Life & Wisdom Quote by Marguerite Young

Young’s provocation isn’t really about ranking Joseph Smith over T.S. Eliot; it’s about dismantling a literary pecking order that assumes “serious influence” must arrive stamped with modernist prestige. By pairing Eliot with Mormonism, she forces two incompatible reputations into the same sentence: the canonical poet of fragmentation and high culture beside a religion widely treated, in elite circles, as quaint, provincial, even suspect. The friction is the point. She’s daring you to notice your own reflexes about what counts as art.

Her phrasing does sly work. “As much influenced” is the polite version; “more so” is the twist of the knife. Then she doubles down with “Actually,” as if correcting a timid earlier self, and lands on “much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.” That last phrase is mischievous and expansive. It treats Mormon language not as doctrine but as poetic production: revelation, prophecy, hymnody, testimonies, the American knack for making metaphysics sound like civic speech. Young is claiming that a living, collective vernacular - swollen with longing, certainty, utopian yearning, and narrative - can shape a writer more profoundly than an individual masterpiece admired at a distance.

Contextually, it fits Young’s larger project: sprawling, obsessive, maximalist, fascinated by American myth-making and the religious imagination as a generator of style. She’s not rejecting Eliot so much as refusing the idea that influence must be approved by the syllabus. The subtext is democratic and a little combative: America’s strangest sacred texts are also its homegrown epics, and a serious writer should be brave enough to learn from them.