“Since God gives His glory to man through metaphoric creatures, it is appropriate that man answer through metaphoric poetry” (Daly, p. 177).
A Word Spoken by the Word
“For him [Taylor] as for them, the world itself is a metaphor, the gift of a loving God, and is intended to raise our affections to Him and to make us sing” (Daly, p. 176).
The Metaphorical Alpha and Omega
“Other Puritan poets, accepting the metaphoric world, worked their way toward metaphor and ended their poems with it. Taylor often begins with metaphor and is left to work his way beyond it and sometimes back to it” (Daly, p. 165).
No Cartoon Puritan
“Earlier critics have noted [Edward] Taylor’s use of images drawn from the sensible world to figure the invisible things of God, and, after some initial disagreement, later critics have agreed that Taylor was neither a closet idolator nor a crypto-Catholic, but an orthodox New England Puritan, a category that recent scholarship has shown to be …
Meaning in the Particular Now
“Less naive, the Puritans centered their elegies about adults on life this side of the grave and only conventionally and briefly mentioned the afterlife. Their elegies, like their sermons, were rarely eschatological. The meaning of a man’s life was to be found in the details of that life, not merely in the confidence that he …
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 …
Metaphor Blindness
“Even Cotton Mather, in his sermon at Wigglesworth’s funeral, identified Wigglesworth’s poetry as catechism and his audience as simple people and children . . . One reason for its failure, and one difference between Wigglesworth and most other Puritan poets, is Wigglesworth’s dismissal of the natural world, his inability to perceive, and hence to use, …
Some Caricatures Really Lived
“So closely does Michael Wigglesworth approximate the unhappy popular conception of our seventeenth-century forbears that he seems more plausible as a satirical construction than he does as a human being. In their descriptions of a Puritan so obsessed with himself, with his own quest for salvation, that he suppressed or ignored all purely human experience, …
God of More Than Ether
“Instead of praising some neoplatonic God for revealing to her the vanity of earthly things, Bradstreet sang hymns of praise and gratitude to an anthropomorphic God Who often answered petitions for such worldly gifts as health and long life” (Daly, p. 103).
God’s Word in the World Metaphor
“As an orthodox Puritan, Bradstreet could not adumbrate the French symbolists by arguing that her words created meaning; the meaning of the sensible world was in the things of the sensible world themselves. It had been put there by god before all time; it was seen and uttered by the poet. To follow the latter …