SOURCE: Hammond, Jeffrey A. “Discovery and Reaction—before 1960.” In Edward Taylor: Fifty Years of Scholarship and Criticism, pp. 1-21. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993.

[In the following excerpt, Hammond provides an overview of the twentieth-century discovery and publication of Taylor's poetry and the immediate critical reaction it inspired.]

“It appears that the poems are of a nature unlike anything yet encountered in colonial American verse, and they warrant the belief that in Edward Taylor, Puritan America fostered unawares a poet of real, not merely historic, importance; one whose fertility in image-making, tenderness, rapture, and delicacy, as well as intense devotion, ally the staunch Puritan with the ‘sacred poets’ of the early seventeenth century” (1937:291). With these words, published in the summer of 1937, Thomas H. Johnson introduced the literary world to Edward Taylor, the obscure Puritan parson who revolutionized early American literary history.

In his own day Taylor was best known not as a poet but as the conservative pastor of Westfield in the Connecticut Valley, a rigid supporter of the New England way and an ally of the Mathers in their struggle against Solomon Stoddard's relaxed requirements for participation in the Lord's Supper. Michael Wigglesworth, some ten years Taylor's senior, was the most popular poet of the time; Taylor's first wife apparently memorized at least portions of his best-selling epic of the Judgment, The Day of Doom. Anne Bradstreet, who was first published in London soon after Taylor's birth in Leicestershire and whose posthumous Several Poems was in his library, was also famous as New England's “Tenth Muse.” Roger Wolcott, whose classically-tinged poems were published when Taylor wrote the last of his Preparatory Meditations, was New England's most prominent poet at Taylor's death in 1729. As far as we know, the only portions of Taylor's verse published during his lifetime were two stanzas from one of his occasional poems, appended to a Cotton Mather sermon, and an elegy that appeared in a pamphlet commemorating David Dewey, deacon at Westfield. Still, Taylor probably enjoyed some reputation as a poet: such audience-centered poems as Gods Determinations and his funeral elegies suggest that he “published” periodically throughout his life, as did many other poets, by circulating his work in manuscript.

Although Taylor's poetic obscurity increased as years went by, it was never total. Just before the Civil War, Judge Henry Wyllys Taylor cited his great-grandfather's “poetical effusions through a period of about sixty-seven years, some of which may justly claim considerable merit.” Thus came the first criticism of a poet who “appears to have had an abiding passion for writing poetry during his whole life” even though he lacked “a poetic genius of a very high order” (1857:180). Despite this passion, Taylor apparently never sought fame. Judge Taylor recalled a family tradition that the poet forbade his heirs from publishing “any of his writings.” As we will see, this claim, repeated in John L. Sibley's Biographical Sketches of Harvard graduates (1881), would play a crucial role in early assessments of the poetry. A few scraps of Taylor's writings surfaced during the nineteenth century, most notably his diary in the 1880 Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society; in addition, a brief biography by descendant John Taylor Terry appeared in 1892. In the 1920s John Hoyt Lockwood reprinted some of Taylor's prose (1922), while Thomas Goddard Wright noted that Taylor “filled a notebook with verse, none of which has ever been published, as the writer forbade publication” (1920:162). When Johnson came upon the description of Taylor's verse in Sibley and examined the “Poetical Works” quarto at Yale, he immediately recognized that the poems were unlike any previously known specimens of Puritan verse (1939b).

The full impact of Johnson's discovery can be appreciated only in light of how Puritan poetry was then viewed. Six decades earlier Moses Coit Tyler had concluded that a few of Bradstreet's lyrics were the only genuine poems produced in colonial New England, chiefly because of an “unappeasable” Puritan “feud between religion and art” (1878:228). Early in this century William B. Cairns similarly lamented Bradstreet's “tendency to sacrifice everything to rather profitless moralizing” (1910:146), while F. O. Matthiessen characterized Wigglesworth as “a hard intellect” whose poetic “fire” was “walled in” by theology (1928:500). Kenneth B. Murdock conceded in the 1920s that the “breath of that rare spirit which indefinably marks poetry for most of us is all too sadly lacking” (1927:lxiii). Two decades later Murdock reaffirmed that Puritanism was “unfriendly” to successful poetry (1949:140). Even Johnson, then collaborating with Perry Miller on the first anthology to suggest the richness and depth of Puritan writing, maintained that Puritan poets “remained curiously indifferent to the quintessential breath and finer spirit of the poetic idiom” (1938:547, 552). The key phrases here—“fire,” “rare spirit,” “quintessential breath”—were intended to describe literary qualities that Puritanism had supposedly suppressed. But the feud between religion and art was really a conflict between Puritan religion and the postromantic art that critics were seeking. Stanley Fish has summarized these modernist aesthetic expectations by citing “the assumption that what distinguishes literary from ordinary language is its invulnerability to paraphrase; the assumption that a poem should not mean, but be; the assumption that the more complex a work is, the more propositions it holds in tension and equilibrium, the better it is” (1980:354). Little wonder that critics found Puritan verse so disappointing. Harold S. Jantz, writing shortly after Taylor was rediscovered, complained of such anachronistic approaches to the Puritan poem, noting a “misapplication of eighteenth-century smoothness and nineteenth-century romantic lyricism to seventeenth-century Baroque verse which had no interest in being either smooth or romantic” (1944:6-7).

Not only was Taylor unlike other Puritan poets, but he was unlike them in ways that had special appeal in the 1930s and 1940s, when critics were still caught up in the revival of seventeenth-century English devotional poets like John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw. A mere sixteen years before Taylor's rediscovery, T. S. Eliot had spearheaded this renewed interest in the metaphysicals, whose texts provided important support for the development of the New Criticism in England and America. Eliot's classic essay on the metaphysical poets, which praised their juxtaposition of spiritual intensity and concrete imagery, proposed their artful blend of deep matter and sensory manner as a universal criterion for true poetry—a criterion that the new-found poet seemed to satisfy. As Matthiessen confirmed a little over a decade after Johnson's announcement, Taylor's poetry “gives a deeper American taproot” to the metaphysical revival “in our own day” (1950:xv). Matthiessen's comment also suggests a second reason for Taylor's impact: the poet arrived on the scene when American literature was becoming a viable object of literary study. In this light it is important to remember that the journal American Literature was only eight years old when the first specimens of his verse appeared. As the title of Matthiessen's classic 1941 American Renaissance revealed, however, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American writing had not yet benefited from this revival despite pioneering work by Wright, Murdock, Vernon Louis Parrington, and Samuel Eliot Morison. Miller, whose studies were beginning to make the field intellectually respectable, had been advised at the start of his career to seek a more promising field in which to apply his talents. A sensational reception was thus virtually assured for this “American Traherne,” as Richard Altick later called him, whose sudden appearance recalled Traherne's publication with similar fanfare in 1903 (1950). Initially perceived as a newfound link between English metaphysical verse and American romantic symbolism, both of which were enjoying great popularity among critics, Taylor could scarcely have come along at a better time.

