God’s Ammunition Is Not Exhausted: on a new edition of Elias: An Epic of the Ages

If God be for us lowly poets, who can be against us?

1. Miltons and Shakespeares

If you’ve heard only one cliché about Mormon literature,¹ it was probably Orson Whitney’s famous line from “Home Literature” (included in an appendix to this new critical edition of Elias: An Epic for the Ages edited by Reid L Neilson and published last year by Greg Kofford Books): “We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.”

William Faithorne, “John Milton” (1904), The National Library of Wales

This is probably the most debated, discussed, and agonized-over line in the Mormon-lit scene.² Terryl Givens tried to slice the Gordian knot by saying the “Mormon Shakespeare is Shakespeare,” but Whitney’s prophecy continues to come up, even though expecting anyone anywhere to replicate the career of either Milton or Shakespeare is absurd. Meanwhile, the repetition of that line out of context misses what Whitney was actually calling for. Here’s a bit more of the surrounding context:

Above all things, we must be original…. No pouring of new wine into old bottles. No patterning after the dead forms of antiquity. Our literature must live and breathe for itself. Our mission is diverse from all others; our literature must also be. The odes of Anacreon, the satires of Horace and Juvenal, the epics of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton; the sublime tragedies of Shakspeare [sic]; these are all excellent, all well enough in their way; but we must not attempt to copy them. They cannot be reproduced. We may read, we may gather sweets from all these flowers, but we must build our own hive and honeycomb after God’s supreme design.

We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own. God’s ammunition is not exhausted. His brightest spirits are held in reserve for the latter times. In God’s name and by his help we will build up a literature whose top shall touch heaven, though its foundations may now be low in earth . . . . Small things are the seeds of great things, and, like the acorn that brings forth the oak, or the snowflake that forms the avalanche, God’s kingdom will grow, and on wings of light and power soar to the summit of its destiny.

As for Elias, his epic poem covering our cosmology from before Eden through the Millennium, Whitney said, “I do not think I have produced . . . a Paradise Lost; but neither have I attempted to do so. Elias is a ‘Mormon’ poem, upon the subject and in the spirit of ‘Mormonism.’ That is all I claim for it.”³

2. Ina and Joaquin

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and, as such, have frequent opportunity to think of two California poets, contemporaries of Whitney, one of whom also wrote epics. The first is Ina Coolbrith, the first poet laureate of California⁴ and a niece of Joseph Smith’s. There’s a walking path named after her near my bishop’s house in the Berkeley hills and a park in San Francisco. The second is Cincinnatus Heine Miller, renamed Joaquin Miller by Coolbrith as part of her successful efforts to turn him into a world-famous poet. She was supposed to accompany him on a trip to Europe to place flowers on Lord Byron’s grave, but stayed behind to care for her ill relatives and Miller’s daughter.⁵ The Oakland Temple is off the same freeway exit as Joaquin Miller Park.

Coolbrith and Miller were huge in their day: Coolbrith locally, Miller throughout the English-speaking world. As Whitney was in Utah.⁶ Yet, not one of these three appears in, say, The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Who reads any of them today?

Some of this is style. Modernism was just about to arrive and make them look like total squares. Not even Longfellow, larger than all three put together and only a tad older, gets much attention in 2026.⁷ And let’s be honest, not many people even read Paradise Lost recreationally in 2026. In a world where the average American reads maybe one book a year, that book is not an epic poem.

So it is huge that a new and care-taking edition of Elias was released in 2025—props to Nelson and Kofford Books for believing Whitney’s labors still have value. This book’s existence is not only a statement of the poem’s value, but, equally, a symbol of faith that we of the twenty-first century have the capacity to read and celebrate an old example from an artform we tend to think of as dead dead dead.

And maybe, even, that we’ll enjoy it?