Puritan Poetry: Crammed With Images

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“The fear of graven images was an obsession with the Puritans. Like most of their obsesssions, however, it resulted, not in the childish dogmatism imputed to them by nineteenth-century commentators, but in a consistent system of clear, taut, definitions and distinctions . . . A verbal idol, such as might be found in poetry, would be as great a sin as a material idol carved in stone. For that reason, Puritan poetry was clearly influenced by the fear of idolatry; to understand the poetry, we must examine the fear. We have seen that Puritan poets did in fact write and read image-filled poetry. We need to know why they felt they could. We need to know how they defined and recognized an idol” (Daly, p. 45).

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