In the initial publication of this American “sacred” poet, Johnson mostly let the poems themselves demonstrate Taylor's importance (1937). Beginning with “Huswifery,” Taylor's most Donne-like and perhaps least representative meditative poem, Johnson reprinted “Upon Wedlock, & Death of Children,” the piece later known as “When Let by Rain,” nine lyrics, in whole or part, from Gods Determinations, and nine “Sacramental Meditations,” named after a title in the “Poetical Works” manuscript later determined to have been supplied by Taylor's grandson, Yale president Ezra Stiles. Johnson also printed the “Prologue,” which he assigned to Gods Determinations rather than to the Meditations. Johnson's tastes—and those of his era—were clearly reflected in these selections. Praising Gods Determinations for its “metaphoric brilliance and unity of design,” Johnson cited “Taylor's artistry in stating orthodox covenant theology in terms of sensuous imagery” (301), qualities fully consistent with metaphysical poetry and the developing New Critical agenda. As a poet who appeared “to love poetry for its own sake” (322), Taylor seemed almost to foreshadow Oscar Wilde's ars gratia artis. For Johnson, the Preparatory Meditations, which demonstrated Taylor's metaphysical sensibility even more clearly, embodied a “poetic imagination” and “inventive fancy” close to George Herbert's (317). Johnson also found echoes of Herbert's metrical sophistication in Gods Determinations, a claim that would diminish when critical emphasis later shifted to the prosodically monotonous Meditations. Taylor's rhetoric intensified the dramatic situation of the verse, and his “seraphic exaltation” seemed to approach that of Catholic convert Richard Crashaw, whose verse, Johnson conceded, Taylor probably did not read (318). Other parallels included Sir John Davies's philosophical poem Nosce Teipsum (London: 1599) and Francis Quarles's Emblemes (London: 1635), which may have supplied the model for the Meditations. But while Taylor's similarities to these poets justified his importance, such comparisons forced Johnson to admit that his verse was marked with “occasional bad rimes or strained figures” suggestive of “a piety that perhaps lacked wings” (317). In his wide-ranging diction, for instance, Taylor sometimes sacrificed literary polish for spiritual intensity—a view that later critics would develop into an image of the poet as an independent American primitive (320). Johnson conceded, however, that the details of Taylor's biography did not seem to square with his poetic gifts. Indeed, the mundanity of his life and the report that he suppressed his work suggested a poet with something to hide, even though Johnson insisted that the injunction merely reflected strong “modesty” and a Calvinist “sense of human unworthiness” (321). While Johnson took pains to assert Taylor's orthodoxy, he opened the door to other possibilities. Citing the rarity of a “sacramental cultus” among Puritans, Johnson found it “little short of extraordinary” that this New England pastor could write like Donne and the “Anglo-Catholic conceitists” (322).

Two years later, in the first selected edition of the poetry, Johnson again presented a poet at artistic odds with his contemporaries even as he walked in perfect social step with them (1939a). Whatever the poetry suggested, Taylor was an orthodox Puritan minister who forged lifelong friendships with such prominent New Englanders as Increase Mather, mintmaster John Hull, Harvard president Charles Chauncy, and Judge Samuel Sewall. Clearly, Taylor was not a man who would willingly offend the sensibilities of his contemporaries through his writing. As in his initial article, Johnson highlighted those features that set the poetry apart from other New England Puritan verse, particularly the inventive language and eclectic diction that would remain central to subsequent appreciations. Commenting less fully than before on Taylor's artistic flaws, Johnson now argued that Taylor's development of unifying figures helped him avoid the random and contradictory structures that marred lesser religious poets. Invoking the imperfect parallels to metaphysical verse, especially Herbert's, Johnson argued that Taylor “struck out for himself” (17) with an artistic independence intensified by his isolation in provincial Westfield. This tension between tradition and innovation—or between skill and ineptitude, depending on the critic's point of view—would mark Taylor studies from this time forward. So would the related issue of Taylor's theological orientation. Johnson now more emphatically declared in favor of his orthodoxy, insisting that his “spiritual fervor” required no recourse to Anglican or Catholic devotional modes (17). Nor did his intense focus on the Lord's Supper. On the contrary, Taylor showed that “Puritan doctrine can at times take on a radiant sweetness” (19). Supporting this reading by citing a source that would not be developed for another thirty years, biblical typology, Johnson provided a theological glossary intended to strengthen the connections between the verse and covenant theology, although the list, as Constance Gefvert later observed (1971:xxviii), may not have sufficiently distinguished Taylor's beliefs from Christian beliefs generally. Further evidence of Taylor's orthodox status came from his library inventory, a collection that any Puritan pastor and physician could be expected to own.

Although Miller had recently rehabilitated the “New England mind,” the time was not right for the radical rethinking of the New England heart implicit in Johnson's comments. As Johnson well knew, many “unwary” readers would question Taylor's orthodoxy based on the emotional pitch and sensuality of the verse (24). In addition, the “metaphysical” autonomy of the poems would soon encourage scholars to isolate the poet from his Puritan milieu as a means of accounting for his artistry and establishing his importance for subsequent American literature. Surely, many readers would assume, Taylor suppressed the verse because he knew how shocking it would be to his fellow New Englanders. But Taylor had been published, as Johnson soon discovered when he found that Cotton Mather had reprinted stanzas five and seven from “Upon Wedlock, & Death of Children” and excerpts from a Taylor letter at the end of a sermon on grief entitled Right Thoughts in Sad Hours (London: 1689) (1941). While Mather's excerpting was hardly evidence of a negative contemporary response to Taylor's work, Johnson did not yet have this small but important clue when he introduced the Poetical Works. Moreover, he unintentionally aided the opposition by describing Taylor's more conventional poems as verse exercises “not stamped with the image of his personality” (1939a:18). The lure of a secret poet proved irresistible, reinforced as it was by Taylor's seeming isolation from his literary culture. It was indeed “curious,” Johnson noted, that his library contained only one volume of English verse, by Anne Bradstreet (202), and even her influence seemed minimal. It was a private, idiosyncratic poet that Johnson presented to the world, and it was as this kind of poet that Taylor would be approached nearly exclusively for the next half century.

Further refutation of an anomalous Taylor might have come from Johnson's decision to present Gods Determinations—later recognized as a decidedly public poem—in first position and in its entirety, followed by five occasional poems, seventeen Meditations from the First Series and fourteen from the much longer Second Series. As Johnson's commentary suggested, his esteem for Gods Determinations reflected the New Critical validation of poetic closure and psychological struggle that Eliot had praised in the metaphysicals. Johnson also implicitly fostered formalist approaches to Taylor in his heavy emphasis on the earlier Meditations which, like the occasional poems, echoed Herbert and Donne more closely than did the later Meditations, which were less volatile in tone and more explicitly biblical in content. Five years later Johnson reiterated his view that the poems written after 1700 were “metrical exercises, repetitious in thought, image, and even in phrasing” (1944:681). Still, his complete listing of the Meditations, with dates of composition and scriptural headnotes, enabled readers to sense the overall thrust of both Series and thus be less dependent, at least conceptually, on his selections.

