Edward Taylor  1642-1729


Edward Taylor (1642 – June 29, 1729) was a colonial American poet, pastor and physician.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Taylor

The son of a non-Conformist yeoman farmer, Taylor was born in 1642 at Sketchley, Leicestershire, England. Following restoration of the monarchy and the Act of Uniformity under Charles II, which cost Taylor his teaching position, he emigrated in 1668 to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in America.

He chronicled his Atlantic crossing and early years in America (from April 26, 1668, to July 5, 1671) in his now-published Diary. He was admitted to Harvard College as a second year student soon after arriving in America and upon graduation in 1671 became pastor and physician at Westfield, on the remote western frontier of Massachusetts, where he remained until his death.

Taylor's poems, in leather bindings of his own manufacture, survived him, but he had left instructions that his heirs should "never publish any of his writings," and the poems remained all but forgotten for more than 200 years. In 1937 Thomas H. Johnson discovered a 7,000-page quarto manuscript of Taylor's poetry in the library of Yale University and published a selection from it in The New England Quarterly. The appearance of these poems, wrote Taylor's biographer Norman S. Grabo, "established [Taylor] almost at once and without quibble as not only America's finest colonial poet, but as one of the most striking writers in the whole range of American literature." His most important poems, the first sections of Preparatory Meditations (1682–1725) and God's Determinations Touching His Elect and the Elects Combat in Their Conversion and Coming up to God in Christ: Together with the Comfortable Effects Thereof (c. 1680), were published shortly after their discovery. His complete poems, however, were not published until 1960. He is the only major American poet to have written in the metaphysical style.
Taylor's poems were an expression of his deeply held religious views, acquired during a strict upbringing and shaped in adulthood by New England Congregationalist Puritans, who developed during the 1630s and 1640s rules far more demanding than those of their co-religionists in England. Alarmed by a perceived lapse in piety, they concluded that professing belief and leading a scandal free life were insufficient for full participation in the local assembly. To become communing participants, "halfway members" were required to relate by testimony some personal experience of God's saving grace leading to conversion, thus affirming that they were, in their own opinion and that of the church, assured of salvation. This requirement, expressed in the famous Halfway Covenant of 1662, was defended by such prominent churchmen as Increase and Cotton Mather and was readily embraced by Taylor, who became one of its most vocal advocates.
Though not for the most part identifiably sectarian, Taylor's poems nonetheless are marked by a robust spiritual content, characteristically conveyed by means of homely and vivid imagery derived from everyday Puritan surroundings. "Taylor transcended his frontier circumstances," biographer Grabo observed, "not by leaving them behind, but by transforming them into intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual universals."

He was twice married, first to Elizabeth Fitch, by whom he had eight children, five of whom died in childhood, and at her death to Ruth Wyllys, who bore six more children. Taylor himself died on June 29, 1729 in Westfield, Massachusetts.

Works

"The Joy of Church Fellowship Rightly Attended" speaks of feelings of joyful acceptance as expressed in the singing of passengers riding in a coach on the way to heaven, accompanied by others, not yet members of the church, on foot.
In "Huswifery," [Pronounced in his day with a silent 'w' and short 'i' making it sound like "hussifry"] possibly his best known poem, Taylor speaks of the Christian (specifically puritanical) faith in terms of a spinning wheel and its various components, asking, in the first verse,

Make me, O Lord, thy spinning wheel complete.

Thy Holy Word my distaff make for me.

Make mine affections thy swift flyers neat

And make my soul thy holy spool to be.

My conversation make to be thy reel

And reel the yarn thereon spun of thy wheel.

"Meditation Eight" [even though this is a metaphysical poem] is centered around the concept of God's being the living bread.
"The Preface to God's Determination" [By personifying Calvanistic beliefs about life and death] speaks of the Creation, when God "filleted the earth so fine" and "in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun."
"Upon a Spider Catching a Fly" depicts Satan as a spider weaving a web to entangle man [and in doing so portrays the dance of death] , who is saved by the mercy of God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Taylor

Biographical Sketch at "Poetry Foundation".

Biographical Sketch and Poems at poemhunter.com

Rev. Edward Taylor, 1642-1729 John Taylor Terry, ‎Emma C. Nason - 1892 - ‎Read - ‎More editions

Rev. Edward Taylor, 1642-1729 - Terry, John Taylor, 1822-1913

 

 

The Poems of Edward Taylor at Puritan Sermons.

 

http://www.puritansermons.com/poetry/taylor.htm

 

Edward Taylor (1642-1729) was a New England Puritan.  He was born in Leicestershire and became a school teacher with Puritan sympathies.  After the Great Ejection, Taylor left England, studied divinity at Harvard, and eventually became minister of Westfield, Massachusetts. Taylor was a colleague of Increase Mather and Charles Chauncey, and corresponded with Richard Baxter and other divines in England. He carried on a long-running controversy with Solomon Stoddard over the Lord's Supper, Taylor taking the position later held by Edwards. Donald Stanford says, "Taylor seems to have been endowed with most of those qualities usually connoted by the word puritan. He was learned, grave, severe, stubborn, and stiff-necked. He was very, very pious. But his piety was sincere. It was fed by a long continuous spiritual experience arising, so he felt, from a mystical communion with Christ. The reality and depth of this experience is amply witnessed by his poetry."  A perusal of his poetry shows that Taylor was a thorough going Calvinist. It was his custom to write a poem ("Meditation") before each Lord's Supper. They are wonderful examples of spiritual experience and devotion.
Here is Reformed theology in beautiful dress. The reader who loves Puritan sermons should welcome a chance to dive into this feast of Puritan poetry. They have been minimally edited, but do not be put off by the old spelling or unfamiliar words. Here is great literature that will repay slow examination, or even better, reading aloud.

These poems are taken from "The Poems of Edward Taylor," edited by Donald E. Stanford, U. Of North Carolina Press, 1989. Dr. Stanford gives an well-written introduction to the life of Taylor and makes many informed observations about his theology. This book is highly recommended.

 

From the website of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke

 

American Poetry of  the Seventeenth Century 

edited by Harrison T. Meserole

(Link goes to the section on Edward Taylor).