SOURCE: Hammond, Jeffrey A. “Discovery and Reaction—before 1960.” In Edward Taylor: Fifty Years of Scholarship and Criticism, pp. 1-21. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993.

In the following excerpt, Hammond provides an overview of the twentieth-century discovery and publication of Taylor's poetry and the immediate critical reaction it inspired.

“It appears that the poems are of a nature unlike anything yet encountered in colonial American verse, and they warrant the belief that in Edward Taylor, Puritan America fostered unawares a poet of real, not merely historic, importance; one whose fertility in image-making, tenderness, rapture, and delicacy, as well as intense devotion, ally the staunch Puritan with the ‘sacred poets’ of the early seventeenth century” (1937:291). With these words, published in the summer of 1937, Thomas H. Johnson introduced the literary world to Edward Taylor, the obscure Puritan parson who revolutionized early American literary history.

In his own day Taylor was best...