Although Donald Stanford would find significant textual errors in the Poetical Works while preparing his 1960 edition, Johnson's achievement was second only to his painstaking editing of that other secretive New Englander, Emily Dickinson. He had ushered a major figure into the canon and started a nearly complete rewriting of early American literary history. As he rightly observed a quarter of a century later, the modern “reassessment of Puritanism, especially in those aspects which reveal the Puritan's feeling for beauty in his hungry search for Heaven, has been given impetus by the appearance of Taylor's poetry” (1966:8). Johnson soon supplemented his edition with a selection of Taylor's topical verses (1942), for which he made few critical claims except that they shed light on the poet's life and confirmed his skill with the acrostic form. The following year he published more “gleanings”: “Upon a Wasp Child with Cold,” “Upon the Sweeping Flood,” a second version of “Huswifery,” and eight additional Meditations (1943). Stating that the remaining unpublished poems would do little to “advance either the cause of letters or Taylor's reputation as a craftsman or seer” (280), Johnson believed that the case for the poet had been adequately made. Except for a sketch written for the first supplement to the Dictionary of American Biography (1944), his involvement with Taylor was over.

Once on the literary scene, Taylor immediately provoked a battle that pitted tradition, polish, and England against innovation, roughness, and America. Placed against his New England contemporaries, he seemed like a poetic brother to Parrington's Roger Williams, another individualist who fled the strictures of Puritanism. Foster Damon, for example, favorably contrasted Taylor's more “humane” sensibility with Wigglesworth's gloom, praising him as a poet who transcended the aesthetic constraints of Puritan culture even as he remained a full participant in that culture (1939:779). Speculating that Taylor recognized his artistic shortcomings in an era that was beginning to favor “polish and Pope” (780), Damon saw Taylor as a poet too brave—or too stubborn—to follow such English fashions. It is not difficult to find a strain of literary nationalism in Damon's conclusion that the “nation should be glad that Edward Taylor loved his rhymes too well to destroy them.” This pioneer American poet, however, lost some of his luster when judged by the established English canon. Howard Blake complained that “too much belated homage” was being given to a poet who was, after all, “no American Donne” (1940:167). In Blake's view, a close formalist reading merely revealed “all the provincial inadequacies” of colonial American writing, especially a “frontier exaggeration” mercifully absent from Donne and Herbert. These two reviews illustrate Taylor's role in a larger critical struggle for American literary independence. Although his metaphysical affinities made him interesting to Anglo-centered scholars, he inevitably came up short whenever such affinities were pursued in detail. Damon, however, anticipated a solution by which artistic flaws could be turned into nationalistic virtues: Taylor could be defended precisely because he did not write as smoothly as those Englishmen of his parents' generation. That is, he could be defended as an independent American poet. Hadn't Henry Wyllys Taylor confirmed that his great-grandfather was “an ardent republican in principle” with a healthy “aversion to the aristocracy of England, alike in Church and State” (1857: 177)?

While these issues were simmering, Taylor quickly became a standard entry in anthologies and reference works. Even before the Poetical Works appeared, Johnson had rushed him into the massive collection of Puritan writing that he and Miller were then preparing, though he figured only briefly in Johnson's discussion of Puritan verse as “one authentic indication that the indigenous Puritan muse, even when tied down to the fashions of an earlier style, soared with metaphoric brilliance” (1938:552). But the first real steps in Taylor's popularizing came with his inclusion in William Rose Benét and Norman Holmes Pearson's Oxford Anthology of American Literature (1938) and his description in James D. Hart's Oxford Companion to American Literature as a metaphysical poet who requested the suppression of his verse (1941:748). Norman Foerster's American Poetry and Prose similarly placed him, though “no imitator,” in the school of Donne and the Anglo-Catholic poets (1947). Ironically, Taylor's rapid acceptance into the anthologies predated a full scholarly case for his inclusion. Only four substantial discussions had appeared by 1948, when Oscar Williams devoted seven pages to Taylor in A Little Treasury of American Poetry (1948). The following year Robert Spiller and Harold Blodgett included five poems from Gods Determinations, five Meditations, and five occasional poems in their anthology of American writing before 1830 (1949). And the year after that Matthiessen's Oxford Book of American Verse devoted nearly twenty pages to Taylor, almost twice as many as to Bradstreet (1950). In 1952 Taylor officially entered the canon when he was assigned space in Major American Writers, edited by Howard Mumford Jones and others, as the last great writer “to be discovered, largely because he forbade his heirs to publish his work” (1952:20). Four years later Miller's The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry included selections from this poet who wrote in secret, yielding “to the temptation to create forms of his own” (1956:309). In the early 1960s canonical status was reconferred by Austin Warren in Miller's Major Writers of American Literature, where Taylor joined the select company of Bradford, Edwards, and Franklin as the sole representatives of colonial America (1962). The following year Taylor's popularity came full circle, when Miller and Johnson reissued their 1938 anthology as a two-volume paperback. The thin selections in the original edition so clearly needed augmenting that the Taylor section required fourteen supplementary pages, numbered 656a through 656n so that the rest of the book would not have to be reset (1963). Taylor came full circle in another sense as well, when he was reunited with the writers of his home culture by Alexander Witherspoon and Frank Warnke in the second edition of their anthology of seventeenth-century English literature (1963).

Taylor soon began to make his way into general and thematic studies. Miller mentioned him in the first volume of The New England Mind as someone who “gave ingenious poetic expression” to Ramist and Puritan rhetoric and an advocate of a “plain style, even in poetry” (1939:326, 361). In Miller's second volume Taylor emerged as a defender of New England's mission in “secretive lyrics,” expressing his “anxiety in a verse technique that Puritans considered suitable only to the sensualities of the Church of England” (1953:31, 155). Morison, bringing Taylor into the revision of his 1936 Puritan Pronaos, insisted that there was “nothing unusual” in Taylor's devotional fervor even though its expression was decidedly “uncommon” (1956:240). Although Morison mistakenly thought that Taylor had come to New England with his father, he astutely asked—as few did—why the poet failed to destroy these supposedly subversive poems (236). The same year, in a study of musical influences on American poetry, Charmenz S. Lenhart defended the appropriateness of Taylor's musical imagery as evidence of his “tremendous physical responsiveness to spiritual experience” (1956:51). Two years later Walter J. Ong took issue with Miller by arguing from the dramatic quality of the verse that Taylor managed to escape the more restrictive effects of Ramist logic and Puritanism generally (1958:287).

