Seventh International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Colonial American poet Edward Taylor’s Preparatory Meditation poems can be seen as a technological aid to speech. Past scholars have focused on these canonical poems’ use of theology and aesthetics, citing the poems’ vivid imagery and passionate lyricism. Yet, their work has not shown how these very qualities- sensuousness, as well as pleas for perfect communication to God-amongst others, actually point to the poems’ role in an early New England media ecology. The poems play a vigorous role in the interplay of orality and literacy in Puritan society. This paper examines the poems’ text and context for how they amplify oral thought and expression, even though they are written. This reinterpretation of Taylor’s poems reveals how speech deeply shaped why and how poetry was written in early America. It shows how literacy may not completely dismantle oral thought, as McLuhan and Ong might suggest, but rather encourage it. I focus on Taylor’s poems in his Christographia series, in which all his sermons have been preserved, scrutinizing the poems’ sensory details, meditative structure, and evocation of speech. The poems allow Taylor to emphasize the auditory nuances of voice, focus on pre-speech unformed thought or “interiority,” and renew his desire for the power of sounded words. Puritan New England may be shaped by the richness of speech more than its proliferation of printed pages would indicate.