SOURCE: Keller, Karl. “Edward Taylor, The Acting Poet.” In Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice, edited by Peter White, pp. 185-97. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Keller explores the persona Taylor assumed in his poetry in order to demonstrate his humility and sense of unworthiness.]

The Connecticut River Valley poet Edward Taylor (1642-1729) had to be invented. There was no way of knowing that someone remotely that good would have lived at that remote time and in that remote place. We could not have guessed him from those who settled in the generation before him or from his contemporaries or from those who followed. We could not have guessed him from the articulated esthetics of the period either, nor from what we have known about the dogmatics or demographics or dynamics of the time. Except for a handful of historians who had him down only as a minister—Ezra Stiles, John H. Lockwood, William Sprague, John L. Sibley, Abiel Holmes, Josiah Holland, Harriet Beecher Stowe¹—Taylor was lost for two whole centuries. The Taylor family had its own tradition about the old man as some kind of backwoods, backwater versifier, and libraries in New England had him catalogued,² but still the name collected centuries of dust. The first frontier poet of early America just disappeared.

He appeared first in the 1930s at the hands of Thomas H. Johnson,³ and here for the first time was an accomplished artist at the heart of, and not merely at the fringes of or among the descendants of, American Puritan life. Not even Perry Miller could foresee what had been the art of Edward Taylor. The event of the discovery, which romanticizes Taylor a little for us now in the twentieth century, is best marked by the anecdote of Johnson and Miller scrambling to insert Taylor into their anthology and history The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings (1938)—pages 656a-n. He has brightened the pages of practically every collection of American literature since then. And more important, he has colored considerably our understanding of the esthetics possible within the Puritan sensibility.

Then the work of rationalizing his existence began. Apologists made two camps: those who thought he was the last flash of a lagging European culture on primitive shores (perhaps baroque,⁴ maybe a little Catholic,⁵ certainly unorthodox,⁶ mainly quaint⁷) and those who thought he was just being reactionary (a devotional man writing private verse for no one to see,⁸ a conservative man trying to preserve the faith within the American experiment⁹). The two camps warred genially over a body that, I fear, remained largely dead to them.

The period of expansion of the Taylor canon began in 1960 when Donald E. Stanford published an edition of over 240 poems, The Poems of Edward Taylor,¹⁰ and Norman Grabo published two collections of sermons, Christographia (1962) and Edward Taylor's Treatise Concerning the Lord's Supper (1966). Johnson's edition had favored Taylor's Gods Determinations over his Preparatory Meditations, for he saw him as mainly an ecclesiastical poet. Stanford's edition favored the Meditations, for he saw him (as did Louis Martz in his important introduction to the edition) as basically devotional and meditative. Grabo's publication of Taylor's sermons set both views straight, however, for with them one could see that Taylor had been more of a fighter than a minister or a dark recluse. There were large, specific issues which lay behind his art. Norman Grabo also wrote the first full-length study of Taylor at about the same time, Edward Taylor (1961), and in it he stumbled upon mysticism as a way of reconciling his Old Worldliness, his private devotionalism, and his debates with the world around him—but it was a stumble. Taylor turned out to be far too earth-bound, too earthy, and too carelessly inconsistent for such characterization.

Important as it was to know how Taylor, through poetry, had been able to break out of the Puritan mold, or at least to stretch it considerably through meditation, which was the fine emphasis of Stanford, Grabo, and most students of Taylor in the first decades of his emergence, it took the work of some very careful analysts of individual Taylor poems,¹¹ of his intellectual milieu,¹² and of the demographics of the Connecticut River Valley¹³ to show that while his spirit could often soar, he was of a time and a place—America in the late seventeenth century.

There came then the closer explications, and they showed for the most part that Taylor was more contender and clown than he was mystic and metaphysician.¹⁴ His language, after all, was clever, idiosyncratic, erratic, egregious. He needed his words to move him to his meiotic and loving states; he felt what he wrote. And there came the closer attention to the American pressures that moved Taylor to write.¹⁵ He wrote out of necessity, out of need, not out of flights of fancy or when possessed of the spirit. He was not a religious poet in that sense at all. He was a self-styled defender of American covenants, a local apologist of Valley orthodoxy. His muse was, perversely, Solomon Stoddard, the devil's liberal up the river from him in Northampton.¹⁶ His references to heaven and hell were in reality his way of talking about New England and orthodoxy in the Valley.

