A Reading Of Edward Taylor
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A Reading of Edward Taylor
Author: Thomas M. Davis
language: en
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Release Date: 1992
"A Reading of Edward Taylor is a study of Taylor's poetry in the sense that Thomas M. Davis is interested in how the nature of the poems evolves during the nearly fifty years Taylor served as minister in Westfield, Massachusetts. The first part of the book examines the long doctrinal poem, Gods Determinations, as the poem in which Taylor emerges as an accomplished poet. The final section of the poem, the "Choral Epilogue," with its emphasis on praising God in song, leads directly to the initial poems of the Preparatory Meditations, the more than two hundred meditative poems that Taylor wrote over the next forty years." "The early poems in Series 1 exhibit only loosely organized sequences; some are directly prompted by the Lord's Supper, but many are related in only indirect ways to the Sacrament. These poems, in their range and celebration of the joys of grace, are some of Taylor's best. In Meditations 19-22, he writes four interlocked poems dealing with the relation of his poetry to his spiritual condition. Despite Taylor's disclaimers about the quality of his poetry, in these poems he also makes his most elevated claim about his ability to praise." "What reservations he has about his ability to praise adequately are relatively minor in subsequent Meditations. But after the death of his wife, Elizabeth, Taylor reexamines the nature of his poetry and the relationship of grace to his ability to write in praise of Christ. And he begins to equate shoddy poetry with his own sin. In the central Meditations in this process, Meditations 39 and 40, the intense examination of his sinful state ("My Sin! my Sin, My God, these Cursed Dregs. . .") leads him to beg Christ to destroy his (Taylor's) sins so that his "rough Feet shall [Christ's] smooth praises sing." By the end of Series 1, he has come to accept a more limited view of the possibility of writing praise commensurate with Christ's glory. He acknowledges that until he receives the Crown of Life "I cannot sing, my tongue is tide. / Accept this Lisp till I am glorifide."" "He then turns at the beginning of Series 2 to the poems on typology. These poems are often mechanical, particularly those where he is too strictly bound by the large number of typological parallels. He also recognizes these limitations and moves increasingly to other texts, particularly those from the Canticles. In the allegory of the Song, Taylor finds the openness and sensuous imagery that allow him to express as fully as is possible his love of Christ and his passionate desire to be with the Bridegroom in the heavenly Garden. The more than forty Meditations based on Canticles texts near the end of Series 2 reveal Taylor's sense of drawing closer and closer to being in the Garden itself, and of replacing his "lisp" with the true voice of the glorified."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations and Preparatory Meditations
Author: Edward Taylor
language: en
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Release Date: 2003
When the young minister-poet Edward Taylor moved to Westfield, Massachusetts, in November of 1671, he had written several poems. When he died there fifty-eight years later, in addition to thousands of sermons and more than 2,000 manuscript pages of original prose, he had composed some 40,000 lines of poetry. For two of his poetic projects in particular, Taylor is considered - with Anne Bradstreet - one of British North America's most accomplished poets. Daniel Patterson's Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations and Preparatory Meditations: A Critical Edition reconsiders the texts of Taylor's two major works for the first time since Donald Stanford's 1960 edition. This volume also offers the first complete text of all the Meditations that Taylor transcribed into his Poetical Works manuscript. The restoration of Taylor's text, however, is the most enduring value of this edition, which is designed to become the new standard edition of these poems. The scores of substantive variants and the hundreds of variants in matters of punctuation and capitalization existing between the Patterson and Stanford texts are fully reported in the back of the volume, as are all editorial emendations. Ulti
Concepts of praise and petition in Edward Taylor ́s Preparatory Meditations
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, LMU Munich, language: English, abstract: My findings pertaining to the concepts of praise and petition in the meditative poetry of Edward Taylor are, for the most part, taken from the work of Norman Grabo1and Robert Daly2. My paper is exclusively discussing Taylor ́ sPreparatory Meditations,a collection of 217 poems, which he wrote during the period from 1682 to 1725. For the purposes of an interesting view on his orthodoxy I consulted the work of Jeffrey Hammond3. In my paper I have incorporated the findings of Ursula Brumm4to a lesser extent, because her work only deals with Puritan America in general. For additional findings regarding Edward Taylor, I gathered useful information fromA Reading of Edward Taylorby Thomas Davis5. In the course of my argumentation I would like to place emphasis on a two- fold conflict, which deeply affected and influenced Taylor ́ s meditative poetry: his fear of God (constant petition to purify and safe him) and his joy in the Lord and the divine creations (praise of nature and God). The question of Taylor ́ s tendency towards a more unorthodox Puritan stance is only briefly discussed in my paper, but mentioning some findings along that line is justified insofar as it bears a relevance to the concepts of praise and petition in Taylor ́ s poetry.