Popular Measures

Book excerpt: Popular Measures examines the influence of Congregationalist church practices on poetry and poetics in early New England. It considers how the rejection of set prayers, and the privileging of more spontaneous oral forms (such as the plain-style sermon and the conversion narrative) in colonial churches influenced the style of locally written religious verse. The book consists of an overview of church practices and their implications for poetry, followed by a series of case studies focusing on texts written at different stages of the colony's development from 1640 to 1700: the Bay Psalm Book, Michael Wigglesworth's The Day of Doom, and Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations. The investigation concludes that colonial religious writers transformed the poetic conventions they had inherited from England in order to enhance the effectiveness of their verse in a culture that portrayed forms and formality as, at best, able to lead an individual only halfway on the journey towards salvation. --University of Delaware Press.