We needed these close studies. That is, we needed to know the air Taylor breathed—the doctrines he loved, the language he knew, the issues he fought for—more than the Old World traditions he emerged from and refreshed. William Scheick wrote the cleverest essays linking Taylor's beliefs with his language: the theology did have its esthetics, Puritanism could produce art. But when these were collected into the book, The Will and the Word: The Poetry of Edward Taylor (1974), one saw that Taylor had once again been made out to be a profound thinker, a systematic philosopher of sorts, an early, smaller Edwards. Scheick's Emersonian assumption that high thought leads to high art skewered Taylor, as Stanford and Grabo had done, on universals that might lead one to make Taylor important beyond his own time and place. Scheick's Taylor thinks he is a thinker.

I came to the writing of The Example of Edward Taylor (1975) because I felt the claims for Taylor had put him in the wrong categories, had in fact been too large, even perhaps, because of his surprise emergence, hyperbolic, hyperactive, a hype. Early American literature had needed a great poet, and the critics were determined to make this one great. I didn't intend to cut him down to proper size, but simply to find a way to measure him better, more interestingly, more relevantly: Taylor the American. Was there anything indigenously American at that early point in the making of a culture, I wanted to know, and Taylor seemed to give an affirmative answer. From his inadvertence came an art, that of a primitive. It was an eccentric point to make, but it at last caught Taylor at his art. It caught him making something for us: attractively flawed poems, “rough feet for smooth praises.”

But the work of Thomas Davis has now overshadowed everything previous and substantially shifts the grounds for understanding Taylor accurately. Davis' correction of previously published Taylor works, his transcription of many unpublished works into three volumes (Boston, 1981),¹⁷ and his (and his Kent State protégés') documentation of Taylor's activities and relationships¹⁸ give us much more of Taylor to know but also, ironically, a much smaller Taylor to like. Taylor can no longer be romanticized into a baroque brocailleur, a high-flying Hooker, a man of much mind. Most of his works now seem narrowed to a single cause, a single motive, a single objective: S. Stoddard up the river. Others had seen Stoddard looking over Taylor's shoulder before Davis did. Now the two face each other off, eyeball to eyeball, in the grand debate of that New England century: admission to the American sacrament. We care little about that now, except for the intellectual history in it. Taylor has been put in his place. The artist was first an ecclesiastic, second an apologist, and only third an artist. He may have gained a place in history by this process but perhaps lost something in esthetics.

The struggle to find the art in Taylor will now be more difficult, if certainly more accurate. His redaction of Scripture into an American typology interests some.¹⁹ His search for forms to accommodate church and ear interests others.²⁰ This is a challenge that has always been there, of course, but now far more demanding of precision and creative criticism: for all the debilities, what is it, precisely, that delights us in this man?

Holding all the studies of Taylor in mind, however, does not give one a defined or definitive Taylor. It has simply very smartly created The Problem of Edward Taylor: the criticism often looks better than the poet does. The problem with knowing, admiring, analyzing, and teaching Taylor is that, like many writers of early American literature, he is, against the best twentieth-century literary standards, a poor writer. He is a poor writer by almost any standard except his own, which understandably was not standard.

Biography is of little help because we still know little about the man, little about the environment that produced him, little about the cultural factors or the persons that influenced and encouraged him. And even as we learn more about these, especially in the writings of Grabo, Scheick, and Davis, the art of his art still seems anomalous. Somehow it came from a source we have not yet tapped, or it came attractively of itself from a poet who did not know what he was doing. Art is often an American accident.

Approaching Taylor through literary conventions is not very rewarding either, for, like many writers of early America, he is almost entirely predictable, his forms and structures are imitative and repetitive almost to the point of self-parody, and his experiments are handled with almost unfailing ineptitude or just get lost. In many formal ways, he is, like many writers of his time, a perfect bore. Nor boring, though, if we see what he found to do within the expected, the determined. He wanted to sing somehow, even when the hymns were all prescribed and proscriptive ones. He just sang them with the voice he had—screechy, anxious, improvisational, loving voice, but a voice indeed: his own. Maybe early America allowed that, encouraged that, demanded that. Maybe it always has, until we come to our time, when the non-singers write songs.

The condition of Taylor's poetry itself, as with much early American writing, also does not help very much in finding the art of his art. The best of it is largely unfinished and unfinishable. You will stumble over it if you try to read it aloud. You will find it was not written to be examined by anyone except Taylor himself and perhaps God. You dance around an antique if you use it at all. You will be a laughing stock if you take it too seriously. The mistakes may or may not be mistaken—who can know?—but certainly should not be mistook, for they have to be accepted as part of the art or else we have not taken the artist whole. Do I go too far to suggest that The Flawed Poet of American Literature was not a failure but God's fool? He fooled around with the toys of this fallen world, the words, thinking he had a calling to play. Rejoice that the man knew how to play, even when it turned out to be his own game, not God's at all. Thank God he got that part wrong. Thank him that it turns out right. It is right because in its silliness, its experimentation, its sprightliness, its corniness, its stretching for color and sound, its cragginess, its ugly lure, it simulates the condition of the world Taylor was in. Taylor did not like it either!

