SOURCE: Keller, Karl. “Edward Taylor, The Acting Poet.” In Puritan Poets and Poetics: Seventeenth-Century American Poetry in Theory and Practice, edited by Peter White, pp. 185-97. University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Keller explores the persona Taylor assumed in his poetry in order to demonstrate his humility and sense of unworthiness.

The Connecticut River Valley poet Edward Taylor (1642-1729) had to be invented. There was no way of knowing that someone remotely that good would have lived at that remote time and in that remote place. We could not have guessed him from those who settled in the generation before him or from his contemporaries or from those who followed. We could not have guessed him from the articulated esthetics of the period either, nor from what we have known about the dogmatics or demographics or dynamics of the time. Except for...