Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts (review)

In Popular Measures: Poetry and Church Order in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts, Amy M. E. Morris champions early New England poetry, not despite its derivation from plain-style sermons, its awkward syntax, its abjection before other genres, but rather because of these qualities. Morris variously terms the design of poetry by Bay Psalm translators Michael Wigglesworth and Edward Taylor as an "alternative" or "resistant" aesthetic (76, 207). And certainly, a quick glance at the Bay Psalm Book's rendering of Psalm 23 reveals it to be quite, ahem, "alternative":

The Lord to me a shepherd is,Want therefore I shall not,He in the folds of tender grassDoth make me down to lie.

Indeed, I once heard a presentation on the excellence of William Tyndale's English translation of the Bible that turned specifically on the contrast of his more elegant verse with that of the Bay Psalm Book. Such criticism of Puritan literary form is familiar, of course, maugre the work over the years of Michael Clark, Robert Daly, Norman Grabo, Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Jeffrey Hammond, William Scheick, Ivy Schweitzer, and others (all of whose work Morris references) to consider Puritan poetry and poetics on its own terms. While those familiar with the cadences of the Tyndalian or Authorized (King James) Bible continue to hear shortcomings, Morris hears real—albeit unusual—poetic strengths.

Morris's point of departure is Perry Miller's still-influential analysis of logic and rhetoric in New England culture. Despite the decades of scholarship on New England since Miller, Morris suggests, we are still left with the question of how the "humanistic and rational side of New England Puritanism" coexisted with "the zeal and pietism that even Miller acknowledged as also characteristic of the faith" (12). Morris admits this question is not original to her study; rather she offers "special consideration of the influence of ecclesiastical practice as well as theory on Puritan poetics." She is interested in how New England poets "created literary opportunities out of the problematic connotations of forms, conformity, and formality with which they were faced" (32). While the result is not a pathbreaking approach to Puritan poetry, it does result in interesting, provocative readings of important poets and poetry of seventeenth-century New England.

Morris argues persuasively that colonial poets responded to the tenets of the New England Way by creating an "unconventional artfulness" (74), which enabled them to write verse—that most formal of literary expressions—that was a vehicle for spiritual meditation, but which did not overwhelm the emotions with elegant language. To do so would be to lead readers down a path of dead formalism. Instead, Morris argues, the aesthetic of early New England poets—jarring in plain-style diction or syntax, relying on the expansiveness of a "lolloping ballad form" (127) for even the most serious of topics, didactic yet not affective—these choices "suggested that God had to be sought through spiritual, as opposed to linguistic, or literary, exploration" (104). In other words, human preparation for salvation could only take one so far—it required God's will to effect conversion. The aesthetic choices of New England's poet-ministers were designed to remind readers that they could not live by verse alone. Theirs was, Morris argues, an aesthetic of "spiritual complementation" (126) in which, if grace is to be bestowed, it can only have divine origins.

This "halfway" quality—and Morris connects the limitations of New England poetic form as a tool of conversion to the intentional doctrinal limitations of the Halfway Covenant—meant that the poetry of New England's writers had to embody a quality that it drew from and shared with other linguistic forms of church order and worship, a transparency that pointed the listener/reader away from the words to God Himself: "Like the rite of owning the covenant, the poem embodied in its own language the absolute need for an encounter that its own form and words could not...