Predictably, Taylor had the greatest impact on early American literary history. In a 1943 survey of early New England poetry, reprinted the following year as a monograph, Harold S. Jantz was the first to incorporate Taylor into a substantial discussion of American Puritan verse (1944). Jantz maintained that despite his links with the English poets, Taylor's relation to other poets of early New England provided the most important context for the verse. Jantz argued that distorted assessments would inevitably result if critics placed among the metaphysicals this poet who wrote in a “typically late Baroque manner: lavishly but purposefully and consequently, in an ordered, well-disposed intricacy” (82). Kenneth B. Murdock had greater difficulty fitting the new poet into New England literary culture. In a series of lectures delivered for the Lowell Institute in 1944 and published five years later as Literature and Theology in Colonial New England, Murdock's description of Puritan literary attitudes almost encompassed Taylor's poetry, even though he stressed the poet's artistic exceptionalism (1949). Finding precedent in the Puritan sermon for Taylor's affective style, Murdock argued that Puritans had few problems with such flourishes so long as they clarified or enhanced the doctrine at hand. English preacher Richard Baxter, for instance, defended pulpit appeals to the senses, and realistic imagery figured prominently in the so-called plain style. Still, Murdock argued that Taylor went well beyond his contemporaries in using language with “the most direct sensuous appeal” (167). Although Murdock considered Taylor to be an orthodox Puritan, he suggested that the poet suppressed his work because he knew that “his passionate expression, his delight in color and fragrance, and his sometimes erotically suggestive imagery would offend his graver colleagues” (167). In the influential Literary History of the United States, Murdock reiterated this somewhat ambiguous judgment (1948). Although Taylor's verse offered an especially vivid illustration of Puritan poetic practice, his “emotions may have been too strong for the tightest bonds of Puritan theory” (67). By 1951 Murdock saw Taylor not as a breaker of Puritan artistic rules but as a gifted poet who “showed what admirable use a genuine artist could make of the Puritan literary code” (1951:57).

While Murdock called Taylor “the greatest poet of New England before the nineteenth century” (1948:65), Jantz cautioned against prematurely accepting his “superiority” over his contemporaries: too much depended on the findings of future scholarship (1944:85). Such caution became outright reaction in Stanley T. Williams, who issued one of the few discouraging words of the era by objecting to what he saw as an Edward Taylor craze (1951). Williams insisted that despite all the excitement about Taylor, “No major poet” and “no single great poem appeared in Puritan New England” because of “the bleakness of the poetic climate” (13). Conceding Taylor's superiority to other American Puritan poets, “at least for the moment” (32), Williams argued that the poetry was marred by repetition and extravagant diction despite its sensuous and metaphoric quality. Unusually conscious of the vagaries of critical reputation, Williams remarked that Taylor's popularity was due to traits “not altogether different from similar qualities in twentieth century poetry” (14). If Bradstreet's discovery had been similarly belated, he claimed, “she might have inspired a similar cult” (32). Another reaction came from Sidney E. Lind, who agreed that if Taylor had been published during his lifetime he “would finally have come to a peaceful rest” in Tyler's History of American Literature (1948:518). Lind saw in the Taylor ballyhoo a general failure to admit the extent to which Puritanism harmed the poetry. Casting a wet blanket on the whole enterprise, Lind insisted that Taylor was “doomed” as a Puritan and a provincial to poetic mediocrity (519).

If a Taylor cult existed, it was because he seemed so mysteriously un-Puritan. And when critics tried to define what, in literary terms, he actually was, their attempts to classify him became entangled in debates over quality of his work. That Taylor's defenders tended to see him as a metaphysical was no surprise in an era that valued English devotional poetry so highly. Critics whose praise was more reserved tended to classify his work as baroque, then largely regarded as an aesthetic based on looser structures and subject to lapses in taste. Those who were least impressed, like Lind and Williams, saw Taylor as simply another Puritan poet hampered by the artistic restrictions described by Tyler, Miller, and the earlier Murdock. At the heart of the matter lay an issue that would not be explicitly addressed for another thirty years, when literary theory began to reshape the practice of literary history: the inevitable interpenetration of history and aesthetics, of attempted objectivity and unavoidable taste. This theme first played itself out in the debate over which seventeenth-century sacred poets were Taylor's closest models. On one side was Austin Warren, who had advised Johnson during the editing of the Poetical Works. Fresh from a book on Crashaw, Warren argued that Taylor manifested a baroque sensibility rather than a truly metaphysical one. Opposing Warren was Wallace Cable Brown, who sided with Johnson by aligning Taylor with the metaphysicals. “Metaphysical,” as Warren pointed out, had become a vague term of “eulogy” (1941:355). In his view, a better characterization for pre-neoclassic verse that stressed “false wit” was “baroque,” a “Christian and supernaturalist and incarnational” mode that grew out of the Counter-Reformation (356). Although the great poets linked the baroque sensibility either to cosmology, like Du Bartas, or to psychology, like Donne, Taylor's “minor ingenuities” and homely conceits fell short of either mode (360). Even though he wrote with a “primitive vigor” (366), images like Sharon's Rose in “The Reflexion” both encouraged and frustrated visualization in a manner that revealed his unschooled tastes. Taylor, Warren concluded, was “sometimes a neat little artisan but more often an unsteady enthusiast, a naive original” and “intermittently inspired Primitive” (370) not unlike another “uneven village poet,” Emily Dickinson (371). In his rebuttal Brown insisted that Taylor overcame baroque limitations to become “a full-fledged, if minor metaphysical poet” (1944:186). Defining metaphysical wit in terms of Samuel Johnson's discordia concors and Eliot's “sensuous apprehension of thought,” Brown declared that Taylor was a genuine metaphysical in his ability to cast abstract ideas into colloquial images and thus to merge thought and feeling into a “tight logical structure” (193). For Brown, the presence of unifying structures in the verse justified Taylor's stature not just relative to his contemporaries but as “the best American poet before Freneau and the first (and perhaps only) American Metaphysical” (197).

