Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH COLONIAL LITERATURE
2.10 EDWARD TAYLOR
(c. 1642–1729)
Little is known of Edward Taylor’s early life in England. His poetry displays a
Leicestershire dialect; he was probably born in Sketchly, Leicestershire County,
where his father was a yeoman farmer. He may have been educated in England. He
seems to have read and been inuenced by seventeenth-century English literature,
including John Milton’s (1608–1674) epic poetry and the Metaphysical poetry of
John Donne and George Herbert (1593–1633). Epics are long, heroic poems tied
to a nation’s history. Metaphysical poetry is a type of highly intellectual, complex
poetry using unexpected metaphors, incongruous imagery, and such linguistic
feats as puns and paradoxes.
To escape the religious controversies and persecutions of the early 1660s and
to avoid signing an oath of loyalty to the Church of England, Taylor emigrated to
America in 1668. He studied at Harvard for three years and eschewed the teaching
profession (that he practiced for a few years) for that of the ministry. In 1671, he
was called to serve as minister at Westeld, Massachusetts, where he lived for the
remainder of his life. He maintained friendships with such prominent Puritans
as Increase Mather (1639–1723) and Samuel Sewall (1652–1730); married twice;
fathered fourteen children; upheld Puritan theocracy; and wrote poetry.
None of his poetry was published during Taylor’s lifetime. His poems were
discovered by Thomas H. Johnson in the 1930s at the Yale Library. They had been
deposited there by Ezra Stiles (1727–1795), Taylor’s grandson and a President of
Yale. Taylor seems to have written his poems as private devotions and communions
with God. They express his rejection of worldly matters and dependence on God
in his own struggle against Satan and evil. In his Preparatory Meditations, for
example, Taylor prepares to celebrate the Lord’s Supper and so ponders the mystery
of the incarnation, of God as esh, and the transubstantiation of God’s blood and
esh into the wine and bread of the communion. Their variety of genres–including
elegies, lyrics, and meditations–attests to his education in the classics and modern
languages. Their original use of the metaphysical conceits (metaphors that yoke
together two apparently highly dissimilar things), paradoxes, and puns attest to
the Puritan God that was Taylor’s absolute that drew together all incongruities.
The poems’ domestic details of everyday life reveal not only his Puritan faith but
also seventeenth-century life in America.
2.10.1 “Prologue” to Preparatory Meditations
Lord, Can a Crumb of Earth the Earth outweigh:
Outmatch all mountains, nay the Chrystall Sky?
Imbosom in’t designs that shall Display
And trace into the Boundless Deity?
Yea, hand a Pen whose moysture doth guild ore
Eternall Glory with a glorious glore.
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