I do not know if I am yet suggesting some solutions to The Problem of Edward Taylor. Maybe we should simply read him as theologian and claim for him some artfulness in delivering his theology to us somewhat interestingly. There is much in New England Puritanism that we can see because of him: the helplessness of mankind, the awful state of the world, the mercy of God in the saving power of Christ, the power and joy of the regenerate saint. Much in the theology—pop-theology, then—is chewable in his images. Much of it stops grumbling in the gut when we see that he could digest it. Much then comes out “streams of Grace, … Heavens Sugar Cake.” But this approach does not allow for many of the complexities of Puritan dogma at all. For one thing, it illustrates only one of the Connecticut River Valley brands in a fairly large New England storehouse. And it overlooks the probable motive behind such poetry: self-therapy. We know we get more of the man in his poetry (a man hunting for words) than we do of God (God hunting for words). It is humanistic, not theistic. It is poetry, not preaching.

Or maybe we should try to read him as a little psychoanalyst: a man after his own darkness for the fun in it. He wrote poetry, if we believe his apologetics, to ready himself for taking the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper through conscientious self-examination, knowing that that very attitude was evidence enough of his spiritual worth. If his poetry indeed moved him to a position of maximum humiliation and dependence, it is better than we have thought, better than we can experience. It is just there on the page for us to wonder at, in awe that so little could do so much to the man. If it balanced his mind between despair and hope, then its art had its effect but still escapes us. And so it is not really poetry anymore for us. How can we deal with the remoteness of the most intimate/private poetry written in this country before Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson? That kind of poetry, to be sure, gave him a means of demonstrating the talent which grace had vouchsafed him, that of writing poetry. Holding Taylor in mind as a little psychoanalyst, however, illustrates only his occult side and not all of his interests and abilities and personality. It makes Puritan practices seem darker (at least after reading him in the dark light of Hawthorne, Melville, and Emily Dickinson) than they actually were. And it does not pay much respect to the poem as an artifact, as a work of art, as an artful accomplishment. It becomes too much of an exercise to only watch his exercises.

If we honor Taylor as an amateur theologian or amateur psychoanalyst but find ourselves wanting more high verse and less thick doodling, we must jump into his poems as belles lettres. Let him handle his conflict, tension, climax, and denouement in his structures. Let him try dramatics in his rhythms and sounds. Let his metaphors move for meiotic and amplified effects. Let his skill with puns and other playful language devices show, even as you admit that such may come from a myopic New Critic rather than from any esthetics inherent in the poetry itself. Admit, as Taylor asks one to do, that he was far more interested in the process of writing his poetry than he ever was in any of his finished products, since they represented his fallen state. And admit that much does go wrong with verse-making in Taylor's hand. He had to fail at being faithful to the world's arts, for he had to show he needed the help of his God. Not the critic's help—God's.

When all of these approaches fail, and I think they do, wonderful as the criticism using them has become, I sell The Poet Primitive, The Village Verse-Maker, Taylor the Messy Emerson, Taylor Who Tried and Survived by Torment and Tease. None of these flip labels are accurate, of course, for in the attempt to see his natural art emerging out of unnatural acts, it is extremely difficult to name the Indigenous Inadvertence simply and clearly. Relaxed, we see how he simply and clearly wrote what he could. The resulting poems are acts of honesty, acts of love. They do not compete with the arts of the world, not even with the critics of the world, and so the temptations to snob it out and call them incompetent. But they nonetheless work in their cranky way. This anomaly, the Rev. Mr. Edward Taylor, therefore makes his place, unskewered, in the literature.

All of the above is a cop-out, however, for even when one can show that he knows the literature about Taylor well and knows the literature written by Taylor well enough as A Problem, one still must prove that the art of the man can be handled. Not manhandled, but handled in accurate celebration of an honest discovery that matters esthetically. We should, after all, try to know where Taylor is good, where Taylor is best—and what in his understanding of his faith and his art made him so. I propose—speculatively, airily—that Taylor had to act in order to be a good poet and that the resulting poems are very good acts indeed. He is the great Acting Poet (both as stand-in and as self-dramatist in a role) of early America.

