Brigham Young said “Joseph Smith was a poet, and poets are not like other men…. they catch the swift thought of God and reveal it to us.” Joseph’s place as a nineteenth-century writer is just beginning to be appreciated. This session will look at one aspect of one of the dictations in which he generates texts remarkably like poems, especially poems on the model of Biblical verse, and in the rhythms of Whitman’s American speech. This paper examines Joseph Smith caught in the act of committing poetry.

DENNIS CLARK