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Show Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow When Edmund Spenser set out to create a uniquely English poetry, he went back to English romantic myth for his stories and characters and to a pseudo-Middle English style for his language, to give i t a feeling of antiquity, authority, nationality, and truth. This did not bar him from satirizing contemporary polit i c s and religion, or from bending the old material any way he wanted in order to achieve a desired effect. And more important than any of the surface techniques was his allegorical method. Not the unambiguous allegory of Pilgrim's Progress, of course: Spenser's allegory was more fluid, with characters and places, things and events able to figure many things at once, and different things in different parts of the poem. Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow frankly imitates, not any work of Spenser's, but his approach. To create a sort of American Mormon epic, I have looked back to the t a l l t a l e and the ghost story for the feeling of antiquity and nationality, to the prairies of Illinois and Missouri for the setting, to colloquial speech as immortalized and half-invented by Mark Twain and others for the voice, and to Mormon doctrine, history, and folk belief for the allegory. Since ambiguous and shifting allegory requires an audience with harmonious beliefs and a sense of shared identity, I suspect this poem might not work on as many levels for nonmembers of that community; nevertheless, if the model is Spenser, the achievement must be measured against his works, which s t i l l live despite the turn of centuries, l i t e r a r y fashions, and community beliefs. |