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愛德華·泰勒（1642-1729），美洲殖民時期的詩人、牧師和醫生。
愛德華·泰勒（1644年至1729年）是一位英國出生的美國清教派牧師和詩人，是殖民時期備受清教徒推崇的美國文學初期兩個重要的宗教詩人之一，也是美國文學拓荒時期宗教詩歌方面具有代表性的詩人，被公認為美國19世紀前最重要的詩人。他於1668年移民到美國波士頓，1671年畢業於哈佛大學，畢業後在馬薩諸塞州的一個邊陲小鎮威斯菲爾德當牧師和醫生，直到逝世。
泰勒在他有生之年僅發表過兩首詩歌，直到1937年，人們在研究他的手稿時纔認識到他那虔誠的詩歌的優美絶倫。研究者將他遺留的手稿加以整理，並首次發表了他的部分詩歌，其後他纔被認為是一個重要的詩人。像約翰·多恩和喬治·赫伯特以及其他英國玄學派詩人一樣，泰勒擅長運用精心選擇的暗喻和豐富而唯美的比喻，也采用日常生活中的尋常措辭和比喻。《愛德華·泰勒詩集》（1939年）收錄了他的傑作，包括寫於約1685年的《上帝對其選民有影響的决定》和寫於1682年至1726年的《內省錄》中的部分。
泰勒以獨樹一幟的詩歌形式探索基督教的教義和教徒所信奉的“原始罪惡”。拙譯《愛德華·泰勒詩選》選擇詩人在不同創作時期不同風格的宗教詩78首。總之，作為清教徒的宗教詩人，泰勒的詩歌堪稱17世紀美國詩壇的佳作。
本書價值在於，首先，它是一部國內首譯的譯著；第二，泰勒是美國早期詩歌的代表性詩人，他的詩歌在國內的首譯將豐富美國文學的漢譯讀本；第三，國內在研究泰勒詩歌的論著或專著方面基本還是一項空白。 隨着多元時代社會、政治、經濟、文化等因素的急劇變化，在傳統經典英美文學的研究不被看好的情形下，本書將為美國文學愛好者、美國詩歌研究者及其學者以及有志於美國詩歌研究的研究生、博士生帶來一股沁人心脾的氣息。（本文作者為重慶郵電大學外國語學院教授、翻譯碩導，本書譯者，本報有刪節） 讀傢：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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