In the late 1660s and early 1670s, he began by writing a set of well-conceited occasional poems imitative of features of an outdated baroque style. By 1682, however, for personal and ecclesiastical reasons, he was writing confessional poems for no other eyes but his own and in a much more inventive, personalized style. In between, at some point, he wrote his cantankerous, contentious, and crude series, A Metrical History of Christianity, and his ministerial, minatory series, Gods Determinations.

When one surveys the full range of Taylor's works, one comes to recognize just how special his one series is, the Preparatory Meditations. The main reason for their distinct difference from the rest of what he wrote lies in the fact that in all of his Meditations, but in very little of the rest of the verse he wrote, Taylor is acting—and acting a very good act, too. In them he plays a persona exacted by Connecticut Valley Preparationism. The Taylor of the Meditations is a Prepared Persona. We in the twentieth century, his only audience, can judge how well he played his part.

Taylor had found within his orthodox beliefs, especially in the Preparationism of which he became an ardent defender for over forty years, the license for a form of drama. He is, in his Preparatory Meditations, the most dramatic of all Puritan poets. In his Meditations he rivals John Bunyan as a Puritan initiator of fictive drama into literature in English.

What gave Taylor his drama in these poems was his decision at some point to play a part before God, and now before us his rediscoverers. Preparationism encouraged this technique. It gave him fuel for his natural ability to act. Probably the innovation was an inadvertent result of Preparational dramatics, but an innovation nonetheless. The persona of his meditative poems knows universal truths but not much about himself. So he doubts and hopes at the same time, creating drama. He is a voice-with-personality, a role or set of roles or range of roles being played coherently and consistently by an identifiable narrator. He has aura-presence by virtue of his ability to make a world. He plays with language more than with ideas. He flaunts his sins and sinfulness flamboyantly, theatrically trying to attract attention from his God in any way he can. He performs for Him.

We might wish that Taylor had made more of a distinction for us, as he worked up his little acts, his poems, between preparation for communion and preparation for grace. We can believe he knew the difference; we can believe equally that in ecstatic mini-states his poetry got him excruciatingly/exhilaratingly into, the difference faded away. Through his writing of poems, such as they are, he could act a part that led him to feel he was ready.

The persona that the grace-desperate Taylor plays the most consistently as he prepared himself to take the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is that of a man working hard to put himself down severely in order to be lifted up radically by a savior. “Woe is mee!” he cries, and his efforts at self-humiliation throughout his 212 Meditations represent his need, which in turn represents his hoped-for grace.²¹ In his assumed passivity he even shifts sometimes to the feminine in order to be “taken.” And then his act becomes one of willing his will to be won at any cheap price. His role of unbidden “Guest” at the “Feast” of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper in his poem “The Reflexion” is a good example. In his little sacramental drama, he is unworthy and so he weeps. He feels God is ashamed to look at him—and he may be right. He is full of filth and poison. He starves for some spiritual nourishment. He begs for some kind of recognition: “So much before, so little now!”

The metaphoric roles of searcher, seeker, desirer which Taylor creates in his Meditations to achieve this meiosis at the time of seeking to feel worthy to take the Sacrament are fanciful, consistent, entertaining, and dramatically convincing. “I am this Crumb of Dust,” he writes in his Prologue to his First Series of Meditations, “which is design'd / To make my Pen unto thy Praise alone. …” But we know all the same that he has chosen to play this dunce for the nonce. His language made the act possible.

Taylor asks God to forgive the roles he plays as fallen human being (“Let not th'attempts breake down … Nor laugh thou them to scorn”), for the person-in-need, as Edwards was to argue two generations later, justifies the saving power of God. The (perhaps to us funny) self-demeaning masochism defines, by distance, the (no doubt to him phenomenal) greatness of God. Taylor therefore works to imagine himself in sorry, abject roles, even begs God's help to put him in such roles: “Let me thy Patient, thou my surgeon bee”—all for the sake of underscoring, or even creating, his dependence on God (“I.4”).

In his meiotic role of “Poor wretched man” with a “poore poore heart,” he speaks of his “Graceless Soule,” his “befogg'd Dark Phancy,” his “naughty heart.” He is thoroughly “Bemidnighted,” he claims. “I … am all blot,” he complains. “I'm but a Flesh and Blood bag.” “I could do more but can't …” (“I.34”; “II.17”; “I.26,” 18, 44, 25, 30, 41). All for the sake of a convincing act before God. The irony of which, however, is that he knows God knows it is just an act. The judgment he must then hope for is that God will think the act (and not necessarily the man himself) a good one.

