Edward Taylor (poet)

Edward Taylor (born around 1642 near Coventry , England ; died June 29, 1729 in Westfield , Massachusetts ) was a New England poet .

Life

Taylor was born into a Puritan family and likely studied for the priesthood in England but was not admitted to the Church of England because of his religious views .

In 1668 Taylor moved to New England and continued his studies at Harvard College . In 1671 he became pastor and doctor of the small parish of Westfield and remained so until his death. Taylor was married twice - first to Elizabeth Fitch, second to Ruth Wyllys - and had a total of 14 children.

In accordance with his will, his poems were not published during his lifetime. He bequeathed the manuscripts to his grandson Ezra Stiles, who later became President of Yale University . They ended up in the university library there, where they were only discovered in 1937.

plant

Central to his work are his around 200 Preparatory Meditations , which have been created since the 1680s. Taylor wrote these poems each month in preparation for the sermon of the monthly ward meeting. They are testimony to a godly but often doubted person.

In doing so, Taylor tries to express his highly differentiated, mystical and religious experiences by dispensing with proximity to everyday language and using the mannerist style of the metaphysical poets . The special mode of action is based above all on the rigorously executed conceit or concetto , a sought-after, complex metaphorical image that can only be understood through the analysis of its functions.

Just like the Preparatory Meditations , his Occasional Poems are also based on the same principles and describe an ongoing, meditative as well as reflective self-founding process of the lyrical-religious self, which is fundamentally in itself incomplete, but always according to a terminating, principally provisional expression seeks.

This provisional nature of the individual pictures or poems urges us to constantly create new ones. Taylor's poetic work is accordingly extensive; the way the conceit is used is naturally varied. A number of the Occasional Poems consist of the exploration of a single image, while the Preparatory Meditations often link different images with one another, also at the points where they are based on the dominant image of a Bible text.

Taylor also wrote a Metrical History of Christianity , which primarily retells the fate of early Christian martyrs in blank verse , as well as God's Determinations Touching His Elect , which reflects his religious convictions, i.e. Calvinist beliefs such as the doctrine of predestination , as well as the treatises Commentary on the Four Gospels and Christographia , or a Discourse on the Virtues and Character of Christ .

In Taylor's own assessment, there was not necessarily a place for his poems with their highly artificial language in the society of the late 17th and early 18th centuries; therefore he wrote his works not primarily for the contemporary audience, but rather for posterity. Accordingly, his poems were published much later in the 20th century.

literature

Thomas Marion Davis: A Reading of Edward Taylor . Associated University Presses, Cranbury (NJ) 1992, ISBN 0-87413-428-5
Robert Hass: Edward Taylor . In: Jonathan FS Post (ed.), Green Thoughts, Green Shades , Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2002, ISBN 978-0520227521 ( online )

Web links

Literature by and about Edward Taylor in the catalog of the German National Library
Harvard Square Library: Edward Taylor (English)

Individual evidence

↑ See Hartwig Isernhagen : Beginnings - The early colonies of the 17th century: Edward Taylor. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, second updated edition 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 1-20, here p. 17 ff.
↑ See Hartwig Isernhagen : Beginnings - The early colonies of the 17th century: Edward Taylor. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, second updated edition 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 1-20, here p. 18.

personal data
SURNAME	Taylor, Edward
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American poet
DATE OF BIRTH	around 1642
PLACE OF BIRTH	near Coventry , England
DATE OF DEATH	June 29, 1729
Place of death	Westfield , Massachusetts

[1] See Hartwig Isernhagen : Beginnings - The early colonies of the 17th century: Edward Taylor. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, second updated edition 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 1-20, here p. 17 ff.

[2] See Hartwig Isernhagen : Beginnings - The early colonies of the 17th century: Edward Taylor. In: Hubert Zapf (ed.): American literary history . J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart 1996, second updated edition 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 1-20, here p. 18.