Opinion on the Psalms extends from the New Testament certainty of their Davidic authorship to the opposite view that it is impossible to say if David wrote any. A suspicion on David conflicts with the tradition that ascribes seventy three psalms to him by title, identifies him as a sweet psalmist and considers him a consummate warrior-poet from youth (I Samuel 16.23) to death (II Samuel 23.1).
For David the supposed conflict of poetry and war is an indulgence but not a contradiction. David is an example of the new man restoring divine government (Zechariah 12.8) who will resemble David as David resembles the angel of the Lord.
This suspicion about David resembles all those suspicions of ancient authors hatched by the peppery professors who when they were not doubting the evidence were confecting their own romantic myths. The five traditional sections of Psalms (1-41, 42-72, 73-89, 90-106, 107-150) were called in doubt because of a supposed absence of literary structure. Such ears cannot hear Beethoven's String Quartets without rearranging notes. Lack of literary structure means that the five or so thematic groups discerned by moderns, especially Gunkel, royal psalms, hymns, communal laments, individual laments and thanksgivings, are not neatly grouped together, but scattered around. How can it be! Art must be literal to the literal. It is pointless to speculate what the psalms were doing before "compilation." Poets often write backwards, throw all the words in the air and rearrange them constantly to seek the true order. It's hard to believe an editor can do better. (Gordon Lish).
Form critics thought all the psalms of similar type should have been written together and that different types scattered throughout the book proved disparate authorship. The modern critics' conclusion about the editor's part in the psalm's organization is absurd. Where editors are, more editors are thought to be. An editor is supposed to have said in Psalm 72.20 that "the prayers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended." These psalms, either 3-41 or 1-72 were then supposed to have been amended to include 1-89 and still further additions 90-150 discovered the whole. The populist scholarly view is that the traditional Psalter is a compilation of successive editors. Even if Lish took out half of Carver and Harriet Monroe did similar for Wallace Stevens (see letter 193 and 194), only writers have understanding. Editors will get their rewards.
Historicity
It is recommended to read scholarship of ancient texts in a hazmat suit to prevent contamination. Substitute German for Chinese in what Alan Watts says of Chuang-tzu and you have the Psalms. "Since the latter years of the + 19th century, scholars of the Western tradition, including many Chinese and Japanese, seem to have established a trend for casting doubt on the historicity of "legendary" figures of the past--especially if they are of the religious or spiritual type" (Watercourse Way, xxiii).
Always remember that writing is the thing about the written word. When the tradition was oral, brought to rendition only by those anthropologists of the Trickster tales (to give one example), no critical eyelids were raised. But Trickster wasn't worthy of conquest so it escaped. Compare however the writing of Howard Norman's oral tales of the Swampy Cree, The Wishing Bone Cycle and Where the Chill Came From, with the editorial versions of trickster hacks in the library. Coyote never had his Norman. Barry Lopez' Coyote Builds North America is utterly unpoetic. The marvel and beauty of Norman's ethno-poetics is so superior it makes the point that poets make the mind. Cormac McCarthy gives wolf a voice in The Crossing. We don't found civilizations on editors. The motive of Old Testament demolition was in essence a hatred of poetry.
To read the Psalms poetically might seem to increase the difficulty with the complications of words in yet another language of the ancient East without adding poetry to the mix. A poetical reading means coming to the text in translation, but referring to the original with intuition of images, undertext and metaphor. In this it resembles poetical research. [T. Rosenberg if you can follow him, if not try Steve McCaffery, or not.] The rabbis said everything David said refers to himself, all Israel and all times. The actual state of the Psalms of David are fairly summarized in the Soncino Hebrew text. Evidence of the Psalms' inspiration in the supposed contradiction of Psalm 8 in the New Testament Book of Hebrews were shown resolution by Maimonides after guidance was sought of the author, as will be seen when that piece is entered.
A poet is lost without the word. The text must be the text. The Sin Against Homer, so called, might as well be against God, for it is not open to choice whether to acknowledge his greatness. Other names occur with Homer's, but no critic. Orpheus among the Maeneads is torn limb from limb. Maeneads serve as an analogy for critics. You can see epic images continually recur among great artists, as Rodin with the Maenead, but critics continually want both lyric and epic to be about themselves. They want to bring it to their level. They want to strip the finish and lay bare the wood, but the word is a hidden architecture whose purpose the poetical seeks to discover. That this reading is not in Hebrew, but English, is also reason to trust the text. Pseudo translation is a modern genre, a compliment and homage to the mind of Kafka or Borges, to invent a text and "translate" it as an original creation. That is not the case here, but pseudo translation backgrounds the Poetical Reading in the same way that disbelief backgrounds critical scholarship.
Demonstrating the text
As Watts observes, every ancient text from Chuang Tzu and Torah to Plato and Homer has been amended. Substituting a nameless editor who edits, orders, selects and rewrites greatness is less than plausible, as vain as a political commercial. By analogy again to Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, Creel believes, as opposed to Watts, that Lao Tzu is not the work of one author, that the unity of voice however proves how good the editor is: "the editor was excellent and gives, on the whole, a remarkable appearance of homogeneity." Have cake and eat! Ancient texts differ from the modern in this. It is only fiction if Borges is demythologized, in essence arguing he never existed, but it is called fact if Homer, Sappho, Moses, David, Plato, Beowulf are disburged. We have the odd fellows of fiction who write like journalists and odder fellows of criticism who write fantasy. Creel cites repetitions in the text, with a terse and aphoristic style, as primary evidence of editing. The same faults are urged against the Davidic psalms, but this nineteenth century fantasy is not a myth of Borges. Watts and Wouk call it the "interpretatio europeica moderna" (the European desk scholar) who demos primary sources as a livelihood to buy promotion and tenure. Poet Wendell Berry calls it the luxury politics of an academic islander. At the same time Graf and Wellhausen were killing Moses, white hunters of the Great Plains killed ten to fifteen million buffalo. First in the mind, then in the mountain and dry gulch, extinction myths of higher critics blew the tops off of Torah, Plato, Psalms, Iliad as if they were mining coal. The implosion, debasement, demolition and strip mine of these cultural authorities, mountaintop mining the classics, enabled that greater demolition of the natural world to rationalize its destruction. There is no perspective without the mountain. It is as absolute as Homer.
The years immediately prior to the Poetical Reading of the Psalms of David (1985) saw the writing of Restorations of the Golden Age In New World Discoveries (1975) and years of working at the Experimental Drug and Herb Garden (1977-80) with the writing of Native Texans (1984).
A geologist with theories of earth finds oil.
Acknowledgments
I am just in from pollinating corn. With incomplete pollination an ear is not whole, kernels are missing. The wind, bees, my wife, brush the pollen from the tassels high above the leaves onto the silk. The pollen is a yellow dust that sticks to the silk and is transmitted down in the forming the ear which then grows whole. So was the wind pollination among many friends to my completeness, especially these few who preceded the formation of my writing desire.
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