Edward Taylor's Public Devotions

It seems worthwhile—in light of the ongoing resurgence of scholarly interest in aesthetics across literary, philosophical, and cultural studies—to reconsider the nature and vitality of the forms of aesthetic sensibility in colonial America. The status of cultural conceptions of the beautiful has been a particularly contested topic in the case of seventeenth-century Massachusetts. The worst of the early critical misconceptions—epitomized by the sweeping judgment that New England Puritans were antagonistic toward beauty—have been discredited (Hall 110), and yet surprisingly little work has been done to outline a positive description of a Puritan aesthetics that could harmonize with scholarly presentations of the religious and material cultures of early New England. I cannot, in this space and format, even begin to elaborate the whole of such a complex project;¹ rather, I will suggest a few central aspects of a Puritan aesthetics by offering a reading of Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations within the framework of its particular mode of cultural production. My goal is to clarify, through a literary reading of an important colonial New England poet, an aesthetic understanding that squares with the religious emphases of Puritanism as well as the material traces of daily life in early Massachusetts. Along the way, I hope to push against the lingering critical suspicion that poetry as aesthetic activity was essentially foreign to Puritan culture. Rather, I will argue that a culture that could understand beauty as central to personal spiritual transformation and social unity could be expected to produce a poet in the vein of Edward Taylor. It is this spiritual, relational aesthetic sensibility that I describe in my reading of Taylor's Preparatory Meditations.

One of the most significant recent interventions in the scholarship on aesthetics in colonial New England has been the writings of Robert Blair St. George. The main thrust of his work has been to stress the influence of traditions of material experience, especially those of craftsmen and the yeomanry, in shaping the cultural landscape of early New England. St. George has argued that attention to craftsmen's practices and the cultural circulation of their material productions shows that, in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, "All people got through life in an artful way" (The Wrought Covenant 18). This conclusion leads him to argue the influence of material culture over against the discursive realm: "a rubric other than religious life might be more helpful in leading us to an understanding of how ideas moved in New England" (13). My assumption in this essay is that the dichotomy St. George lays out here is unnecessary. It seems likely that Massachusetts colonists would have explored points of overlap between material and religious traditions, and St. George's later work assumes such correlation in contradiction to the polemical thrust of his earlier statements (Conversing by Signs 115–203, esp. 144). In particular, St. George's development of a "poetics of implication," which he uses to discuss cultural transmission between architecture and preaching or piety and commerce, brings his study of material life into direct conversation with the metaphorical concerns of poetic production (6–7).² While I am concerned here with rereading Taylor's Preparatory Meditations, and so do not engage material culture directly, I think my reading of Taylor sits well alongside such research; indeed, the logical next step (though beyond the scope of this essay) would be to explore the dialogue between spiritual modes of thinking and the representation of material culture in Taylor's lyrics. But what needs to be addressed first is the curious critical attitude that has long resisted seeing a serious connection between Taylor's Puritan spirituality and his work as a successful poet.

Generally taken as one of the best Puritan poets of early New England, Taylor has nonetheless been plagued by a critical unwillingness to see him as just that: a Puritan and a poet. Shirley E. Lind summarizes nicely this sentiment as it existed in the first decades of Taylor criticism: "It is precisely at those places where Taylor has lapsed from Puritan standards that we find his poetic expression most rewarding to the modern reader" (529). A...