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When the young minister-poet Edward Taylor moved to Westfield, Massachusetts, in November of 1671, he had written several poems. When he died there fifty-eight years later, in addition to thousands of sermons and more than 2,000 manuscript pages of original prose, he had composed some 40,000 lines of poetry. For two of his poetic projects in particular, Taylor is considered - with Anne Bradstreet - one of British North America's most accomplished poets. Daniel Patterson's Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations and Preparatory Meditations: A Critical Edition reconsiders the texts of Taylor's two major works for the first time since Donald Stanford's 1960 edition. This volume also offers the first complete text of all the Meditations that Taylor transcribed into his Poetical Works manuscript. The restoration of Taylor's text, however, is the most enduring value of this edition, which is designed to become the new standard edition of these poems. The scores of substantive variants and the hundreds of variants in matters of punctuation and capitalization existing between the Patterson and Stanford texts are fully reported in the back of the volume, as are all editorial emendations. Ulti
Popular Measures examines the influence of Congregationalist church practices on poetry and poetics in early New England. It considers how the rejection of set prayers, and the privileging of more spontaneous oral forms (such as the plain-style sermon and the conversion narrative) in colonial churches influenced the style of locally written religious verse. The book consists of an overview of church practices and their implications for poetry, followed by a series of case studies focusing on texts written at different stages of the colony's development from 1640 to 1700: the Bay Psalm Book, Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom, and Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations. The investigation concludes that colonial religious writers transformed the poetic conventions they had inherited from England in order to enhance the effectiveness of their verse in a culture that portrayed forms and formality as, at best, able to lead an individual only halfway on the journey towards salvation. --University of Delaware Press.