Chapter 3 - The World, the Flesh, and God in Puritan Poetry

Summary

More than two hundred American Puritans wrote poetry that is still extant. In their worldview, the physical world was itself a book written by God to connect this world with the next, to link the lowly creatures with their creator, because that, which may be known of God, is manifest in them. Standardized prayer was criticized as a papist and Anglican ritual, because any good minister could and should pray in the spirit. The practice of meditation, of making abstract doctrine real and true to human experience through an intense focus, was itself a poetics, away of channeling thought and feeling in language. Anne Bradstreet, Roger Williams, Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor and Jane Colman Turell, wrote poetry, as a part of their religion, an unending struggle to connect transient life and lasting truth, to work out the meanings of life, to connect the natural and supernatural orders.