The consistency of the self-demeaning persona throughout the Meditations might lead one to believe that this is the real Edward Taylor talking. But it is not possible to believe that Taylor really thought so poorly of himself. It is an act, the act of The Poor Thing in Need of God:

Was ever Heart like mine? Pride, Passion, fell.
          Ath'ism, Blasphemy, pot, pipe it, dance
Play Barlybreaks, and at last Couple in Hell.

[“I.40”]

He says he is but “a Ball of dirt.” He speaks of his “vile Heart.” He is sure of his “little all.” He claims that he is merely a “hide bound Soule that stands so niggardly” (“I.40,” 22, 46, 48). Such meiotic assertions, because so insistent and so repetitious, raise the important question whether this was a genuine conviction on Taylor's part or a genuine role he played. Surely the intensity is concocted, contrived. “I … have been a pest,” he says, “And have done the Worst.” “O bad at best! what am I then at worst?” (“II.1,” 17; “I.26”). Can we really believe he believed this of himself? Acting, an especially degrading activity to the staunch Puritans anyway, demeans the man nicely. His pride must now play the clown, the fool, the beggar, the pitiful one. Acting—a creative, confessional choice of his—gives him, if he is good at it, need.

Taylor is especially good at acting when he works at berating his own writing. He speaks of “My Rough Voice, and my blunt Tongue” as he puts himself down. “I know not how to speak, …” he says (ironically, cutely) quite competently. “I am Tonguetide [,] stupid, sensless.”

What aim'st at, Lord? that I should be so Cross.
          My minde is Leaden in thy Golden Shine.
Though all o're Spirit, when this dirty Dross
          Doth touch it with its smutting leaden lines.
.....                    Mine Eyes, Lord, shed no Tears but inke.
My handy Works, are Words, and Wordiness.

[“I.23,” 27, 24]

Taylor is often redundant in the extent to which he writes about his bad writing, but there was a Preparational reason for this. Taylor plays the role of writer by writing. He plays the role of Humble One by meiotic metaphors and a primitive style. He plays the role of Insufficient One by writing deliberately insufficiently. He therefore makes the role real. His desires thereby become truth. Anyone (that is, God) should be able to see that.

Taylor's acting in such little scenes as he sets for himself to play roles in is factitious. In acting, he is trying to deceive God: that he is good at being no good. His Meditations are vehicles for him to act poor in (though not poorly in), so that he can sustain his hope of rescue. God (that is, the critic) should love watching the fool play the fool when he is in reality a fool and only needed to play it to see it himself. The act then becomes an act of honesty.

Taylor had the phenomenal task of making this humility—that is, this recurring act of grovelling before God—attractive. Both preparation for grace and preparation for the Sacrament required at least that of him. In his Meditations, therefore, Taylor did a certain amount of playing at humility, knowing it was really a form of worthiness. He apparently hoped that the playing at humility was not hypocrisy or presumptuousness, but a showing forth of one's faith-filled abilities. To put on a humble act—that is, to play the Prepared Persona—is human, natural. “The New Englanders,” Sacvan Bercovitch observes in his American Jeremiad, “acted as if they were doomed while presuming they were saved.”²² Taylor's little act of self-abasement in his poems had to be attractively convincing to his God. And so what we get is his attempt at poetry. His fallen self, after all, had to be made interesting.

But what happens to voice when a poet creates a persona which acts only for God? Taylor's persona violates the assumption that a poetic role is for an audience.²³ Playing only to himself, as Taylor did in his Meditations, left him free to innovate, for there were no other judges, no other criteria, than his own desires. Since Taylor-the-persona is pretty much in the dark about himself, he is free to play any earthly role he wishes through the metaphors of his poems. This counterpoint of consistent persona and wild, brief flights with his roles, his voices, his images, represents the already determined soul free to play in and with a foolish world. The poet therefore has the advantage which Preparationism promised: that one might participate in one's salvation a little. Because his Self is as yet undefined (and will remain so until fully aware of his election, hereafter), he may try out many roles, not in search of his true Self but because he cannot know what his true Self is. His ignorance is liberating, for he is at liberty to play—and that leads him to all his fanciful, and sometimes extravagant, metaphors. Taylor the Tense Actor is then, through his writing of poetry, something of a free spirit, if only among the little toys of this world—which is all that a Puritan could expect of his liberties anyway.