Each side soon gained adherents. Among the early defenders of a metaphysical Taylor was William B. Goodman, who argued that the courtship letter and pictorial poem that Taylor sent to his first wife Elizabeth Fitch matched the metaphysical mode of the Meditations (1954). The baroque side was taken up, as we have seen, by Jantz, who argued that Taylor wrote in a “typically late Baroque manner” (1944:82). In the mid-1950s Biancamaria Tedeschini Lalli agreed, arguing that Taylor's spiritual goals virtually forced him into verbal excesses normally associated with the baroque as the only means by which he could express his love for God (1956). But Jantz did not accept the standard equation of the baroque with artistic excess. As he observed three decades later, a critical bias against the baroque that prevailed when Taylor rose to prominence reinforced the widespread assumption that he somehow lagged behind English writers (1985:270). Gradually, however, this bias faded, and both terms became less judgmental. For Goodman, Taylor's metaphysical affinities were less a matter of literary classification than of thought patterns natural to a poet for whom the production of polished literature was not the primary issue. Lalli was similarly less concerned with the baroque as a formal rubric than as a verbal embodiment of spiritual intensity. This transformation of terminology would be complete by 1970, when Walter Reinsdorf argued that the essentially metaphysical Taylor sometimes employed a baroque style in which the image “transforms, takes fire, and melts under the pressure of an extreme intensity of religious feeling” (1970:36). In retrospect it seems clear that whether Taylor was a metaphysical or baroque poet depended not only on critical predilections but on the affective level of the poem at hand. Still, the debate was by no means fruitless. While the baroque Taylor arose chiefly because the verse seemed not to hold up to exacting New Critical standards for explication, the emotional underpinnings of the baroque encouraged a shift from purely formal analysis to a focus on the religious and artistic processes informing the texts. Louis Martz and Norman Grabo would soon describe Taylor in contemplative terms that rendered traditional belletristic categories like metaphysical and baroque far less relevant than they had seemed to Taylor's earliest critics.

Meanwhile, other frameworks as broad as the baroque-metaphysical polarity was narrow were soon proposed as keys to Taylor's place in literary history. Perhaps his real roots lay deeper than seventeenth-century England, in the echoes of medieval folk traditions that continued to hold sway in the country hamlets of Leicestershire, where he grew up. Nathalia Wright invoked these traditions by arguing that Gods Determinations resembled a morality play in its frankly allegorical characters, rough prosody, homely language, and doctrinal themes (1946). Taylor had been born near Coventry, where a Corpus Christi procession was still being performed; moreover, poets like Spenser, the Fletchers, Quarles, Joshua Sylvester, Milton, and Marvell could have served as intermediate sources. For Wright, the characters of Mercy, Satan, and other such personified abstractions suggested that Taylor had “a mind more responsive to medieval than to Renaissance influence” (17). Wright's Taylor, who embodied Miller's characterization of the Puritans as the last of the medievals, dwelt in an Augustinian cosmos constructed from dogma and Scripture. While Wright suggested that Taylor's indebtedness to the moralities accounted for the absence of Renaissance classicism in his work, Willie T. Weathers came to the opposite conclusion (1946). Pointing out that Taylor's library contained six volumes of classical poetry, Weathers argued that classical echoes in the verse, especially in Gods Determinations, explained Taylor's deviations from the morality tradition. The debate between Justice and Mercy, for instance, recalled pastoral song contests in Theocritus; Homer was echoed in the martial attacks on Taylor's soul-hero; “Christs Reply” recalled Aphrodite's consoling of the young Eros; the raging Satan suggested the Nemean lion of the Hercules story. Concluding that the “main tenor” of Gods Determinations was “Hellenistic” (19), a characterization that she also briefly applied to a few occasional poems and Meditations, Weathers argued that Taylor suppressed his work because he feared that its classical content would offend his scripturally-bound contemporaries (26). Eight years later Weathers proposed a specific seventeenth-century source for Taylor's “non-Puritan exaltation”: the Cambridge revival of Platonic interpretations of Christian doctrine (1954:2). The Cambridge Platonists, chiefly Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, had developed a more optimistic view of human reason than that espoused by strict Calvinism, along with a greater acceptance of erotic metaphor and symbolism—all traits that Weathers identified as central to Taylor's verse. In Gods Determinations, for example, Taylor combined Calvinism with Platonic “natural theology” as a means of identifying “Calvinistic Law with Platonic Love” (13). Weathers maintained that as a result of the Cambridge influence Taylor rejected Calvinist notions of election and predestination. Arguing that the poem treated “the salvation of all mankind” (13), she assumed that this “good New England Puritan”—despite his universalist beliefs—owed his artistic successes to an influence foreign to his faith (31).

It was quickly becoming obvious that this metaphysical-baroque-Hellenist writer of moralities could be all things to all people. As Lind complained, Taylor studies were becoming a “critical parlor-game” leading “only into a semantic maze” (1948:521). The many-faceted Taylor of the 1940s and the 1950s indeed suggests that critics were putting literary labels before the poems themselves. Clearly, a great deal of careful work was needed before such definitive explanations could be proposed, especially detailed investigations of Taylor's sources, both literary and theological. Although permanently valuable source work would not come until biblical and exegetical structures central to the Puritan imagination were better understood, modest contributions during the first two decades of Taylor scholarship began the necessary spadework. The search for the origins of specific images began in 1948, when G. Giovannini linked the “Artificial Angels” found in “The Glory of and Grace in the Church Set Out” from Gods Determinations with the formal gardens and topiary art of baroque Europe (1948). In the late 1950s Robert R. Hodges traced the allusion in “Meditation 2.56” to the “Artificiall man Aquinas slew” to the legend of Albertus Magnus, who built an automaton—either a talking head or a mechanical woman—that was destroyed by his pupil Aquinas because it interfered with his studies (1959). Specific work on Taylor's archaisms began when Sister M. Laurentia proposed that the “crickling” of “Meditation 1.42” was a cricket, not a pork crackling as Johnson had suggested (1949). Critics also began to pursue source-informed explications of individual poems, usually following Brown in confirming a metaphysical discordia concors and a consequent unity of theme and structure. Anne Marie McNamara, for example, argued for such unity in “Meditation 1.6” by connecting the lily of the valleys in the preceding poem's headnote with Taylor's image of the “Angell” coin (1958). But at this early stage in the scholarship, even small stones could make large waves. McNamara's reading prompted Norman S. Grabo to deny such a close connection between the biblical headnotes and the poems, arguing instead that Taylor based the Meditations on the doctrine preached in the accompanying sermon rather than on the Bible verse at hand (1960d).

In the early rush to validate Taylor's standing in terms of the English canon, contexts provided by the Bible, Puritan theology and rhetoric, and other Puritan poets remained largely undeveloped. Lind offered a sobering corrective to this by pointing out that Taylor's verse had been “snatched up” and “inflated unrecognizably” by critics who ignored the simple fact that he was a New England Puritan poet (1948:520). But like the critics he refuted, Lind was seduced by a predefined label—in his case, “Puritan.” Arguing that the Puritan poem was designed to edify and thus had to be clearly written, Lind found plainness in Taylor where others found sensuality. What critics were praising as “homely imagery,” for example, did not reflect an innovative escape from the dictates of Puritan art but merely fulfilled the poet's adherence to a thoroughly Puritan “principle of intelligibility” (525). For Lind, Taylor's apparent originality resulted from what a Puritan could not help doing: his imagery was “conditioned and shaped at the source of his imagination by the Puritan theories of rhetoric and psychology” (527). Although Lind conceded that the five occasional poems included in the Poetical Works hinted at what Taylor might have achieved if his “poetic genius” had “rested on a basis broader than the theological compulsions of his community,” Taylor the poet only occasionally transcended Taylor the orthodox minister (528). Reprising Tyler's conflict between religion and art in the Puritan sensibility, Lind implicitly applied modern poetic standards not just to Taylor but to the poet's entire culture when he insisted that the “primacy of doctrine over poetic expression” is what “spells the difference between mediocrity and greatness” (527). Although Taylor tried to write acceptable Puritan poetry, he “did not, unfortunately for the modern reader, fail in his appointed task often enough” (530).

