Teaching poetry to LDS students raised on the KJV
a comment on Victoria Moul's bog
When I left my earlier post teaching mostly Greek and Latin in Boston for a position at BYU (whose students, though they come from all over the world, are mostly LDS), I immediately noticed how much more enjoyable it was to teach English poetry. I think this has to do in large part to the persistence, in the LDS tradition, of adherence to the King James Version of the Bible, which over the past century has been jettisoned in most other Christian traditions. My LDS students at BYU grow up, both in church and at home, on King James English as effectively a second native language. A significant minority of my students have been brought up in parts of the US with a majority-LDS population: for them, King James English will have remained what I suppose it once was for much of the Anglophone world: the common inheritance of their entire community, an idiom your barber and your doctor could understand.
The result is that not only are they are far more at home than my Bostonian students with Elizabethan and Jacobean English, but that whether we’re reading Herbert or Milton on the one hand, or Eliot or Heaney on the other, they’re far more likely to vibrate, so to speak, with a sense of deep recognition and feeling, when they encounter a word or phrase (”they toil not”) or even a grammatical construction (”greater love hath no man”) that they will have encountered in childhood, often before they could read themselves, as a result of their LDS religious formation. In those little moments it’s as if a chord has been touched that summons deep feelings not only from the reader’s personal past but a deep historical past shared by many generations…
That is from a comment left on Victoria Moul’s recent piece about whether religious poets currently have an advantage.
I was raised as a Latter Day Saint - jack-style. Every year we went through the old and new testaments, although in an abridged fashion. I subsequently went to U.C. Berkeley (not in English) and 20 years later my niece graduated from there in English . Much to my amazement, even having gone to a Quaker k-12, she had never read and was unfamiliar with the bible. This is astounding. How can one understand the last 2000+ years of western history, literature, and philosophy without at least a passing familiarity with the basic way people structured their consciousness during that time?
Some time back it struck me that being raised in a church (Presbyterian) that used the KJV meant that I had absorbed early modern English as more or less a second dialect or verbal register from earliest childhood. This should have been obvious to me as an early modern literature specialist, but I also realized that I had taken this aspect of my acculturation for granted. I further recognized that it made things much easier for me when I started reading Shakespeare, Spenser, et al. in my teens.