This can help to explain the shifting roles, confusion of voices, and mixed metaphors in a Taylor poem: he does not know who he is—and can enjoy that fact. Though he desires an identity (“God's determinations,” he calls such), he also enjoys the not knowing. Ignorance is his area of freedom. Taylor thus justifies the Puritan principle: Adam fell that mankind might be, and mankind is that it might have joy. The Fall meant living with the ambiguity of having freedom from knowing oneself, alongside the obligation to seek to know oneself—and there was a certain amount of joy in that. The Fall was therefore the form that God's grace takes: excrement dished up by angels' hands, as Taylor puts it in one of his more humorous, theological poems. Taylor appears to have understood the Fall, at least on the occasion of writing his Meditations preparatory to taking the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, as not merely a burden but also as license to play, to act, to try out, to create. Out of unknowing came his poetry. And it is thus to be taken less as a Poetry of Piety than as a Poetry of Poverty. The “Poor wretched man” can at least write.

It should be obvious to anyone who reads through the Preparatory Meditations that the range of roles Taylor gives himself to play is not very wide. But he has an obsession to create; that is, to deplete, to enrich, to supplement ordinary human experience. Acting adds a new dimension to his life. His acting makes it possible for him to project some of his desires (as if out of some hell into which he delights putting himself) in the form of potentials, possibilities, hopes. The fairly chaotic variety of projected hopes out of his self-induced mire do not, however, make up Taylor's ideal self, merely some possibilities, for it would be presumptuous of him to think he knows what he might be. That he leaves to God. For the present this deferral means, of course, that his ideal self is one of the great unknowns. He plays the man trapped by existence and begging for a way out. And that is why his act has the simplest and worst emotions in it: sentimentality, severe melodramatic angles, hokey gestures, mumblings and screechings, cowering before the lights, lots of bathetic asides, a pause for the applause.

The gloomy Puritan is at play. Language made his game possible. I think Taylor has importance because he is the first American to discover language as a way out of some of the oppressiveness of the Fall, even while the way out was indigenous to the system of the Fall itself. It is to Taylor's credit that the voices of his persona in the Meditations have remained with us so well. He sticks—loathsomely, lovingly, Americanly—in the ear.

Notes

1. Actually the first to give any recognition to Taylor as minister were Increase and Cotton Mather. They made use of some writings of his in their works, Illustrious Providences (1684) and Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), respectively, though they do not refer to him by name. (See my “Edward Taylor and the Mathers,” Moderna Språk 72 [1978], 119-35.) The only other references to him in published works in the eighteenth century are Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed. Franklin B. Dexter (New York, 1901), I, 367-8; Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, ed. Franklin B. Dexter (New Haven, 1916), 81-83, 103-4, 403-4; and Abiel Holmes, The Life of Ezra Stiles (Boston, 1798), pp. 379-82. In the nineteenth century, Taylor was known to only a few historians: Josiah Holland, History of Western Massachusetts (Springfield, 1855), I, 107-8, 115-18; II, 141-44: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks (Boston, 1869), p. 453; John L. Sibley, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Harvard University (Cambridge, 1873-85), II, 397-412; William B. Sprague, ed., Annals of the American Pulpit (New York, 1957-9), I, 181; and John H. Lockwood, Westfield and Its Historic Influences, 1669-1919 (Springfield, 1922), I, 102-321 passim.

2. Taylor's major manuscripts can be found in the following places: Massachusetts Historical Society: “Commonplace Book.” Boston Public Library: “Extracts.” Redwood Library and Athenaeum: “Diary,” “Harmony of the Gospels,” “A Metrical History of Christianity.” Westfield Athenaeum: “The Publick Records of the Church at Westfield.” Yale University Library: “Commonplace Book,” “Christographia,” “Dispensatory,” “Poetical Works,” “Manuscript Notebook,” and “Metallographia.” University of Nebraska Library: “Commentary upon the Scriptures.” Charles W. Mignon, Jr., is editing the “Commentary” for publication. Those other manuscripts not already in print will be published by Thomas M. Davis in volumes IV-VI of the G. K. Hall edition of the works of Taylor. Taylor's brief manuscript diary in the Connecticut Historical Museum has been edited by Francis Murphy, The Diary of Edward Taylor (Springfield, Mass., 1964). In addition, there is a good bibliography of Taylor: Constance J. Gefvert, Edward Taylor: An Annotated Bibliography, 1668-1970 (Kent, Ohio, 1971); and an excellent concordance: Gene Russell, A Concordance of the Poetry of Edward Taylor (Washington, D.C., 1973).

3. The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor (New York, 1939), Johnson discusses his find in “The Discovery of Edward Taylor's Poetry,” Colophon, I, No. 2 (1939), 100-6.

