“In Puritan poems, symbolic correspondences occur, not at the level of trope, but at the level of perception” (Daly, p. 93).
No Celestial Lunatic
“Images in the perceived world figured even the ‘irradiations,’ the communicable glories of God, Who is portrayed in Bradstreet more as a wise and loving parent than as the celestial lunatic so often foisted off on the Puritans by their modern detractors” (Daly, p. 91).
Love of the Senses
“Bradstreet’s prose statements place her within the tradition of orthodox Puritans who loved the sensible world but knew that it could not compare with its Maker” (Daly, p. 88).
God’s Own Metaphor
“Puritan poets . . . knew that part of their work in this world was to wean their affections from the unmixed love of it. But they also knew that this world was God’s metaphor for His communicable glories and that another part of their duty was to see and utter that metaphor, to use …
Incarnation and Metaphor
“Indeed, the central and defining event in Christianity, the Incarnation of the invisible God in visible man was, like creation and all other metaphor, God’s act of making part of Himself available to the understanding of man . . . In Baxter’s prose, then, we find the theological rationale for the figures that constitute so …
Deep Metaphor
“In focusing on the metaphorical nature of the physical world and the metaphorical language of the Bible, Taylor was moving toward an understanding of meditation as a literary, as well as a religious, exercise. And he knew it” (Daly, p. 73).
A Plain Man’s Path
“Though its abuse could lead them from Him, its proper religious use was a ‘plain man’s pathway to heaven.’ It offered the plain poet a world rich in intrinsic symbols, correspondences, and significances that were not decorations but necessary parts of the truth he attempted to tell” (Daly, p. 71).
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 …
The Centrality of Puritan Symbolism
“For the Puritan, however, the world in which he lived was symbolic. Things meant . . . Puritan poets saw symbols in the Bible and the world. From these sources they derived not only most of their symbols, but the symbolic method itself, the lens through which they perceived and expressed their own experience. Not …
The Sensual Puritan
“We can, however, examine Puritan appeals to both the sensuous and the sensual in man. Such an examination reveals that one who believes that Puritans avoided sensuous and even erotic imagery in expressing religious doctrine or describing spiritual states does so in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary” (Daly, p. 22).