Edward Taylor

Edward Taylor: 1642?-1729

Biography:

• Relatively little is known about his life
• Born in Leicestershire, England to a yeoman farmer
• Might have been educated at Cambridge
• Around 1668, he was (possibly) dismissed from teaching school for refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the Church of England that asserted the king was the head of the church
• 1668: Immigrates to New England and enrolled at Harvard, where he stayed for three years
• 1671: Graduates and takes on minister position in rural and remote Westfield, MA, where he would remain for the rest of his life
• At this time, the founders’ energy and sense of mission had been diminished by death, sectarian struggle, and the colony’s expansion
• 1674: Marries Elizabeth Fitch, who has eight children, three of whom survive to adulthood
• Served as minister, physician, farmer, teacher, disciplinarian for community, spiritual guide
• Strict observer of the “old” New England way: Demanded a public account of conversion before admission to church membership and the right to take communion
• 1674-1676: King Philip’s War; Taylor refuses to leave the community
• 1689: First wife dies; he remarries in 1692 and has six more children

Criticism and Interpretation:

• Did not publish during his lifetime; but did collect over 400 pages of verse in carefully hand-bound letter volumes, discovered in Yale’s library in 1937
• Sheer volume of poems reveals his fascination with language, and the individual’s reaction to religious experience
• “Nothing previously discovered about Puritan literature had suggested that there was a writer in New England who had sustained such a long-term love affair with poetry” (Baym 341). 
• Works include: God’s Determinations…, Preparatory Meditations, A Metrical History of Christianity (21,000 lines), other occasional verses
• Preparatory Meditations (two series of 217 poems begun in 1682 and continued for 43 years)
• Importance of being prepared for the sacrament; involved examining the soul for signs of grace which involved a state of active self-abandonment and utter passivity
• Poems illustrate a kind of “holy violence” necessary to purge the sinful, doubting, stubborn, contaminated self
• Poems reflect the metaphysical school of poetry; Uses metaphysical conceit as a focus for literal and poetic meditation
• Use of a disciplined, even caged and controlled verse form
• Each meditation disciplines the mind by formally squeezing theological complexities into a flexible stanza and rhyme scheme, yet also allows for a release of spiritual affections through images and metaphors
• He was a man trying to understand a miracle—to come to grips with the incomprehensible
• All earthly things are analogues to things in heaven
• Confronted this dilemma: “How can I write myself into self-effacement?  And once abjected, how can I possibly fulfill my religious/poetic obligation which is to sing God’s praises?” (Castillo 309). 
• “Nothing less than his eternal life…depended upon the answer to these literary questions” (309). 
• Taylor’s problem as a Puritan is to demonstrate to himself over and over again that he is one of the elect
• Puritan aesthetic—very operation of language reveals the divine
• Taylor’s aesthetic dilemma—how can I, a fallen man, represent God’s infinity—was finally inseparable from his spiritual pursuit of salvation

Works Cited
Baym, Nina, editor.  The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume A.  NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003.
Castillo, Susan and Ivy Schweitzer, editors.  The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology.  Malden, MA: Blackwell Books, 2001.