Puritan Poetry: Crammed With Images

“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).