Recap of 11/2 Class

Lingua quo tendis ("Tongue, where are you heading?"), Crispijn van de Passe, 1611.

We began with a brief discussion of Anne Bradstreet's "A Dialogue between Old England and New," noting the poem's generic complexity and the implications of its central image, a parent-child relationship.

Next, Jonathan gave a presentation detailing Bunyan's theology, his sources for The Pilgrim's Progress, the book's possible autobiographical origins (include Bunyan's own trial), and it's influence on nineteenth-century British and American literature. He showed us several fascinating illustrations for The Pilgrim's Progress and compared these with, among others, the illustrations from Frank L. Baum's classic children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz  (1900).

The class then discussed The Pilgrim's Progress, first comparing its use of allegory with that in Milton's Paradise Lost, and then analyzing Bunyan's various narrative techniques, including the dream frame and the strategy of repeated retelling. We considered ways in which the book does and does not function as a proto-novel.

Finally, the class looked at some of Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations, noting especially their use of garden imagery and discussing Taylor's possible reasons for not publishing these poems.

One final note on a topic we didn't have time to discuss in class: Taylor was influenced by the tradition of the emblem, a minor literary kind that amalgamated picture, motto, and poem. (An example of an emblem is above.) In Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (1979) Barbara Lewalski argues that Taylor's "Canticles" series, of which we read several poems, derives its garden imagery from seventeenth-century emblems.