The Lord of Experience by Clinton F. Larson

Abstract

142 Western American Literature which has the best chance of being used as a basic text for introductory courses in folklore. It is better, for this purpose, than almost any other book in the field, partly because the Brunvand work is a general survey of the discipline. Taking all aspects into consideration, Brunvand has filled a definite need with his work, a volume which evinces thorough scholarship based in part on his study at Indiana with Richard Dorson and others who rank among the leading folklorists of this country. The Study of American Folklore is very sound in every important respect. It should be given high priority as a basic text by every teacher of folklore, provided that teacher has an adequate knowledge of the discipline before he takes on the teaching assign­ ment. Each folklorist and each library in the country should have a copy of this book even though a single volume can do little more than scratch the surface. Brunvand himself is well aware of this aspect, and perfectly willing to admit it, as is shown in the labeling of the work as an introduction. With a companion volume of selected readings, yet to be edited by someone, The Study of American Folklore can serve as the primary text for any basic course in folklore of the United States. It is highly recommended. It is likely to have an excellent record of adoption, well deserved, as it holds the interest of amateur and professional folklorist alike. K en P e r im a n , Fort Lewis College The Lord of Experience. By Clinton F. Larson. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1967. 129 pages, $4.95.) The sheer concentrated bulk of Clinton Larson’s first published collection of poems (almost 170 poems in 129 pages) is less the expression of a happy plenitude than of a kind of anxious stuffing. Larson has the poet’s appetite for words, but in collecting his poems (and what is more regrettable, in writing many of them) he seems not to have known how to stop himself. His book would have a considerably firmer claim to the attention of serious readers of poetry if it were pared to something around a quarter of its present length; which is a way of saying that some twenty or thirty poems here seem more or less genuine, original, and fulfilled in their purposes. But even the warmest sympathies are bound to shiver when confronted with: Once I climbed a castled hill And saw below me in a nook of land A village there Reviews 143 So neat and prim It flickered like a diadem . . . or, to choose the even headier kind of triteness in which Larson more fre­ quently indulges, I, meek, must sink in prevalence Of him, but yield him not renown Of grace as he for me. It is when the language avoids the prissiness of the first passage and the turgid vapors of the second that Larson achieves a voice of some power and authority. With such caveats then, what is Clinton Larson’s interest for us as a poet? It is not the whole answer to say that he is a Mormon but I think it is most of the answer. He is, to my knowledge, the first writer to produce a considerable body of “literary” poetry the guiding spirit of which is Mormon faith. But while his Mormonism is unquestionably essential in much of his work (and particularly in his more interesting though not necessarily his better work), the poems are not simply versified dogma. Nor does their not in­ frequent opacity result from any specifically Mormon tincture. Whatever Clinton Larson’s limitations as a poet, they are the limitations of the poet, not of the Mormon (with the obvious qualification that any writer is bound in part to develop his strengths and weaknesses in response to his whole environment). In fact, one comes to feel that a heartier assertion of the peculiarly Mormon features of these poems might be what Larson needs to free himself from the intensely literary self-consciousness that stifles so many of them. In poems such as “Stag,” “The Stallion,” and “Seagull at Dawn...