About A Motley Vision:

A Motley Vision is a group blog devoted to exploring the world of Mormon arts and culture. Or to be more specific: Mormon literature, criticism, publishing and marketing — plus film, theater, art, music, and pop and folk culture. Founded by William Morris, AMV was launched June 2, 2004, as a solo Blogger blog. It has since moved to its own domain, added 10 contributors, and continues to be the leading blogosphere destination for Mormon arts and culture commentary, discussion and news.

A Motley Vision received the 2005 Award for Criticism from the Association for Mormon Letters.

About the name:

A Motley Vision takes its name from “Love and the Light: An Idyll of the Westland” a rather didactic verse epic written by Orson F. Whitney. Published in 1918, the work was intended to combat the secularism and “Higher Criticism” which Whitney felt was creeping into Utah society. At one point the hero of the poem, a Harvard man who converts to the LDS Church, visits the Grand Canyon while traveling by train to Utah. Whitney launches into an extended description of the Canyon, drawing upon vivid imagery and wild Classical- and Christian-inspired metaphors to present a complex portrait of its sublime beauty. It’s the best passage in the entire work.

Several stanzas into the passage, the hero describes the Canyon at sunset:

Glorious and grotesque presentment,
Good and ill, a motley vision,
Half-alluring, half repelling;
Rainbow-hued, yet shorn of radiance,
Like to Lucifer the Fallen;
Beautiful, though sadly brilliant,
Blazing with satanic splendor
In the sunset’s dying glory;
All the hues of hell and heaven
In one blare of lurid blazoning,
In one master stroke commingled.

Image credits:
Left – “Lonesome Journey” by Maynard Dixon; middle — photo of woman at Grand Canyon by Merle E. Morris Sr.; right — photo of Grand Canyon courtesy of National Park Service.