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Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations: A Decorum of Imperfection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Charles W. Mignon
Charles W. Mignon*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Abstract

The problem of assessing Edward Taylor's literary reputation has been made difficult by the claims put forward on his behalf and by the criticisms of these claims because both share the assumption that Taylor's poetry may be compared with Herbert's. But a consideration of Taylor's Prologue (glossed with relevant poems and sermons) reveals the rudiments of Taylor's Puritan theory of the imperfect function of human art, rudiments which form a concept of decorum which is not “metaphysical.” Taylor's theory features the severely limited possibilities of fallen human art not only in dealing with man's condition but even in attempting the praise of God. Accordingly, at the practice of metaphor Taylor is committed to meiosis, and uses amplification for the praise of God with considerable hesitation. On the other hand, Herbert, with a different religious position and with consequently a different subject (the contrast between man's insignificance and his greatness as a child of God), has as a result a much wider metaphoric range. These differences in the range and use of metaphor reveal quite different concepts of decorum and suggest judgments about Taylor's literary reputation based not on “metaphysical” decorum, but rather on a Puritan decorum of imperfection.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 5 , October 1968 , pp. 1423 - 1428
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1. The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 1, hereafter referred in the text as series (i) and Meditation number (2); i.e., 1.2. References to Edward Taylor's Christographia, ed. N. S. Grabo (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), will be indicated by C, followed by page number.

2. See the following: Thomas H. Johnson, “Edward Taylor: A Puritan ‘Sacred Poet’, ” NEQ, x (1937), 290–322, and the “Introduction” in The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor (New York: Rockland Editions, 1939); Austin Warren, “Edward Taylor's Poetry: Colonial Baroque,” KR, iii (1941), 355–371; Wallace C. Brown, “Edward Taylor: An American Metaphysical,” AL, xvi (1944), 186–197; Emma L. Shepherd, “The Metaphysical Conceit in the Poetry of Edward Taylor (1644?-1729)” (unpubl. diss., North Carolina, 1960); Louis Martz, “Foreword” in The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960).

3. “Poet in a Wilderness” (anon, rev.), TLS, 3 Feb. 1961, p. 72, and 17 Feb. 1961, p. 105.

4. See Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), especially Ch. ix, “The Criterion of Decorum.”

5. Norman S. Grabo, “Edward Taylor's Spiritual Hus-wifery,” PMLA, LXXIX (1964), 554, the fullest critical explication of a single poem.

6. Until Taylor is glorified he cannot really sing:

“Till then [glorification] I cannot sing, my tongue is tide. Accept this Lisp till I am glorified.” (l.43.41-42)

7. See the important anonymous review, “Poet in a Wilderness,” TLS, 3 Feb. 1961, p. 72, and that reviewer's rebuttal to George L. Proctor's objection, TLS, 17 Feb. 1961, p. 105. The rebuttal includes the assertion that a style like Taylor's was “commented on once and for all by Dryden in his remarks on Sylvester's Dubartas.” Dryden as a boy admired these lines from that work,

Now when the 3Winter's keener breath began
To chrystallise the Baltic Ocean;
To glaze the Lakes, to bridle up the Floods,
And penning with Snov the bald-pate Woods,

but later commented “I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustion, that is, thoughts and words ill-sorted … But as in a room contrived for state, the height of the roof should bear a proportion to the area; so, in the heightenings of Poetry, the strength and vehemence of figures should be suited to the occasion, the subject and the persons. All beyond this is monstrous: ‘tis out of Nature, ‘tis an excrescence, and not a living part of Poetry” (Dryden's Essays, London: Dent, 1954, p. 159).

8. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, p. 224; hereafter I cite page numbers.

9. The term “amplification” is slightly misleading since it is properly a mode which includes meiosis. Details may be found in Henry Peacham's The Garden of Eloquence, Conteining the Most Excelient Ornaments, Exornations, Lighles. flowers, and formes of speech, commonly called the Figures of Rhetorike (London, 1593) : auxesis, p. 167; meiosis, pp. 168–169; brief mention of tapinosis and bomphilogio, p. 169. More extensive descriptions of these last mentioned are in Peacham's The Garden of Eloquence Conteyning the Figures of Grammar and Rhetorick (London, 1577), sig. Gii.