Monk

Before leaving the Puritans, we should get at least one poem by the other big name of the era, Edward Taylor. We will use the one on the Lord’s Supper. This is the Christian custom that a lot of non-Christians find to be especially off-putting, being rather suggestive of cannibalism as well as cultic and just plain weird.

It is based on the night before Christ was betrayed and captured by the Jewish and Roman authorities, to be crucified ultimately. On that night, as they partook of a festive meal, Christ instructed his disciples that they should eat the bread and understand it to be His flesh, and to drink the wine and understand it to be his blood, and this should become their ritual practice. In doing this they proclaim themselves to be of the body of Christ. Or at least this is my loose rendition. I was never a Catholic, and so I probably do not have it down very well.

Taylor goes further and discusses how man first took holy food for the soul more naturally before the fall from Paradise, and how man was deprived since then of holy food for his soul. The poem will also be easier to understand if you know that he calls the soul a bird of paradise that has been placed in a cage, the body. It was only when God sent Jesus down that this bird of paradise was able to eat its special holy food again. If you can get around the oddness of the concept, it is actually a pretty idea.

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Our critic on the Puritan poets, Francis Murphy, notes that one would go too far to say that the Puritans, in their otherworldliness, eschewed entirely the wonders of nature, but that they did clearly give it second place at best to their dreams of heaven. Murphy aptly demonstrates this point with Anne Bradstreet’s “The Flesh and the Spirit” (1612-1672), and we will quote more generously from that poem.

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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.

“One can hardly imagine our debt, as a culture, to Walt Whitman, who was able to summon a vision as defiantly idiosyncratic yet as thoroughly central and representative as any in the history of our poetry.”

-- Jay Parini, “The Columbia History of American Poetry”

On my library trip, I thought I would pick up an anthology of poems, and while I was browsing, I happened onto Parini’s survey and critical study of American poetry, which looks like a graduate course on the subject, and a course that I would like to try. It looks like fun. Though, I will have to lay Hamlet aside for a while to fit it into my busy life.

Nevertheless, the above quote, taken from the introduction, is a little discouraging. I have never been able to find much in Whitman that is to my liking. In the last month, for instance, I was giving “Leaves of Grass” another crack, and it just does not sing to me. Ninety percent of it strikes me as loose prose, and not very gripping or inspiring prose at that. But it is not like the book is centrally about Whitman, and I am still good to go.