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爱德华·泰勒（1642-1729），美洲殖民时期的诗人、牧师和医生。
爱德华·泰勒（1644年至1729年）是一位英国出生的美国清教派牧师和诗人，是殖民时期备受清教徒推崇的美国文学初期两个重要的宗教诗人之一，也是美国文学拓荒时期宗教诗歌方面具有代表性的诗人，被公认为美国19世纪前最重要的诗人。他于1668年移民到美国波士顿，1671年毕业于哈佛大学，毕业后在马萨诸塞州的一个边陲小镇威斯菲尔德当牧师和医生，直到逝世。
泰勒在他有生之年仅发表过两首诗歌，直到1937年，人们在研究他的手稿时才认识到他那虔诚的诗歌的优美绝伦。研究者将他遗留的手稿加以整理，并首次发表了他的部分诗歌，其后他才被认为是一个重要的诗人。像约翰·多恩和乔治·赫伯特以及其他英国玄学派诗人一样，泰勒擅长运用精心选择的暗喻和丰富而唯美的比喻，也采用日常生活中的寻常措辞和比喻。《爱德华·泰勒诗集》（1939年）收录了他的杰作，包括写于约1685年的《上帝对其选民有影响的决定》和写于1682年至1726年的《内省录》中的部分。
泰勒以独树一帜的诗歌形式探索基督教的教义和教徒所信奉的“原始罪恶”。拙译《爱德华·泰勒诗选》选择诗人在不同创作时期不同风格的宗教诗78首。总之，作为清教徒的宗教诗人，泰勒的诗歌堪称17世纪美国诗坛的佳作。
本书价值在于，首先，它是一部国内首译的译著；第二，泰勒是美国早期诗歌的代表性诗人，他的诗歌在国内的首译将丰富美国文学的汉译读本；第三，国内在研究泰勒诗歌的论著或专著方面基本还是一项空白。 随着多元时代社会、政治、经济、文化等因素的急剧变化，在传统经典英美文学的研究不被看好的情形下，本书将为美国文学爱好者、美国诗歌研究者及其学者以及有志于美国诗歌研究的研究生、博士生带来一股沁人心脾的气息。（本文作者为重庆邮电大学外国语学院教授、翻译硕导，本书译者，本报有删节） 读家：高黎平
Life
The son of a nonconformist yeoman farmer, Taylor is thought to have been born in 1642 at Sketchley.[a], Leicestershire. There is conflicting evidence in regard to the dates and locations of events in his early life, but he grew up during the Commonwealth of England and under the influence of his father became a convinced Protestant dissenter. His childhood was spent on the family farm where he enjoyed the stability of a middle-class upbringing. His later writings are full of influences from his farmhouse childhood, both as regards imagery, and in the occasional use of the Leicestershire dialect.
Taylor's mother and father died in 1657 and 1658, respectively. He continued to develop alone and the extent of his formal education is unknown. For some time he worked as schoolmaster at Bagworth but following the restoration of the monarchy, Taylor refused to sign the Act of Uniformity, which cost him his teaching position. It was at this point that he began to write poetry in which he continued to lament the loss of religious freedoms after he emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in America in 1668.
Taylor's Atlantic crossing and subsequent years (from April 26, 1668, to July 5, 1671) are chronicled in his now-published Diary. Just two weeks after landing in Boston, he was admitted to Harvard College as a second year student to prepare himself for ordination, studying a variety of topics and languages. Upon graduation in 1671 his first choice was to stay at university and become a resident scholar. But just a week later he accepted the call to serve as pastor and physician at Westfield, on the remote western frontier of Massachusetts, where he remained until his death 58 years later.
He was twice married: first to Elizabeth Fitch, by whom he had eight children, five of whom died in childhood; and at her death to Ruth Wyllys, who bore him six more children. Taylor died in Westfield on June 29, 1729.
Poetry
Taylor's poems, in leather bindings of his own manufacture, survived him, but he had left explicit instructions that his heirs should never publish any of his writings and the poems remained all but forgotten for more than 200 years. In 1937 Thomas H. Johnson discovered a 7,000-page quarto manuscript of Taylor's poetry in the library of Yale University and published a selection from it in The New England Quarterly. The appearance of these poems, wrote Taylor's biographer Norman S. Grabo, "established [Taylor] almost at once and without quibble as not only America's finest colonial poet, but as one of the most striking writers in the whole range of American literature." His most important poems, the first sections of Preparatory Meditations (1682–1725) and God's Determinations Touching His Elect and the Elects Combat in Their Conversion and Coming up to God in Christ: Together with the Comfortable Effects Thereof (c. 1680), were published shortly after their discovery. His complete poems, however, were not published until 1960, by Donald E. Stanford.
