SOURCE: Adams, Percy G. “Edward Taylor's Love Affair with Sounding Language.” In Order in Variety: Essays and Poems in Honor of Donald E. Stanford, edited by R. W. Crump, pp. 12-31. Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Adams discusses Taylor's use of alliteration and consonance in his verse.

Much has been written about Edward Taylor's curious and fascinatingly attractive mind, his similarities to George Herbert, his poetic kinship with Emily Dickinson, his typology, his passionate love of Christ, his Meditations—so many of which were inspired by the sensual Canticles, his homely and even shocking metaphors, his images from nature and music and everyday life and the Bible, his vocabulary in general, his “imperfect” rhymes, and the “dialectical” features of those rhymes, but almost nothing has been said about his great and lasting love of sounding language.¹ This love was not just of...