Puritan Poets and Poetics

Book excerpt: The first comprehensive and integrated critical survey of colonial American poetry, this book focuses on the New England Puritans, who produced the most notable poets, relating them contextually to writers of the Middle Atlantic and Southern colonies and to their European forebears. Following a general introduction by the editor, the book's three parts present: first, the social and aesthetic context in which the poets worked; second, the individual achievements of nine of the most successful poets; thin the varied forms the poets used sacred and profane, serious and humorous, formal and informal.