Here's an early stab at an online essay of the week: a series of short essays entitled The Poetic Genius of Alma the Younger, over at Meridian Magazine. The link is to Part 1 on Lyricism; there are later installments talking about Virtuosity and about Symbolism. Since my earlier post on depth in Book of Mormon elicited some interest, I though this might be a nice follow-up. The author doesn't try to make an apologetic argument out of his analysis, he just looks at some of the material in Alma as poetry and sees how far he can go with it. I find the author's approach rather refreshing, the kind I would expect from a backpacker turned missionary turned lawyer-poet (from the author bio paragraph accompanying the article).



Now that I've actually read the first essay, it comes across as a bit more apologetic than I originally thought, but it's still nice to hear from a poet as opposed to an apologist. After being a bit harsh on Alma in the previous thread, I thought it fair to highlight his talents as an artist in this one.
Posted by: Dave | Nov 17, 2004 at 12:17 PM