The American Puritan Elegy: A Literal and Cultural Study (review)

The Puritan elegy, like Puritan writing generally, is a hard product to sell these days—and Jeffrey A. Hammond knows it. Those lines "upon the death of " that we find everywhere in the pages of such collections as Harrison T. Meserole's Seventeenth-Century American Poetry (1968) and Kenneth Silverman's Colonial American Poetry (1968) seem so, well, "occasional." As modern readers, we expect true art to rise above its particular occasion, but the New England elegists anchored their lines so firmly in the specific circumstances of their composition as to discourage transcendence, if not defeat it. And we value innovation, even in Puritan poetry, loving the surprise Anne Bradstreet gives us in her private verse when we read her seductive letters to Simon and appreciating the jolt in the private meditations of Edward Taylor when we encounter his "squitchens," "snick-snarls," and images of the Deity bowling a strike in the celestial rec center. The Puritan elegies, by contrast, seem public, conventional, inert. Were not they inert even in their own day, their familiar expressions of grief so hackneyed as to be funny? Surely, we all have laughed at the way that smart-aleck Boston teenager Benjamin Franklin had Silence Dogood publish a "receipt" explaining how some empty-skulled "young Harvard" might embalm the memory of any corpse by composing a New England funeral elegy. Franklin's recipe, moreover, foreshadows that of the later printer-humorist who created Emmeline Grangerford, the family elegist always trotting right behind the doctor and ahead of the undertaker with her "tribute" to the deceased until the day she "hung fire" on a rhyme for Mr. Whistler's name and then "kind of pined away and did not live long" afterward. These impediments, and the fact that while criticism disdains the Puritan elegy, it does admire a very different elegiac tradition—that of the "pastoral elegy" represented by such poems as "Adonais," "In Memoriam," "Lilacs," and "Thyrsis"—give Hammond a difficult subject and presuppose a resisting reader.

Consequently, he devotes the first half of his slender but important book both to an extended appeal for the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of that resisting reader and to a careful protocol for an adequate method of reading the writings of seventeenth-century New England Puritans (not solely the elegies), an approach he calls "an anthropology of Puritan reading" (4). In the twenty-first century, we read as "postromantics," operating "according to our notions of selfhood and mourning" (2), "recasting the dead as primitive versions of ourselves" and wrenching them "into validating conformity with—or damning opposition to—current values and tastes" while refiguring the past "as a mere proto-present" (4–5). To Hammond, such presentism constitutes the besetting sin of American literary historiography (as many scholars have contended in the pages of this journal); to avoid it in a critique of Puritan culture, we must read against our grain, making a "rigorous effort to understand and empathize with the people who inhabited that culture" (4). Although confessedly a postromantic himself, he writes, "I am playing the admittedly impossible role of a sympathetic ethnographer who tries to see another world through its inhabitants' eyes" (2). If he can become a sympathetic ethnographer, Hammond suggests, so can we. Yet how can one of us manage to make the leap of imagination into their seventeenth-century world and even approximate the way they thought?

His answer lies in "an anthropological approach" (resembling Greenblatt's version of "new historicism" but with a prominent admixture of theory drawn predominantly from Jauss, Perkins, and Iser), concentrating upon describing and appreciating another culture's patterns of behavior, asking what literary texts did in and for the culture, and noticing how those texts met, or failed to meet, that culture's needs for expression. This effort involves considerable, wide-ranging learning, including in this instance an examination of seventeenth-century funerary, grieving, and mourning practices, all rooted in what Hammond terms "the...