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Starting at the beginning of our survey of American poetry, we return to our Puritan friends, so reserved and austere.
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In his often quoted guide to young ministers, the learned Boston divine Cotton Mather shuddered at the thought of New England clergy reading the pagan Homer (“one of the greatest apostles the devil ever had in the world”); nevertheless he had to admit that Homer’s example of an invocation uttered as a “preface unto all important enterprizes” could serves as a useful model for the seminary student, and that the Latin of Virgil, especially in his Georgics, “will furnish you with many things far from despicable.”...
Above all, he warned the student reading Ovid to take care not to be sensually aroused and find himself conversing with “muses” no better “than harlots.”
-- Francis Murphy, “Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor” in The Columbia History of the World
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I hope Milton would meet with his approval, or was Adam and Eve a bit too sensual in Milton’s paradise? These are the questions that prey on Puritan minds.
Fortunately, not all Puritans were students of Cotton Mather and were willing to ply their hand at poetry, or else we might have had to forgo any chapter on the Puritans in this survey.
_ _ _
In his often quoted guide to young ministers, the learned Boston divine Cotton Mather shuddered at the thought of New England clergy reading the pagan Homer (“one of the greatest apostles the devil ever had in the world”); nevertheless he had to admit that Homer’s example of an invocation uttered as a “preface unto all important enterprizes” could serves as a useful model for the seminary student, and that the Latin of Virgil, especially in his Georgics, “will furnish you with many things far from despicable.”...
Above all, he warned the student reading Ovid to take care not to be sensually aroused and find himself conversing with “muses” no better “than harlots.”
-- Francis Murphy, “Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor” in The Columbia History of the World
_ _ _
I hope Milton would meet with his approval, or was Adam and Eve a bit too sensual in Milton’s paradise? These are the questions that prey on Puritan minds.
Fortunately, not all Puritans were students of Cotton Mather and were willing to ply their hand at poetry, or else we might have had to forgo any chapter on the Puritans in this survey.