While some critics overpraised Taylor because he did not write like a Puritan, Lind devalued him because he did. Still, Lind was the first to answer Johnson's call to read Taylor within his Puritan milieu. Roy Harvey Pearce soon agreed that for all the baroque or metaphysical influences on the verse, what really mattered was “its matrix in Taylor's Puritan culture” (1950:31). Citing Ramist invention as a search for divine order in the world, Pearce described a Puritan “poetics of discovery” rather than sentiment, creativity, or personal expression (42). If Taylor failed to invoke human drama with a sensitivity equal to Herbert's, it was because he was more concerned with “God and God's order” than with the “human experience” of that order (31). For Pearce, Taylor was the antithesis of a confessional poet. “What is primary in the poems is not the poet's experience—the poet as man speaking to men—but rather the meaning and understanding—the discovery—which is the end of that experience” (33). Gods Determinations thus had little dramatic appeal for modern readers because Taylor's deeper interest lay not in personal experience for its own sake but in its revelation of the redemptive scheme. Justice and Mercy were flat characters because they existed only to clarify abstract arguments and not to invoke “any interpersonal dramatic quality” (36). Similarly, Taylor did not develop paradoxes as fully or consistently as Donne because of his overriding belief in the divine resolution of all such enigmas. Finally, Pearce argued that if Taylor seemed to pursue simplistic parallels between the mundane and the spiritual, it was because his Puritan faith made him repeatedly seek “an earthly counterpart—however poor and dim—of that which is ineffably holy” (32).

Although Pearce tried to assess Taylor on the poet's own terms, his implicit definition of good verse doomed even the best Puritan poem to failure. His confirmation that “reading Taylor's poetry, we read his Puritanism” (46) seemed to present the Puritan poem not as art but as theological compulsion. In this he ended up not far from Lind. Puritan culture, Pearce argued, was “inadequate for major poetry” because it “allowed for little play of the individual will—in the last analysis, for little real human drama” (43). Ultimately, Pearce's validation of the “individual will” colored his assessment of Taylor. For him, as for other readers less sensitive than he to historical context, good poetry demanded the more individualistic ethos of a later America that was not so “reactionary, orthodox, and static” (40)—an America of Whitman and Dickinson, for whom Taylor and his contemporaries would serve as primitive antecedents in The Continuity of American Poetry, which Pearce published eleven years later. Pearce's comment that “technique is little or nothing” for Taylor (45) was not a neutral observation but an expression of disappointed modernist aesthetic expectations. There even seemed to be a hint of Wallace Stevens's “poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice” in Pearce's statement that for Taylor, “the end of the poem inhibits the act of composition, and ultimately the act of the poem itself” (43).

Despite this encroachment of post-romantic definitions of good verse, Pearce's stress on Puritan aesthetics played a pioneering role in the scholarship. Equally important, and for similar reasons, was Mindele Black's assertion that Taylor's spiritual intensity was almost—though not quite—fully Puritan (1956). Black argued that Taylor blended the intellective matter of Calvinist theology with a “baroque manner” consistent with Catholic devotional tradition (171). Uncomfortable with the sensuous images derived from this tradition, however, Puritans compensated with a “copious allegorization” (170) that produced an unconscious “aesthetic schizophrenia” embodied in Taylor's split between rigid doctrinal content and baroque verbal expression (180). The tension between Taylor's Calvinist orthodoxy and his evocative treatments of the Bridegroom and the Supper indicated two strains whose “incompatibility” was “itself inherent in the Puritan devotional tradition.” This split, which accounted for Taylor's characteristic juxtaposition of homely with theological diction, explained how an orthodox preacher could write poems suggestive of high Anglican and Catholic devotional modes. Black nevertheless argued that the poet's similarity to Herbert was “established at some cost to Taylor's orthodoxy” (174). Citing sermon 15 from the Christographia manuscript as “typical of the Puritan's attraction to themes which he subsequently tries to explain away” (170), Black finally depicted Taylor less as a Puritan poet than as a harbinger of an “increasing humanization” in Anglo-American religious life and expression (181).

While Pearce saw Taylor as a Puritan whose beliefs partly diminished his poetry, Black saw him as a poet whose emotions partly compromised his Puritanism. Herbert Blau pushed the latter approach to an extreme, thereby bringing the simmering question of Taylor's orthodoxy to a boil (1953). Although Blau, like Pearce and Black, focused on the artistic implications of Puritan theology, he ended up joining Weathers in depicting a decidedly un-Puritan Taylor. For Blau, it was a Calvinistic paradox in which the doctrine of predestination contradicted any possibility of repentance that prompted the compassionate poet to stray from Puritan orthodoxy. Taylor, he maintained, felt far more rapture at the Lord's Supper than his faith allowed; unlike Anglicans and Catholics, he had “no excuse” for his “intense feeling for the ritual as ritual” (338). Moreover, Taylor took the humanistic side in the question of free will versus determinism, especially in Gods Determinations, where his stress on repentance showed his refusal to accept man's predestined inability to repent. Taylor thus adopted a theological fiction in order to make art equal to Donne's and Crashaw's by accepting “the illusion of good works (no illusion for Herbert, but definitely one for a sound Puritan)” (340). Although Blau overlooked Taylor's call to do good works “As if you should be sav'd for doing so” (Poems 444) and thereby labeled as unorthodox the central message of virtually all Puritan texts, he was instrumental in shifting the critical focus from Gods Determinations to the Preparatory Meditations as the sequence “better suited to Taylor's genius” (343), a shift that stimulated a focus on inner processes by which the meditating Puritan could finally be joined to the gifted poet. Most early critics had agreed with Jantz that Gods Determinations was Taylor's “greatest work” (1944:82), though its predominance in early studies was due in part to the fact that Johnson's edition reprinted it entire. Although Blau praised its metrical variety as evidence of Herbert's influence, he criticized its “slight” characterization and unsustained “action” (342). Yet he avoided overstating the poem's flaws, a feature common in most comparisons with Herbert. Blau concluded that although Taylor was capable of imagistic “brilliance” in such poems as “The Reflexion” (346), he often failed “the demands of poetic decorum” because of a gulf between divine tenor and homely vehicle that was intrinsic to the sharp separation of heaven and earth mandated by Puritan theology (359).

