Edward Taylor: Venerable, Learned, Pious

On Edward Taylor's tombstone is the claim, "Aged, Venerable, Learned, & Pious Pastor-Served God and his Generation Faithfully for Many Years."* A better recommendation to future generations would be hard to find. Edward Taylor served his generation as minister to a small church in Westfield, Massachusetts, and he also served this community as a physician. But we would likely have never heard his name had he not fashioned into poetry his personal search for God.

Like Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Edward Taylor immigrated to America from England. Along with Bradstreet, he is now considered a first American poet. (According to Thomas H. Johnson, Taylor's library held "only one book of English poetry: Anne Bradstreet's verses.") Taylor wrote his poetry between 1662 and 1725, yet not it was not until 1937 that Thomas H. Johnson discovered Taylor's poems in manuscript form at the Yale library. In The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, Johnson writes, "It seems probable that had the poetry of Edward Taylor been published during his lifetime, he would long since have taken a place among the major figures of colonial American literature."

Taylor's poetry reveals a kinship with the Metaphysical poets, George Herbert (1593-1633) and other late Elizabethans. Johnson found two groups of poems, Gods Determination and Sacramental Meditations in the Yale manuscript. The subject of Taylor's poetry is a single subject, the love of Jesus Christ, a focus he formed early and maintained throughout his life. In 1722 at age eighty when he penned his last poem, the focus was still the same.

Taylor's originality is evident in his use of the metaphysical conceit. In portraying the love of Christ he fashions perfectly unified metaphors; for example, a garden emitting the perfumes of foliage, a spinning wheel, a pipe moving liquid. As he developed his art, his poems became more unified, concentrating on one figure at a time.

Reading Taylor is at first a challenge for today's readers, because of the difference in language use and style. For an example, I offer the first stanza of his "Meditation One":

What Love is this of thine, that Cannot bee
In thine Infinity, O Lord, Confinde,
Unless it in thy very Person see,
Infinity, and Finity Conjoyn'd?
What ! hath thy Godhead, as not satisfi'de
Marri'de our Manhood, making it its Bride?

The use of the familiar forms of direct address "thine," "thy," etc, along with altered spelling and at times even slightly changed meaning are some of the aspects of language use that provide the challenge. But Taylor's poems are true, and we can trust him to be offering us his best crafted art. Only a little effort is required to reap much benefit from his poems.

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