"The English of this wildernesse:" Aspects of early New England’s literary inheritance, as illustrated by the works of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor

Abstract

"'The English of this wildernesse': aspects of early New England's literary inheritance, as illustrated by the works of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor." Since the late 1920's, the literature of early New England has been increasingly studied in the context of the development of American history, literature, and mythology. Without denying the usefulness of such a context, I want to redress the balance by setting selected aspects of two writers in particular, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, in the context of their English origins, and to study them specifically as English provincial writers who exemplify the important phenomenon of cultural lag in a community distant from but crucially attached to a changing metropolitan culture. Part of the originality of my approach is the new look I give to the implications of colonial and provincial literature. Chapter one outlines a detailed historical and critical context for my study. As well, I discuss some of the roots and presuppositions of modern literary scholarship of Early New England, and using T. S. Eliot's distinction between "aesthetic" and "merely historical" criticism, I stress the need for an evaluative context for the early New England poets to complement any discussion of historical perspective. In my second chapter, I tackle crucial and inadequately examined aspects of the influence of Puritanism on New England poetry, concentrating especially on the theological distrust of the imagination and (especially important for Taylor) the literary implications of eucharistic theology. Having developed the major strands of my approach, I then turn to Bradstreet (chapters three to six) and Taylor (chapters seven to nine). Chapter three discusses Anne Bradstreet in the context of Renaissance attitudes to women, in order to show what expectations and possibilities existed for a woman in her position to write poetry. Chapters four and five gradually move from an historical to an evaluative perspective - chapter four to deal with her public poetry, chapter five with her domestic verse and chapter six, her religious poetry. Chapters seven to nine are devoted to selected aspects of Taylor's work. Chapter seven attempts to make a new evaluation of his contribution to the Metaphysical literary tradition; chapter eight explores the implications of his religious beliefs for his poetic practices and especially his constant sense of literary inadequacy. In chapter nine, the crucial question of the relative importance of "historical" and "critical" contexts is again faced as I look at Taylor's poems on the Canticles, not in order to examine his sources, but rather to show the ways in which his poetical imagination responded to and transformed his sources. There is a brief concluding chapter. Throughout the study, I have responded to the great amount of critical and scholarly work done in recent years, and I have therefore concentrated on particular aspects of the topic which, if in no case providing me with totally untouched territory to map, at least have offered the chance of meaningful and original exploration. I also hope that I am offering my explorations within an original and provoking cultural and critical context.