Blau prompted timely inquiry not so much into what kind of poet Taylor was, but what kind of Puritan he was. Two years after Blau's essay, Donald E. Stanford began to lay the un-Puritan Taylor to rest by demonstrating that the allegedly unorthodox Meditations articulated a thoroughly orthodox view of the Supper (1955). In contrast to Blau's view that Taylor's sacramentality was unusual, Stanford confirmed at least some degree of mystical experience in Puritan sacramental and devotional life. As he pointed out, Calvin had “asserted the real spiritual presence of Christ at the Lord's Supper and the union of Christ with the believer” (173), and even Cotton Mather, the very embodiment of New England orthodoxy, experienced “ecstasy upon contemplating the Eucharist” (175). Taylor's view that such ecstasy was reserved for the converted was clear from his participation in theological controversy. When Solomon Stoddard, influential pastor of neighboring Northampton, proposed that the Supper be opened to all believers, whether converted or not, Taylor's vehement opposition hardly revealed a shaky or reluctant orthodoxy. The following year Stanford reinforced his case with specific reference to Taylor's anti-Stoddard Meditations (“2.104-109” and “2.111”), which he published for the first time (1956). Adhering to the conclusion of the 1662 Half-Way Synod that the Supper was not a converting ordinance, Taylor sided with Increase and Cotton Mather against his Connecticut Valley neighbor and thus took a position that was conservative even for his time. In Taylor's view, the Synod, the Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1648, and Calvin's Institutes had settled the issue: the Supper was properly a “seal” of a spiritual betrothal already made, not a sacrament open to all. Stanford conceded, however, that Taylor's orthodoxy did not make him a better poet, as evidenced by his “homely, colloquial diction, the extravagant tropes, and the all-too-frequent awkwardnesses of phrasing and rhythm” (62). Four years later Stanford cited Taylor's prose to refute Weathers's charge that the poet was a universalist and not a predestinarian (1960b). In his analysis of sermon 10 of the Christographia, Stanford confirmed that Taylor's “rigid Calvinism” inspired “his most powerful writing in poetry and prose” (10). Earlier Stanford had conceded that Taylor's Puritanism did not make him a good poet; here he maintained that Taylor's religious beliefs did not automatically keep him from being one either. Regardless of whether particular texts struck modern readers as successful or not, Taylor's faith was the motivating force behind all of the verse, and not simply an obstacle that the poet had to overcome in order to write.

Stanford was soon joined in the defense of Taylor's orthodoxy by Norman Grabo, who found further support in documents related to the Stoddardean controversy. The first of these was the sermon Taylor preached in 1679 at the founding of the Westfield church (1960b). As Taylor's title suggested, “God's House” was a “particular church” charged with screening out those who were unworthy of the sacrament. Reaffirming Taylor's role as an orthodox minister, Grabo also argued that the Meditations were direct responses to the doctrines featured in the sacrament-day sermons. In contrast to the figure torn between belief and art depicted in much of the early criticism, Grabo's Taylor was a man for whom intellective doctrine and emotional response were inseparable. In the engagingly titled “The Poet to the Pope,” Grabo published Taylor's cordial but firm letter of February 13, 1687/8 to Stoddard, the “Pope of the Connecticut Valley,” along with Stoddard's brief reply (1960c). Written nearly ten years after the “Foundation Day” sermon, Taylor's letter was prophetic of New England's growing attraction to what Grabo called Stoddard's “easier” religion (201). In a third essay Grabo took a broader focus. Although he concurred with Stanford regarding Taylor's orthodoxy, he expanded the definition of what such orthodoxy entailed (1960a). Asserting the existence of mystical and Catholic elements in Puritan devotional life, Grabo argued that such experience was fully articulated by the Mathers and Samuel Willard. Extending Black's stress on the richness of Puritan spiritual life (1956), Grabo maintained that anti-Catholic sentiments did not keep Puritans from drawing on a venerable tradition of Catholic devotion, often filtered through English advocates of meditation like Richard Baxter. Unlike Black, however, he posited no Puritan discomfort in appropriating this tradition. Citing Protestant guides to meditation, Grabo insisted that devotional intensity like Taylor's was perfectly acceptable among devout New Englanders.

After 1960, with the settling of Taylor's Puritan credentials, the debate over what it actually meant to be a Puritan would intensify. The eventual result was a more pluralistic view of Puritan inner experience than earlier critics had been willing to embrace, one in which Wigglesworth's stern thunderings, Bradstreet's conflicted musings, and Taylor's emotional volatility all found a place. Significantly, the question of Taylor's orthodoxy was resolved first in his prose and only later in the poetry. Moreover, the question had been raised in part because critics had been limited to the selections in the Poetical Works, the “topical” poems and “gleanings” that Johnson published in the 1940s, and twenty-six additional Meditations published in the 1950s by Morris Neufeld (1951) and Barbara Simison (1954). As Stanford noted when he published nineteen more Meditations if more of the poetry had been available Taylor would not have seemed so much like a “modified Anglican or a neo-Platonist rather than the Calvinist he actually was” (1957:18). By publishing a much broader selection of the writings, Stanford and Grabo would soon reveal a more representative Edward Taylor, whose connections with the religion and art of early New England could be explored in depth. As a result, critics would return to Johnson's view that Taylor was not so unusual for his milieu as the poems suggested. As Grabo observed, the poet “had no more to hide” than such pillars of the New England Way as the Mathers (1960a:402). And as Grabo would confirm early in the new decade (1962c), Taylor was helping to lift a “veil” from the perceptions of early Americanists by which the old feud between Puritanism and poetry could finally come to an end.

Bibliography

1. Works by Edward Taylor

The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. New York: Rockland Editions, 1939. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1943, 1966.

The Poems of Edward Taylor. Ed. Donald E. Stanford. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960.

Edward Taylor's Christographia. Ed. Norman S. Grabo. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962.

A Transcript of Edward Taylor's Metrical History of Christianity. Ed. Donald E. Stanford. Cleveland: Micro Photo, 1962.

The Diary of Edward Taylor. Ed. Francis Murphy. Springfield, Mass.: Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, 1964.

Edward Taylor's Treatise Concerning the Lord's Supper. Ed. Norman S. Grabo. East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1966.

Edward Taylor's “Church Records” and Related Sermons. Ed. Thomas M. Davis and Virginia L. Davis. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Vol. 1 of The Unpublished Writings of Edward Taylor.

Edward Taylor vs. Solomon Stoddard: The Nature of the Lord's Supper. Ed. Thomas M. Davis and Virginia L. Davis. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Vol. 2 of The Unpublished Writings of Edward Taylor.

Edward Taylor's Minor Poetry. Ed. Thomas M. Davis and Virginia L. Davis. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Vol. 3 of The Unpublished Writings of Edward Taylor.

