Edward Taylor and the Cambridge Platonists

Abstract

JT IS EASY to see why orthodox Puritanism in seventeenth-century New England was not a good school for poets. Although its Augustinian piety fostered what Perry Miller calls inward ecstasy of regeneration, this ecstasy of personal religious experience was tempered by both rationalism and authoritarianism. The Puritan theologian, disapproving equally of extremes of Catholic authoritarianism, Anglican rationalism, and Enthusiastic belief in infallibility of spirit, sought to harmonize revealed and religion by maintaining an ordered relationship between divine revelations of Bible and natural revelations of human mind and human soul. At top stood biblical revelation, unquestionably superior to natural; next came logical reason, most trustworthy source of natural revelation; last came revelations of intuition, emotion, and aesthetic sense, valid only after being subjected to tests of authority and reason. Consequently imagination, emotions, and senses, essential assets of poet, were suspect until double-checked by combination of intellect and authority which constituted orthodox Puritan brand of scholasticism.1 Since orthodoxy of Edward Taylor has thus far gone unquestioned, it has been easier to account for his poetic limitations than for his considerable poetic achievement. His limitations have been emphasized in an article by Sidney E. Lind, who declares that Taylor was doomed to be a mediocre poet, whatever his native abilities, because he was an orthodox Puritan churchman in seventeenth-century New England. When at times the poet transcended clergyman Taylor may have looked at his verse with a sense of dismay; but his lapses from Puritan