SOURCE: A review of The Preface and John 1:14, in The Explicator, Vol. 51, No. 3, Spring, 1993, pp. 151–53.

In the following essay, Polette finds similarities in the conception of God held by Borges and that of seventeenth-century Puritan minister, Edward Taylor.

The power of the imagination to unify opposites and thus reveal the interplay between the eternal and the temporal, or the Divine and the human, links Edward Taylor, a seventeenth-century Puritan colonial minister, to Jorge Luis Borges, a twentieth-century secular Argentine writer. Separated by time and language, Taylor and Borges become, in a sense, two human eyes in the face of God. The two writers offer poetic visions of two important acts of creation: Taylor re-visions the wonder of Genesis in his “Preface,” and Borges sees with bright and broad eyes the poetry of St. John's Gospel. Both poets, via the imagination, reconcile and harmonize oppositional forces and ideas by...