THE PURITAN LEGACY

Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury

American literature is essentially a modern, recent and international literature.

That came from the meeting between the land with Indians, discoverers and
settlers who populate the New World a virgin continent.
The discoverers and settlers imposed on the North American continent their
forms of interpretation and narrative, their Christian history, their iconography,
their book The Bible, their science and technology, their settlement practices
and modes of commerce.
The fact is the main direction of the American literary imagination was formed
from the intersection between the European Renaissance mind and the new land
with the myths they brought, learned and constructed after they came.
America was opened up by exploration and discovery from fifteenth century and
was place for the imaginings Europeans. Columbus confirmed some of their
expectation and disproved others. There were wonders, cities of gold, strange
civilizations, unusual savages; there were also danger, death, disease and cruelty.
In effect, America became the space exploration program of an expansive,
intensely curious and often genocidal era of European adventuring.
From the many different European societies who came to America, there were
the American books; often these are narratives of travel and exploration, of
religious mission and letters home.
The first permanent English settlement began writing annals, geographical
records, social, scientific and naturalist observation. When Jamestown in
Virginia in 1607 was founded under difficult and dangerous circumstances it had
its recorder. Smith emphasizes adventure, missionary intention and the potentials
of the rich American plenty; he also emphasizes privation and dangerous conflict
with the Indians. Still, the story of his rescue from danger by the virtuous Indian
princess Pocahontas this story gave Virginia and North America the first great
romantic table in English, creating a version of the Noble and Remediable
Savage that prospered freely in the European mind.
A description of New England talks about the practical problems of travel,
settlement, terrain, climate, crops and prospects for cultivation. Smith shows us
the need to narrate the Christian faith in mission, moral notion of the value of
plantation, cultivation and honest toil.
Plymouth Plantation in 1620 and Massachusetts in 1630, following Smiths own
maps of settlement; Maryland in 1664, Pennsylvania in 1681.
THEY WERE THE PURITANS, who determined to maintain the purity of their
separatist Protestant fait, did aim to begin a new process of erecting town,
teaching virtue and reforming things a truly fresh start.
Pilgrim Fathers brought the technology of printing and soon produced an
American book on American soil, the Bay Psalme Book of 1640, they wrote first
themselves and their colonial successors, they also, like Smith, had in mind
readers in Europe, they were still writing for English eyes, seeking to convert
English minds.
God guides the encounter between the traveler and the New World. They read
the BIBLE and especially its opening chapters Genesis and Exodus, the tale of
Chosen People and Promised Land.

The Puritan imagination was central to the nature of American writing and
puritan narratives defined a shape for the writing of America.
Puritanism turned into a hard-working enterprise, relations with Europe and
England became distant and estranged and the thirteen American colonies finally
declared their independence and became the First New Nation.
Willian Bradford was a leader of the Mayflower separatists and governor of
Plymouth for thirty years after its settlement.
Bradford and any other Puritan insisting on radical purification of religious
belief and practice and the voyage to New England was an act of faith and the
simple truth was an account of the significant actions of Gods Chosen People,
sent on a divine errand into the Wilderness.
John Winthrop was governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north
founded ten years after Plymouth.
Both Bradford and Winthrop see the migrants as none other than Israelites; the
facts are clear allegorical and transcendental meanings, evidence of Gods
participation in the successive stages of human history.
The material of journals is the stuff of millenarian epic, but it is epic without
known outcome. Signs and meanings are always uncertain and satanic deception
is always a possibility.
The Puritans were attempting to found a new order of society based on a new
covenant of men and a new relation of religion and law.
The essential elements the separatists brought with them they left Britain to
found their Bible were the search for the relationship between Gods and mans
history, between providential intentions and individual conscience.
Central to the Puritans life was the question of individual election and
damnation, the relation of private destiny to predestined purpose.
The central expression of the American Puritan mind were the history, annals,
scientific observation, the diary and so on, the Puritan period is not what we
would now call imaginative literature. Metaphor and typology are the shaping
elements of Puritan writing.
British Protestant spirit had its own metaphysical and allegorical resources that
marked early Puritan writing and later American literature.
Puritan thought anticipated many aspects of Romanticism especially
transcendentalism. But Romanticism celebrated the imagination as a path to
spiritual understandings, the Puritan mind required piety.
Anne Bradstreet was, perhaps, the first major woman poet in English language.
Also born in England, she sailed in 1630 on the Arbella. Both her father and her
husband (by whom she had eight children) were governors of Massachusetts
Bay.
Anne produced poetry between domestic duties, not about great political,
historical or theological matters, and represents a crucial antecedent.
Anne acquired a contemporary reputation as the first author of American poems;
her brother-in-law published her work in London in 1650.
Anne drew for models on the writing of Renaissance England and her themes
were her own provincial and displaced world, her domestic life. Its create
tension in her verse.
Edward Taylor has been recognized as the major Puritan poet, the best and the
most productive America would produce till the mid-nineteenth century.

Taylor born in Britain and received his education there before emigrating in
1668. A minister in Westfield, Massachusetts, he was a Puritan first and a poet
second; his poetry never deviates from dedication to the glory and goodness of
God.
Taylors poetry shows that there is an extraordinary compatibility between the
Puritan world view and the sensibility of metaphysical verse.
Taylors verse employs conceits of the metaphysical tradition to render the
psychological and emotional pressures of New England Calvinism, using the
linguistic intensity of poetic creation as itself a means of reaching toward God
and redemption.
Taylors poems pass beyond literary artifice to become emblems of transcendent
relationships, beyond allegory into the moral, psychological and symbolic
intensity that comes to characterize the American writing.
The narrative drew the essential Puritan myth: a chosen people crossing the sea
to enter a wilderness peopled with devils, suffering and seeking redemption.
For Taylor, soul and body, grace and sin, the will of God and the intransigence of
his fallen creature, all require violence of conception and expression to resolve
their contradiction.
Taylors verse employs the conceits of the metaphysical tradition to render the
psychological and emotional pressures of New England Calvinism, therely using
the linguistic intensity of poetic creation redemption.
Taylors poems pass beyond literary artifice to become emblems of transcendent
relationships, beyond allegory into the moral, psychological and symbolic
intensity that comes to characterize so much of the richest American writing.
Puritans cosmic, transcendental and providential vision, their faith and escape
from Old World to a redemptive new one their exceptionalist belief in the
powerful recovery of history lingers in American culture.