The Veiled Vision: The Role of Aesthetics in Early American Intellectual History

Abstract

T THE first publication of Edward Taylor's poetry was heralded as significant enough to bring about a total re-evaluation of American letters.' Twenty-three years later we find that Taylor has indeed shouldered his way into anthologies of American literature but has barely dimpled the still waters of early American intellectual history. This fact raises the problem posed succinctly some years ago by Professor Arthur 0. Lovejoy, who wrote that there are instances which the initial specialized interest of investigators in one province has produced a kind of blindness to aspects of the historical material with which they deal that are of great significance in relation to other parts of intellectual history.... Learned historians of literature, philosophy, religion, science, or social or political movements, sometimes fall into . . . omissions, simply because, knowing only their own subjects, they do not know all that is to be looked for in those subjects.2 Just such a blindness afflicts historians (literary as well as social, cultural, and intellectual) of the pre-Revolutionary period, especially in their use of literary materials. Taylor's poetry only makes the blind spot more obvious because Taylor is unquestionably a fine, if limited, artist, and the usual ways of talking about colonial poets simply cannot account either for his work or for its place in colonial intellectual history. Modern aesthetics pinpoints the historical problem here by raising a philosophical one. The perennial challenge to philosophers and critics of art has been to find a way of thinking and talking about art that, by transcending the particular limitations of all times and places and personalities, will apply universally-an aesthetic system as valid for the examination of