Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor

The popular notion that the Puritans were wholly focused on their religion is not much of an exaggeration. Even a casual exploration of writing from the colonial period in America underscores this thematic dominance: Puritan authors felt duty-bound to use their writing to support believers to stay the righteous course. The Puritans believed that life on earth was test of faith in God and an opportunity to demonstrate an unalterable dedication to living righteous lives. The quotidian existence was a battle against evil, the victory of which required intimate knowledge of God's will and absolute avoidance of hazards to the spirit. Writers such as Anne Bradshaw and Edward Taylor used their talents to help their brethren stay on a very straight and narrow path, indeed.

The Puritans were a surprisingly well-educated group of people (Rowe). Edward Taylor was a teacher and studied at Harvard (Rowe, Edward Taylor). Writing was a pastime for Taylor; he was kept busy with his duties as a minister, civic leader, and doctor (Rowe, Edward Taylor). Interestingly, Taylor's poetry was not discovered until the 1930s (Rowe, Edward Taylor). His best work is considered to be his petitions to God and Christ to prepare him to preach God's word to his congregation (Rowe, Edward Taylor). Taylor didn't feel worthy of God's grace or the act of administering the Lord's Supper; these Preparatory Meditations were scaffolding to his doubts and a form of personal devotion (Rowe, Edward Taylor). As in Huswifery, many of his poems were prayers of supplication: "Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheele compleat / Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee / Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate / And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee." Taylor's spirituality seemed to be nurtured by what he believed was a mystical communion with Christ (Rowe, Edward Taylor). Indelible traces of this close relationship with Christ are seen throughout his poetry (Rowe, Edward Taylor).

For Puritans who felt compelled to write, there was a need to balance their duty-bound lives with their creative impulses. In Taylor's case, the daily demands of life and multiple civic roles won out. Taylor may not have felt he could afford to appear engaged in something as frivolous as poetry, or he may simply not have valued his poems enough to share them (Rowe, Edward Taylor). By all reports, he was sincerely very pious and his responsibilities to his community were great (Rowe, Edward Taylor). His writing, when it did reach the public eye, was functional, serving as funeral elegies for public figures, or transcriptions of metrical paraphrases of the Psalms (1-9, 18). (Rowe, Edward Taylor)

The degree to which Taylor held to the strictest of Puritan rules and expectations is perhaps be illustrated by his ongoing debate with Soloman Stoddard about communion (Rowe, Edward Taylor). Stoddard eschewed many of the more rigid Puritan beliefs and was focused on maintaining the church membership more than he was policing the congregation for breaches of protocol (Rowe, Edward Taylor). Stoddard believed that everyone who was known to live uprightly in the community should be able to partake of communion; Taylor insisted that only those who had experienced a spiritual conversion and were full-fledged members of the congregation were fit to participate in the Lord's Supper (Rowe, Edward Taylor). Taylor's reasoning is a natural extension of religious thought at the time, in which rigidity was part of the position of righteousness (Rowe, Edward Taylor). Taylor was bound to the Calvinist belief in the literalness of the Scriptures as the Word of God (Rowe, Edward Taylor).

For women -- albeit, there were few women writers at the time who were the caliber of Anne Bradshaw -- becoming a popular poet was an occurrence of substantive suspect. So much so that a prologue to Anne Bradshaw's book, offered to the public by John Woodbridge, Bradshaw's brother-in-law, offers the following clarification -- lest anyone harbor suspicions (Cowell).

"…the worst effect of his reading will be unbelief, which will make him question whether it be a woman's work and ask is it possible. If any do, take this as an answer from him that dares avow it; it is the work of a woman, honored, and esteemed where she lives, for her gracious demeanor, her eminent parts, her pious conversation, her courteous disposition, her exact diligence in her place, and discreet managing of her family occasions, and more than so, these poems are the fruit bot of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments." (Cowell, Anne Bradstreet).

The daughter of an earl's estate manager, Anne Bradshaw had private tutors and access to the earl's library (Cowell). She immigrated to America with her family and married a man who eventually became the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the precursor to the city of Boston (Cowell). Bradshaw's poetry was very much concerned with Puritan doctrine, but it was not pedantic. She seemed primarily to work toward clear expression of her experience, and the tensions that made up the fabric of her life: life in a frontier environment where she practiced "exact diligence in her place" and the pleasure she took in raising eight children and the poetry that drew her to steal time away from duties to write (Cowell). In her poem, To My Dear and Loving Husband, is an example of her poetry that was perhaps the most well received. Her rich expression of domesticity is wrapped in pious references (Cowell). "Thy love is such I can no way repay / The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray / Then while we live, in love let us so persevere / That when we live no more, we may live ever." (Cowell)

The rules of the Congregationalist Puritans during the 1630s and 1640s were stricter than those of their religious peer organizations in England (Rowe, Saint and Singer). The colonial Puritans' concerns about the back-sliding and piety lapses of the congregations led them to believe that something more profound than just professing a belief in God was a necessary precursor to being enfolded into the church (Rowe, Saint and Singer). Since salvation was an act of grace and did not occur in response to the profession of belief and the living of a scandal free life (Rowe, Saint and Singer). To be full members of the congregation, people who identified as halfway members had to publicly communicate about some redeeming personal experience that gave testimony to God's grace and led them to conversion (Rowe, Saint and Singer). Once converted, they were entitled to participate in the full sacraments of the church. This belief formed the basis for the Halfway Covenant of 1962, a document Taylor fully supported (Rowe, Saint and Singer).

Conclusion

The erudite and disciplined colonial writers of Puritan bent were convinced that their actions in this life could be a conduit to a heavenly afterlife. To the grace they believed in, they hitched the notion that believers must avoid faltering in faith and in saintly practice. From the writing of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, and a host of other Puritan writers of the time, it is possible to understand how precarious their position must have seemed. A believer simply could not let his or her attention wander from the rigid religious practices that were intended to save their very souls.