I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am

Hear the voice of Marguerite Young, visionary author of the vast and the strange, who declared: “I’m as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I’m much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.” These words strike like a bell in the temple of literature, for they place side by side two sources of influence: the formal grandeur of T.S. Eliot, architect of modernist verse, and the prophetic voice of Joseph Smith, founder of a faith, whose followers poured their longing, their migration, their visions into words. Young confesses here that she found not only in the canonized halls of poetry her nourishment, but in the living hymns, the rough, fervent poetry of the Mormons.

The meaning is this: poetry is not only in the refined structures of literary elites, but in the chants, hymns, and declarations of those who dreamed and struggled in the wilderness. For the Mormons, poetry was not an ornament but a force of survival, carrying across plains, deserts, and persecution their vision of a promised land. To be “influenced” by them, as Young says, is to draw from a well of communal imagination, where every line is soaked in faith, endurance, and prophecy. Against Eliot’s polished modernist despair, she found in Mormon verse a raw, untamed affirmation of hope.

The ancients themselves would have understood this. The Hebrews in exile sang psalms, rough with anguish and radiant with longing. The Greeks wove their myths into hymns that were both worship and art. Homer’s epics were not only entertainment; they were scripture of a people, recited as identity and memory. So too the Mormons sang their journeys, their losses, their revelations. In them, Young recognized a voice older than criticism and more enduring than analysis: the poetic fire of a people bound together by vision.

History gives us examples of this pattern. Think of Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass did not spring from aristocratic tradition but from the democratic spirit of America itself, the voices of workers, wanderers, soldiers, and singers. Or consider William Blake, whose “prophetic books” were infused with his own mystical visions, often dismissed in his time but later revered as genius. Both Whitman and Blake remind us that the most enduring poetry often arises not from polished literary salons but from raw vision. Young, in turning to the Mormons, aligned herself with this lineage of prophetic voices.

Her words also reveal her courage. In an age when T.S. Eliot’s influence loomed like a colossus over English poetry, she dared to say that she drew more from Joseph Smith. This was no rejection of Eliot’s craft, but an assertion that true inspiration comes from unexpected places. She teaches us that one should not bow only to the canon but should listen to the music of living faiths, communities, and movements. For the poet’s task is not only to echo tradition but to discover fresh fountains of meaning.

The lesson for us is clear: do not limit your influences to what the world declares “great.” Look beyond, to the voices of the marginalized, the believers, the wanderers, the dreamers. Poetry is not always bound in books—it is in hymns sung on dusty roads, in chants whispered in secret meetings, in stories carried by those who refuse to be silenced. The richness of your art will grow not from narrowing your vision, but from opening it to the breadth of human expression.

Practical wisdom flows from this. Read Eliot, yes, but also read the psalms of common folk, the ballads of pioneers, the chants of monks, the songs of protestors. Seek poetry where life is raw and urgent. Write not only with the voice of the academy, but with the heartbeat of the people. And if you find a prophetic fire in unexpected places, embrace it. For true poetry is not about prestige, but about power—the power to shape the soul and carry it through hardship into hope.

Thus Marguerite Young’s words endure as a reminder: inspiration is not only in the canon, but in the songs of those who believed enough to sing while suffering. Let this truth be passed to future generations—that poetry is both craft and prophecy, and that the greatest voices may rise not from the ivory towers, but from the wandering camps of the faithful, whose verses keep alive the dream of a promised land.