Poetry

Ah, poetry! I am entering on a brief study of three early American poets—Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, and Edward Taylor. Bradstreet seems like an old friend, for I have read and written about her before, exploring the relation of earthly and heavenly concerns in her poetry. Of the questions I asked at the beginning of this semester, here are some that the poetry may address:

What was most important to the Puritans?
What was the nature of community and family interactions?
How did the Puritans integrate spiritual values with the demands of day-to-day life?
What was the role of words—written and oral, prose and poetry—in their culture?
And I’ll add: How does the congregation examine themselves and their commitment to God?

As pre-reading, I chose a volume by Jeffrey Hammond called Sinful Self, Saintly Self. Rather than putting modern constructs on writing that is so different from our own, Hammond asks: How did the Puritans write, read, and experience their own verse? I’d like to keep some of his points in mind as I read.
1. Remember that to us moderns, the Puritans are “the other”—their culture and worldview are foreign to modern America. Poems that seem grim and grave today may have been a “source of delight” to the Puritans.
2. There is apparently a debate about whether most Puritan poetry can qualify as art. Did Puritan poets sacrifice art to their religious didacticism? On this charge, many poets have been dismissed, with the exception of some of Bradstreet’s and Taylor’s works. However, it’s important to consider whose definition of art we are using.
3. The Bible was the basis for both writing and reading in that era. Poets often modeled their work after Biblical poetry like Psalms or Song of Solomon. Further, readers of the Bible were expected to judge their own hearts against Scripture. A religious poem was like “an index of spiritual condition”—if your heart responded fervently, it was an indication of your nearness to God.