Edward Taylor's Harmony of the Gospels. 4 vols. Ed. Thomas M. Davis and Virginia L. Davis, with Betty L. Parks. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1983.

Upon the Types of the Old Testament. 2 vols. Ed. Charles W. Mignon. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989.

2. Critical Works

Altick, Richard D. 1950. The Scholar Adventurers. N.Y.: Macmillan.

Benét, William Rose, and Norman Holmes Pearson, eds. 1938. Oxford Anthology of American Literature. 2 vols. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Vol. 1.

Black, Mindele. 1956. “Edward Taylor: Heavens Sugar Cake.” New England Quarterly 29: 159-81.

Blake, Howard. 1940. “Seventeenth-Century Yankee.” Poetry 56: 165-69.

Blau, Herbert. 1953. “Heaven's Sugar Cake: Theology and Imagery in the Poetry of Edward Taylor.” New England Quarterly 26: 337-60.

Brown, Wallace Cable. 1944. “Edward Taylor: An American ‘Metaphysical.’” American Literature 16: 186-97.

Cairns, William B., ed. 1910. Selections from Early American Writers. New York: Macmillan.

Damon, S. Foster. 1939. Review of Johnson, Poetical Works. New England Quarterly 12: 777-80.

Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.

Foerster, Norman, ed. 1947. American Poetry and Prose. 2 vols. Third edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Vol. 1.

Gefvert, Constance J. 1971. “Introduction.” Edward Taylor: An Annotated Bibliography, 1668-1970. Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press. xiii-xxxiii.

Giovannini, G. 1948. “Taylor's ‘The Glory of and Grace in the Church Set Out.’” Explicator 6 (4): Item 26.

Goodman, William B. 1954. “Edward Taylor Writes His Love.” New England Quarterly 27: 510-15.

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———. 1960d. “Taylor's ‘Sacramental Meditation Six.’” Explicator 18 (7): Item 40.

———. 1962c. “The Veiled Vision: The Role of Aesthetics in Early American Intellectual History.” William and Mary Quarterly 19: 493-510. Reprint, The American Puritan Imagination: Essays in Revaluation. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974. 19-33.

Hart, James D. 1941. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Hodges, Robert R. 1959. “Edward Taylor's ‘Artificiall Man.’” American Literature 31: 76-77.

Jantz, Harold S. 1944. The First Century of New England Verse. Reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1962.

———. 1985. “Baroque Free Verse in New England and Pennsylvania.” Puritan Poets. Ed. Peter White. 258-73.

Johnson, Thomas H. 1937. “Edward Taylor: A Puritan ‘Sacred Poet.’” New England Quarterly 10: 290-322.

———. 1938. “Poetry.” The Puritans. Ed. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson. Reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1963. 545-52.

———. 1939a. “Edward Taylor.” The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. New York: Rockland Editions. 11-28.

———. 1939b. “The Discovery of Edward Taylor's Poetry.” Colophon, New Graphic Series, 1 (2): 101-4.

———. 1941. “A Seventeenth-Century Printing of Some Verses of Edward Taylor.” New England Quarterly 14: 139-41.

———. 1942. “The Topical Verses of Edward Taylor.” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 34: 513-54.

———. 1943. “Some Edward Taylor Gleanings.” New England Quarterly 16: 280-96.

———. 1944. “Edward Taylor.” Dictionary of American Biography: Vol. 21: Supplement I. Ed. Harris E. Starr. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 681-82.

———. 1966. “Foreword to the Paperback Edition.” The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. 8.

Jones, Howard Mumford, et al., eds. 1952. Major American Writers. 2 vols. Third edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Vol. 1.

Lalli, Biancamaria Tedeschini. 1956. “Edward Taylor.” Studi Americani 2: 9-43.

Laurentia, Sister M. 1949. “Taylor's ‘Meditation 42.’” Explicator 8 (3): Item 19.

Lenhart, Charmenz S. 1956. Musical Influences on American Poetry. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press.

Lind, Sidney E. 1948. “Edward Taylor: A Revaluation.” New England Quarterly 21: 518-30.

Lockwood, John H. 1922. Westfield and Its Historic Influences. Springfield, Mass.: privately printed.

Matthiessen, F. O. 1928. “Michael Wigglesworth, A Puritan Artist.” New England Quarterly 1: 491-504.

———. 1950. “Introduction.” The Oxford Book of American Verse. Ed. F. O. Matthiessen. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. ix-xxxiii.

McNamara, Anne Marie. 1958. “Taylor's ‘Sacramental Meditation Six.’” Explicator 17 (1): Item 3.

Miller, Perry. 1939. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.

———. 1953. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. Reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.

————, ed. 1956. The American Puritans: Their Prose and Poetry. New York: Doubleday.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. 1956. The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press.

Murdock, Kenneth B. 1927. “Introduction.” Handkerchiefs from Paul. Ed. Kenneth B. Murdock. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. xv-lxxiii.

———. 1948. “Writers of New England.” Literary History of the United States. Ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. New York: Macmillan. 54-70.

———. 1949. Literature and Theology in Colonial New England. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.

———. 1951. “The Colonial and Revolutionary Period.” The Literature of the American People: An Historical and Cultural Survey. Ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. 1-171.

Neufeld, Morris A. 1951. “A Meditation upon the Glory of God.” Yale University Library Gazette 25: 110-111.

Ong, Walter J., S.J. 1958. Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. 1950. “Edward Taylor: The Poet as Puritan.” New England Quarterly 23: 31-46.

Reinsdorf, Walter. 1970. “Edward Taylor's Baroque Expression.” Greyfriar 11: 31-36.

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———. 1960b. “The Puritan Poet As Preacher—An Edward Taylor Sermon.” Studies in American Literature. Ed. Waldo McNeir and Leo B. Levy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press. 1-10.

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Terry, John Taylor. 1892. Rev. Edward Taylor. New York: DeVinne Press.

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Warren, Austin. 1941. “Edward Taylor's Poetry: Colonial Baroque.” Kenyon Review 3: 355-71.

———. 1962. “Edward Taylor.” Major Writers of America. 2 vols. Ed. Perry Miller. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World. 1:51-62.

Weathers, Willie T. 1946. “Edward Taylor, Hellenistic Puritan.” American Literature 18: 18-26.

———. 1954. “Edward Taylor and the Cambridge Platonists.” American Literature 26: 1-31.

Williams, Oscar, ed. 1948. A Little Treasury of American Poetry. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Williams, Stanley T. 1951. The Beginnings of American Poetry (1620-1855). Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells.

Witherspoon, Alexander M., and Frank J. Warnke, eds. 1963. Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry. Second edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World.

Wright, Nathalia. 1946. “The Morality Tradition in the Poetry of Edward Taylor.” American Literature 18: 1-17.

Wright, Thomas Goddard. 1920. Literary Culture in Early New England 1620-1730. Reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1966.