 7, no. 3 (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1944); “Ein merkwürdige Kompositions form der älteren griechischen Literatur,” Mnemosyne, 3d ser., 12 (1944); and De Ringcompositie als Opbouwprincipe in de epische Gedichten van Homerus, Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afdeling Letterkunde, NS 51, no. 1 (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1948). Cederic H. Whitman extends and amplifies this approach in Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958). (See especially the detailed foldout chart at the back of the book. See also Julia Haig Gaisser, “A Structural Analysis of the Digressions in the Iliad and the Odyssey,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 73 [1969]: 1–44.) This method of analysis has also been applied to literary traditions other than the ancient Greek (see David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk [London: Routledge, 1972]; John D. Niles, “Ring-Composition in La Chanson de Roland and La Chancun de Willame,” Olifant 1 [December 1973]: 4–12; John D. Niles, “Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf,” PMLA 94 [1979]: 924–35.) Of particular interest in conjunction with the “Psalm of Nephi” is Michael Fishbane, “Composition and Structure in the Jacob Cycle (Gen. 25:19–35:22),” Journal of Jewish Studies 26 (1975): 15–38.

16. The present arrangement in poetic lines and stanzas does not alone create, determine, or define per se the lyricism of the passage but rather makes more obvious the inherent lyric elements obscured by printing conventions. For an exchange of letters concerning the implications of typographical rearrangements, see the TLS of 4 February 1965, p. 87, for the beginning of the controversy which continues in the issues of 11 February 1965, p. 107, and 18 February 1965, p. 127, the latter touching on the question of biblical poetry. Finally, in a brief article in the issue of 25 February 1965, p. 147, an earlier (27 September 1928) letter of T. S. Eliot discussing the question is published. The question is also discussed by Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, pp. 94–98. Jonathan Culler raises the issue with regard to the generic expectations that typographical rearrangements can imply (see Structuralist Poetics [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975], pp. 161–62; see also Gerard Genette, Figures II [Paris: Seuil, 1969], pp. 150–51).

17. Hans-Georg Gadamer argues convincingly that the essential difference between literary and nonliterary texts resides in their fundamentally different claims to veracity. “. . . der Unterschied zwischen einem literarischen Kunstwerk und irgendeinem anderen literarischen Text [ist] kein so grundsätzlicher. Gewiss besteht ein Unterschied zwischen der Sprache der dichterischen Prosa und der ‘wissenschaftlichen’ Prosa. Man kann diese Unterschiede gewiss auch vom Gesichtspunkt der literarischen Formung aus betrachten. Aber der wesentliche Unterschied solcher verschiedener ‘Sprachen’ liegt offenbar woanders, nämlich inder Verschiedenheit des Wahrheitsanspruches, der von ihnen erhoben wird.” (Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutic, 3. erweiterte Auflage [Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1972], p.155.) It is, thus, questionable whether the “Psalm of Nephi” gives the reader any reliable information about Nephi’s actions or attitudes. This view is contrary to that represented by Reynolds and Sjodahl and more recently by Steve Gilliland, “‘Awake My Soul!’: Dealing Firmly with Depression,” Ensign 8 (August 1978): 37–41. (See also Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 74–76.) Gadamer’s view of poetry, however has not gained universal acceptance. Among the opposing theories, for example, is that advanced by Kate Hamburger in Die Logik der Dichtung (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1957) in which lyric poetry is approached as a “real utterance” (Wirklichkeitsaussage) having the same status as a historical narrative.

18. T. S. Eliot advances this general arguments in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964), pp. 3–11. Though working within a very different framework, that of Russian formalism and semiotic theory, Julia Kristeva makes a similar point. “. . . tout texte se construit comme mosaîque de citations, tout texte est absorption et transformation d’un autre texte. A la place de la notion d’intersubjectivité s’installe celle d’intertextualité, et le langage poétique se lit, au moins, comme double.” (ΣημειωτιΚε Recherches pour une Sémanalyse [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969], p. 146).

19. “. . . toute oeuvre modifie l’ensemble des possibles, chague nouvel example change l’espèce. . . . Plus exactement, nous ne reconnaissons à un texte le droit de figurer dans l’histoire de la literature ou dans celle de la science, que pour autant qu’il apporte un changement à l’idee qu’on se faisait jusqu’ alors de l’une ou de l’autre acrivite. Les textes que ne remplissent pas cette condition passent automatiquement dans une autre categorie: celle de la literature dite ‘populaire,’ ‘de masse,’ là; celle de l’exercise scolaire, ici.” (Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la litterature fantastique [Paris: Seuil, 1970], p. 10.)

20. Dante Purgatorio 11.88–89. (The edition cited is that edited by Giorgio Petrocchi [Rome: A. Mondadori for the Società Dantesca Italiana, 1966–68]. The translation is my own. I side with Singleton against Grandgent in taking Dante’s collapse to result from his contrition, the last stage of the sacrament of penance, rather than satisfaction. (See Charles S. Singleton, ed., The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio, 2. Commentary, Bollingen Series 80 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973], p. 767.)

21. To regard Nephi as a poet is entirely consistent with what is otherwise known about him. Hugh Nibley, in An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1964), pp. 220–21, notes that “in Lehi’s day an inspired leader had to be a poet.” Nephi, moreover, of all other figures in the Book of Mormon, seems most concerned with questions of language and is the most moved by the difficult yet lyrical mode of Isaiah.

Steven P. Sondrup

BYU Studies Publications