Taylor's poems were an expression of his deeply held religious views, acquired during a strict upbringing and shaped in adulthood by New England Congregationalist Puritans, who during the 1630s and 1640s developed rules far more demanding than those of their co-religionists in England. Alarmed by a perceived lapse in piety of those in his congregation, he concluded that professing belief and leading a scandal-free life were insufficient for full participation in the local assembly. To become communing participants, "halfway members" were required to relate by testimony some personal experience of God's saving grace leading to conversion, thus affirming that they were, in their own opinion and that of the church, assured of salvation. This requirement, expressed in the famous Halfway Covenant of 1662, was readily embraced by Taylor, who became one of its most vocal advocates.
Taylor's poems are marked by a robust spiritual content, conveyed by means of homely and vivid imagery derived from everyday Puritan surroundings and glorifying the Christian experience. Written in conjunction with his sermons, his "Meditations" each explore scriptural themes and passages, often showing Taylor's own deep understanding of doctrine, as well as his struggle with some of the contradictions within strict Puritanism. His poetry is full of his expression of love of God and of his commitment to serve his creator amid the isolation of rural life. "Taylor transcended his frontier circumstances," biographer Grabo observed, "not by leaving them behind, but by transforming them into intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual universals."
Interpretation
When a first selection of his work was published, he was called simply “A Puritan sacred poet”. Soon after, however, he was being described as “an American metaphysical” and his poetry typified as ‘Colonial Baroque’. In his work appear such typically Baroque elements as acrostic verse, word play and use of conceits, as well as spoken meditations reminiscent of George Herbert. A later study compared his approach to that of such Baroque Poets as Giambattista Marino and Francisco de Quevedo, who in his time were influencing the Spanish-language poets of the New World.
Musical settings
Gerald Finzi made two settings from Taylor's Meditations. The first (op. 27.1) was the final stanza of Meditation 12, “Glorious in his apparel", which was composed as a marriage anthem for his sister-in-law in September 1946. The second (op. 27.2) was a setting of two internal stanzas from Meditation 20, “God is gone up with a triumphant shout”, commissioned for the 1951 St. Cecilia Festival Service at St.Sepulchre’s Church, Holborn.
Two settings have been made of Taylor's poem "Huswifery". That by Richard K. Winslow (b.1918) for chorus and piano was the winner of the American Music Competition of the Sigma Alpha Iota music fraternity in 1950. It was later set for A cappella chorus by Gordon Binkerd in 1970. Binkerd had earlier set “The Ebb and Flow” for A cappella chorus in 1966. In addition, the meditation "What Love Is This" was set as an anthem for four-part chorus and organ by Timothy Hoekman in 1978.
Notes
a hamlet in Aston Flamville parish.
Rowe, Karen E. Saint And Singer: Edward Taylor's Typology And The Poetics Of Meditation. Cambridge studies in American literature and culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
---."Edward Taylor." In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 3rd Edition, Paul Lauter, editor Richard Yarborough, et al., 2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin (1998), vol. 1, pp. 366–407.
References
Sketchley, Leicestershire - genealogy heraldry and history Retrieved 2018-03-08.
Francis Murphy, editor, The Diary of Edward Taylor (Springfield, Mass.,1964).
Norman S. Grabo, Edward Taylor (New York, 1961), pp. 22–24, 30.
Thomas H. Johnson, The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor (New York, 1939), p. 11.
Grabo, p. 17.
Taylor, Alan (2013). Colonial America: A Very Short Introduction. NY: Oxford University Press. p. 66. ISBN 978-0199766239. Retrieved November 11, 2020.
Edmund Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 62.
Thomas and Virginia Davis, editors, Edward Taylor vs. Solomon Stoddard (Newark, Del., University of Delaware Press, 1997), p.47.
"Edward Taylor". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved November 14, 2016.
Grabo, p. 173
New England Quarterly 10, June 1937, pp.290-322
Wallace Cable Brown, American Literature, Duke University 1944, Vol. 16. 3, pp. 186-197
Austin Warren, Kenyon Review, 3.3 (Summer 1941, pp.355-71
”Edward Taylor”, Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2004
Alfred Owen Aldridge, Early American Literature: A Comparatist Approach, Princeton University 1982: Chapter 2, “Edward Taylor and the American Baroque”
Welcome Sweet and Sacred Feast: Choral Settings of Metaphysical Poetry by Gerald Finzi, W. Elliot Jones, University of Arizona 2010, electronic dissertation, pages 90-100
Performance on YouTube
"Composer Wins Music Contest", The New York Times (30 August): 27.
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