4. See especially: Austin Warren, “Edward Taylor's Poetry: Colonial Baroque,” Kenyon Review 3 (1941), 355-71; “Edward Taylor,” Major Writers of America, ed. Perry Miller, et al. (New York, 1962), I, 51-62: Wallace C. Brown, “Edward Taylor: An American ‘Metaphysical,’” AL [American Literature] 16 (1944), 186-97; and Mindele Black, “Edward Taylor: Heaven's Sugar Cake,” NEQ [New England Quarterly] 29 (1956), 159-81.

5. See especially: Norman S. Grabo, “Catholic Tradition, Puritan Literature, and Edward Taylor,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 45 (1960), 395-402; “The Veiled Vision: The Role of Aesthetics in Early American Intellectual History,” WMQ [William and Mary Quarterly] 19 (1962), 493-510; Stephen Fender, “Edward Taylor and ‘The Application of Redemption,’” Modern Language Review 59 (1964), 331-34.

6. See especially: Murdock, Literature, pp. 152-71; Herbert Blau, “Heaven's Sugar Cake: Theology and Imagery in the Poetry of Edward Taylor,” NEQ 26 (1953), 337-60; and Willie T. Weathers, “Edward Taylor and the Cambridge Platonists,” AL 26 (1954), 1-31.

7. Three who have pictured him thus are: Roy Harvey Pearce, “Edward Taylor: The Poet as Puritan,” NEQ 23 (1950), 31-46; Charles W. Mignon, Jr., “The American Puritan and Private Qualities of Edward Taylor, the Poet,” unpub. diss., University of Connecticut, 1963; and Karl Keller, “The Example of Edward Taylor,” EAL [Early American Literature] 4 (1969-70), 5-26.

8. On the issue of the essential privacy of Taylor's act of writing see: Francis Murphy, “Edward Taylor's Attitude Toward Publication: A Question Concerning Authority,” AL 39 (1962), 393-94; Emmy Shepherd, “Edward Taylor's Injunction Against Publication,” AL 38 (1962), 512-13; and Norman S. Grabo, “Colonial American Theology: Holiness and the Lyric Impulse,” in Joseph Waldmeir, ed., Essays in Honor of Russell B. Nye (East Lansing, Michigan, 1978). pp. 74-91.

9. For discussions of Taylor as defender of the faith see Donald E. Stanford, Edward Taylor (Minneapolis, 1965); Norman S. Grabo, “Edward Taylor on the Lord's Supper,” Boston Public Library Quarterly 12 (1960), 22-36; and Michael J. Colacurcio, “Gods Determinations Touching Half-Way Membership: Occasion and Audience in Edward Taylor,” AL 39 (1967), 298-314.

10. Stanford, Taylor. Stanford also transcribed and made available a long work of Taylor's from the Redwood Athenaeum and named it The Metrical History of Christianity (Baton Rouge, 1963).

11. Those who have best shown Taylor as an artist in individual series and individual poems are Clark Griffith, “Edward Taylor and the Momentum of Metaphor,” English Literary History 23 (1966), 448-60; Peter Thorpe, “Edward Taylor as Poet,” NEQ 39 (1966), 356-72; E. F. Carlisle, “The Puritan Structure of Edward Taylor's Poetry,” AQ [American Quarterly] 20 (1968), 147-63; Charles W. Mignon, Jr., “Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations: A Decorum of Imperfection,” PMLA 83 (1968), 1423-28; John F. Lynen, “Literary Form and the Design of Puritan Experience,” The Design of the Present: Essays on Time and Form in American Literature (New Haven, 1969), 61-70; Donald Junkins, “Edward Taylor's Creative Process,” EAL 4 (1969-70), 67-78; John J. Gatta, Jr., “The Comic Design of Gods Determinations,” EAL 10 (1975), 121-43.

12. It took a long time for Taylor scholars to realize the intellectual milieu in which he wrote. Some works to consult on this are Norman Pettit, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven, 1966); Thomas M. Davis, “Edward Taylor and the Traditions of Puritan Typology,” EAL 4 (1969-70), 27-47; and Lewalski, Poetics.

13. Paul R. Lucas, “Valley of Discord: The Struggle for Power in the Puritan Churches of the Connecticut Valley, 1636-1720,” unpub. diss., University of Minnesota, 1970; Stephen Foster, Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (New Haven, 1971); James W. Jones, The Shattered Synthesis: New England Puritanism before the Great Awakening (New Haven, 1973); and John Gatta, Jr., “Edward Taylor and Thomas Hooker: Two Physicians of the Poore Doubting Soul,” Notre Dame English Journal 12 (1979), 1-13.

