Edward Taylor (1642-1729) New England Puritan.

Born 1645? Coventry Warwickshire, Eng.Died 1729Westfield,

born in Leicestershire, England where father farmed his own land

became a school teacher with Puritan sympathies

•After the Great Ejection, left England(wouldn’t sign the oath)

studied divinity at Harvard

became minister of Westfield, Massachusetts (physician too)

Puritan: He was learned, grave, severe, stubborn, and stiff-necked. He was very, very pious but sincere.

His poetry shows that Taylor was a devoted Calvinist. It was his custom to write a poem ("Meditation") before each Lord's Supper.

Religious intellectual

writings intended to defend the Puritan faith (reformed theology or Calvinism) against newer more liberal religious ideas

Poetry similar to that of English metaphysical poet, John Donne

Am’s only metaphysical poet of the time

“Metaphysical:”

meta: transcending, over, above

transcending the physical world; dwelling in the spiritual world of ideas

Poetry explored the mystery of God’s grace

Tradition of medieval debate that explores the progress of man’s soul from creation and the fall of man to redemption through Christ

best work: Preparatory Meditations

most famous poem: God’s Determinations

wonderful examples of Reformed spiritual experience and devotion

God’s Determinations

Idea that everything in life is according to God’s plan and God’s mercy triumphs

Carried on the meditation literary tradition begun in the middle ages and later practiced by Puritans.

Process of meditation involves:Immagination, Reason, Will

Subject: imagining a scene drawn from the Old or New Testaments, the details of the life of Christ, the terrors of hell, or a current situation.

Truth thru reason: deriving eternal truths (“invisible things of God”) from that scene through a process of reasoning about one’s own relation to God

Will: determining to have more faith, to give up sin, to abide by God's laws, or to have greater moral discernment

The Puritan Conception of The Mind: Man seen as a  "receptor" to divine will. 

Puritan’s believed that because of Adam's misuse of his faculties, God had withdrawn his blessing  from the reasoning process, causing a paralysis of the faculties and a disruption of the flow of information;

thus man could no longer automatically understand God's will.  Both meditation and the conversion process were attempts to "rewire" or "reconnect" this arc.