Gods of Nature

“Before considering Puritan work in other genres, I wish to examine the casual classicism of Puritan poetry. Like most education people of the Renaissance, the Puritnas had a solid grounding in the classics. Had anyone taken their divinity seriously, the classical deities might have seemed false gods to the Puritan. As it was, however, the gods were so obviously not divine, so thoroughly identified with the natural world (their names were usually used only as shorthand designations for the natural objects or forces they metaphorically controlled) that only Michael Wigglesworth felt compelled to reject them, even as he had rejected nature” (Daly, pp. 142-143).