UTOPIAN PROMISE - Annenberg Media

20 UNIT 3, UTOPIAN PROMISE
tial? What might make it seem particularly “American”? Can you
think of any nineteenth- or twentieth-century novels or films that
draw on the conventions of the captivity narrative?
Exploration: Compare Rowlandson’s captivity narrative with Alvar
Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relation from Unit 2. How do these texts
portray Native Americans differently? What do they have in common?
What kind of audience does each author write for? How does
each of these narratives differ from the Yellow Woman stories in
Unit 1?
Edward Taylor (c. 1642–1729)
Edward Taylor was born in Leicestershire, England, in 1642 to
Nonconformist parents of modest circumstances. In his mid-twenties,
frustrated by the climate of intolerance toward Puritans, he fled
England for Massachusetts. Entering Harvard with advanced standing,
Taylor embarked on a course of study to prepare himself to
become a minister. In 1671 he accepted a call to the ministry in the
town of Westfield, a farming community on the fringes of the colony.
He spent the rest of his life there, rarely leaving Westfield even for visits.
Because the area was threatened by Indian attacks throughout
the 1670s, Taylor’s church building had to do double duty as a fort,
delaying the formal organization of the congregation as a Puritan
church until 1679. As the most educated man in Westfield, Taylor
served the town by assuming the roles of physician and teacher as well
as minister.
Taylor’s education had left him with a lasting passion for books, and
his library was a distinguished one, though many of the books were
his own handwritten copies of volumes he could not afford to purchase
in printed form. Much of Taylor’s time was devoted to writing
sermons for public presentation, but he also produced a large corpus
of some of the most inventive poetry in colonial America. While he did
not publish any of this poetry in his lifetime, viewing it instead as a
personal aid to his spiritual meditations and as preparation for giving
communion to his congregation, he did carefully collect and preserve
his manuscripts. His collection was not published until the twentieth
century, after it was discovered in the Yale University Library in 1937.
Taylor experimented with a variety of poetic forms, composing
paraphrases of biblical psalms, elegies, love poems, a long poem called
God’s Determinations in the form of a debate about the nature of salvation,
and his five-hundred-page Metrical History of Christianity.
His best-known poems, a series of 217 verses called Preparatory
Meditations, are lyric explorations of the Puritan soul and its relation
to the sacrament. The poems’ struggles with complicated theological
issues are carefully contained within rigidly structured six-line stanzas
of iambic pentameter. While the metaphors and metaphysical conceits
in Preparatory Meditations are elaborate (they are sometimes compared
to the work of the English poet John Donne), much of Taylor’s
other poetry is characterized by its plain-style aesthetic and its homely
metaphors of farming and housekeeping. Taylor’s work is not easily