14. Donald Junkins, “‘Should Stars Wooe Lobster Claws?’: A Study of Edward Taylor's Poetic Practice and Theory,” EAL 3 (1968), 88-117; Karl Keller, “‘The World Slickt up in Types’: Edward Taylor as a Version of Emerson,” EAL 5 (1970), 124-40; John J. Gatta, Jr., “Dogma and Wit in the Poetry of Edward Taylor,” unpub. diss., Cornell University, 1973; William J. Scheick, “The Jawbones Schema of Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations,” in Emory Elliott, ed., Puritan Influences in American Literature (Urbana, Illinois, 1979), pp. 38-54.

15. Thomas M. Davis summarizes these pressures best in his introduction to his three-volume edition of Taylor's writings (Boston, 1981).

16. From the outset, students of Taylor have seen Stoddard's presence in the Taylor canon, but this has increased now to show the serious obsession that Taylor had with the man and his heresy. On the conflict between the two and the resulting esthetics, see especially Norman S. Grabo, “Edward Taylor on the Lord's Supper,” Boston Public Library Quarterly 12 (1960), 22-36; “The Poet to the Pope: Edward Taylor to Solomon Stoddard,” AL 32 (1960), 197-201; James P. Walsh, “Solomon Stoddard's Open Communion: A Re-examination,” NEQ 43 (1970), 97-114; Dean Hall and Thomas M. Davis, “The Two Versions of Edward Taylor's Foundation Day Sermon,” Resources for American Literary Study 5 (1975), 199-216; and David L. Parker, “Edward Taylor's Preparationism: A New Perspective on the Taylor-Stoddard Controversy,” EAL 11 (1976-77), 259-78.

17. Until Davis' work, more than half of the manuscripts of Taylor remained unpublished. Volume One of Davis' edition, Edward Taylor's Church Records and Related Sermons, includes the continuous record of Taylor's pastoral activities for nearly fifty years and three sermons related to major issues in those records. Volume Two, Edward Taylor versus Solomon Stoddard: The Nature of the Lord's Supper, includes key manuscripts written before the published works of the Stoddard-Increase Mather controversy. Volume Three is Edward Taylor's Minor Poetry. Three more volumes are to follow, made up of Taylor's The Harmony of the Gospels.

18. Davis' students have produced some of the most original research on Taylor. Of note: Burley Gene Smith, “Edward Taylor and the Lord's Supper: The Controversy with Solomon Stoddard,” unpub. diss., Kent State, 1975; Dean Hall, “Edward Taylor: The Evolution of a Poet,” unpub. diss., Kent State, 1977; and Walter L. Powell, “Edward Taylor of Westfield: An Edition of the Westfield Town Records,” unpub. diss., Kent State, 1981.

19. Many scholars have been attracted to Taylor's uses of typology in his poetry. Most important are: Ursula Brumm, American Thought and Religious Typology (New Brunswick, N. J., 1970); Karen Rowe, “Puritan Typology and Allegory as Metaphor and Conceit in Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations,” unpub. diss., Indiana University, 1971; Lowance, Canaan; and see the essays on Taylor in Bercovitch, Typology.

20. Herein lies the greatest need: to relate Taylor's religion to his art. Valuable attempts to do so are Kathleen Blake, “Edward Taylor's Protestant Poetic: Nontransubstantiating Metaphor,” AL 43 (1970), 1-24; Steven Goldstein, “The Act of Vision in Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations,” unpub. diss., Tufts University, 1972; Gary A. Wood, “The ‘Festival Frame’: The Influence of the Tradition of Right Receiving on the Preparatory Meditations,” unpub. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1972; Michael D. Reed, “Edward Taylor's Poetry: Puritan Structure and Form,” AL 46 (1973), 304-12; Daly, God's Altar; Michael North, “Edward Taylor's Metaphors of Promise,” AL 51 (1979), 1-16; William J. Scheick, “Edward Taylor's Herbalism in Preparatory Meditations,” American Poetry 1 (Fall 1983), 64-72; and Catherine Rainwater, “Edward Taylor's Reluctant Revolution: The New Astonomy in the Preparatory Meditations,” American Poetry 1 (Winter 1984), 4-17.

21. All quotations from the Meditations are from Stanford, Taylor. The poems are designated by Series I or Series II and by Taylor's own numbers or titles within each series. Here, I.3.

22. P. 51

23. A thoughtful study is Caroline C. Zilboorg, “The Speaking Self in American Puritan Literature: A Study in Genre and Rhetorical Continuities,” unpub. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1976. See also Paul Sorrentino, “The Metaphor of the Earth as a Theater: The Early American Actor on the Stage of Life,” unpub. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1978.