[To complement
last week’s series on pre-Revolutionary histories, this week I’ll AmericanStudy
some of the many compelling writers and voices from the nation’s exploration
and colonial eras. Leading up to a special Guest Post on a wonderful new
anthology of Native American writing!]
On Puritan confessional
poetry.
Imagining our
way into the perspectives of the past is never an easy task, and I don’t know
that there’s a more challenging community into which to imagine ourselves than
17th century Massachusetts Puritans. This was the group for whom both
Anglican England and Protestant Holland were sufficiently liberal to force them
across the Atlantic, for whom Roger
Williams and Anne Hutchinson
represented dangerous characters who must be banished, for whom every minute element
of nature and life presented what Cotton Mather would term Wonders
of the Invisible World (1693). And if we take Michael Wigglesworth’s
hugely popular mid-17th century epic poem “The Day of Doom” (1662) as a
representative literary text from this community, then we see the most extreme
version of their perspective; Wigglesworth’s speaker takes great joy, for
example, in imagining the souls of newborn babies who died before being
baptized suffering for all eternity in the fires of hell.
Wigglesworth may
have sold the best of any Puritan poet, thanks in no small measure to his
ability to gratify his audience’s holier-than-everybody impulses, but I would
argue that two 17th century poetic peers had him beat in talent: Anne
Bradstreet and Edward
Taylor. To be sure, both Bradstreet and Taylor feature their own
representations of extreme Puritan perspectives: in two of Bradstreet’s most
famous poems she expresses understandable sorrow for the death
of a grandchild and the
burning of her house but then instantly rebukes herself for that emotion
and instead celebrates these losses as examples of God’s Providence; while
Taylor not only composed individual poems in which he imagined himself the Lord’s “Spinning
Wheele” and portrayed all humans as flies caught in spider
webs of sin and damnation, but also wrote thousands of “Preparatory
Meditations,” poems intended to be read nightly before taking the Lord’s
Supper. In these and many other works, both Bradstreet and Taylor reflect not
only their close relationship to Puritan orthodoxy (Taylor was a pastor, while
Bradstreet’s father and husband would both serve as governors of the
Massachusetts Bay colony) but also the central role of Puritan ideology in
their personal perspectives and lives.
Yet it is
precisely because Bradstreet’s and Taylor’s poems are so much more personal
than (for example) Wigglesworth’s epic that I find them far more compelling and
successful as well. Long before the concept of confessional
poetry had been coined, that’s what Bradstreet and Taylor were producing—not
just in the religious sense, although certainly both poets were influenced by and
could be said to participate in the 17th century American genre of
the Puritan
confession narrative; but also, and most relevantly for my purposes here,
in the sense of turning their intimate emotions and thoughts into carefully
constructed, formally complex poetic works. This is perhaps most clearly
reflected by Bradstreet’s wonderful “The Author to Her Book,”
a poem in which Bradstreet captures a number of different emotional responses
to learning that her
first book of poetry had been published (without her knowledge) in England.
Bradstreet’s poem is the expression of both an individual person surprised and
yet gratified by publication and a Puritan woman unsure of the appropriateness
of what has happened—yet it is also a carefully composed, cleverly structured,
well-written and engaging poetic work, as are all the texts produced by these
two talented Puritan poets.
Next early
writing tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Early American writers or works you’d highlight?
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