Class Recap 10/26

We began Wednesday's session with Angela's helpful discussion of poets Edward Taylor, Michael Wigglesworth, and Anne Bradstreet and their complex relationship to public and private poetry. 

Afterward, we took up Edward Taylor's God's Determinations Touching His Elect, examining first the historical context out of which it and Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (1662) came before turning to comparisons with Milton's Paradise Lost.  Creation, the portrait of Satan, and Eve's role all fell under consideration.  We further discussed Taylor's metaphysical aesthetic as well as his shift to the psychology of the Saint and away from Milton's emphasis on the psychology of Satan.

Hans Memling, Last Judgement, 1466-1473

After the break, we looked at Andrew Marvell's poetic technique in "Bermudas" before turning to Wigglesworth's seventeenth-century bestseller.  We continued to interrogate poetic aesthetics with Day of Doom, considering the use of hymnal meter, the plain style, and epic devices.  Wigglesworth's treatment of the saints and sinners was also discussed, including the sinners' varying defenses before Christ.  It is noteworthy in Wigglesworth that each time he begins enumerating sinful behavior he mentions hypocrisy first (see stanzas 27 and 68).  Though we did not elaborate on this in class, the hierarchy of sin within Wigglesworth's epic is significant, particularly his emphasis on hypocrisy.  If the intention of the New England Puritans was to establish a godly community of the elect, detection of both the saintly and the reprobate was tremendously important.  While Puritans did not have access to the invisible church (known only to God), they did have control over the visible church, and policing falsity regarding one's status an a member of the elect was key.  We have already seen this in the conversion narratives recorded by Thomas Shepard.  That the hypocrites come first in Wigglesworth's register signals the dire threat they posed to the visible church (just as the unbaptized infants' position near the end indicates that theirs is the least of offenses).

We closed with a brief mention of Wigglesworth's private diary.  A nifty little book, it reveals much about not just the poet's own psychology but Puritan attitudes toward sexuality, introspection, and the spiritual anxieties they faced on a daily basis.

In addition to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, you will be reading a small selection (less than a dozen out of over 200) of Taylor's Prepatory Meditations, a poetic project he began early in his ministry.  These poems were composed prior to Taylor's monthly administering of communion.  What qualities do Taylor's poems share with Bunyan's text?  How do the Meditations garner Taylor his "title" as the "American Metaphysical"?  How do these poems compare to those composing God's Determinations?