Neighbors

Edward Taylor

Edward Taylor (1642-1729), of Westfield, is the second notable American poet, after Anne Bradstreet (1612-72), and the first poet of the Berkshires. No poet could hope for a better role model, since an unfettered curiosity was the engine of his creativity, as the excerpt quoted below demonstrates.

Already well educated upon his arrival at Boston in 1668, he studied for the ministry at Harvard, graduating in two years, then accepting a call to go to the western frontier to become minister and physician in Westfield, on the eve of King Philips War. His leadership kept the people from fleeing in the aftermath of the Deerfield Massacre in 1704.

Besides succeeding in establishing a vibrant settlement in the wilderness during the remaining 58 years of his life, he left a body of written matter that would remain hidden for 200 years. One of his grandsons was Ezra Stiles (1727-95), 7th president of Yale College and a founder of Brown University.

Poetry by Edward Taylor

With its dual roots in 17th century diction and dogma, I expected Taylor’s poetry to be overrun with stale diction and errant dogma. My biases were overcome as soon as I read these lines, found in The Preface to his long serial poem, God’s Determination touching his Elect:

Who made the Sea’s its selvedge, and it locks
Like a Quilt Ball within a Silver Box?
Who Spread its Canopy? Or Curtains spun?
Who in this Bowling Alley bowled the Sun?

Those few lines display enough of a nimble imagination to make Edward Taylor worth reading, even long since the world, as he contemplated it, has sunk deep beneath the surface of today’s artificially-informed virtual reality.

Edward Taylor resources online

Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), long-time resident of neighboring Conway, MA, studied English at Yale and Law at Harvrd. After service in Europe during the first world war and some time in magazine journalism, he accepted the job as Librarian of Congress, at the suggestion of his Harvard classmate Felix Frankfurter. That places him at the beginning of the impressment of poetry into the executive department of the federal government, which would be a good thing so long as Americans only elected poetry lovers to the presidency.

Mr. MacLeish was present at JFK’s last major speech, at Amherst one month before Dallas. The President quoted this line from his poem Invocation to the Social Muse: There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style.

Among the many accomplishments that distinguish him among the fellowship of American poets celebrated here, he is the only one to have collaborated with Bob Dylan, on a project that failed to come to fruition, however. (He wanted to transform his play JB into a musical)’ Here is the opening stanza of his famous poem Ars Poetica:

Poetry by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

Archibald MacLeish resources online

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) spent the last decades of her life adjacent to the Berkshires at her Steepletop estate in Austerlitz, NY.

Ms. Millay was born in Maine and moved to Greenwhich Village after graduating from Vassar College in 1917. Her poetry, which first won prizes in her teens, led to becoming began recipient of the first two Pulitzer Prizes awarded to a woman, thus her stature in the literary world is unquestioned.

Poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ebb

I know what my heart is like
Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
Left there by the tide,
A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.