When the young minister-poet Edward Taylor moved to Westfield, Massachusetts, in November of 1671, he had written several poems. When he died there fifty-eight years later, in addition to thousands of sermons and more than 2,000 manuscript pages of original prose, he had composed some 40,000 lines of poetry. For two of his poetic projects in particular, Taylor is considered - with Anne Bradstreet - one of British North America's most accomplished poets. Daniel Patterson's Edward Taylor's Gods Determinations and Preparatory Meditations: A Critical Edition reconsiders the texts of Taylor's two major works for the first time since Donald Stanford's 1960 edition. This volume also offers the first complete text of all the Meditations that Taylor transcribed into his Poetical Works manuscript. The restoration of Taylor's text, however, is the most enduring value of this edition, which is designed to become the new standard edition of these poems. The scores of substantive variants and the hundreds of variants in matters of punctuation and capitalization existing between the Patterson and Stanford texts are fully reported in the back of the volume, as are all editorial emendations. Ulti

Now considered America's foremost colonial poet, Edward Taylor was virtually unknown until some of his poems were discovered in the Yale library and published in 1937. The intellectual brilliance and the emotional intensity of his poetical meditations have led critics to compare him to John Donne and George Herbert. These poems are now recognized as one of the great achievements in American devotional literature.

Over the last two decades a major revaluation has been taking place of the colonial Puritan imagination. With the growth of interest in early American literature has come increasing recognition of its quality and a better understanding of its place in the continuity of American culture. However, much of the best critical work to date has been published as articles in scholarly journals, and in bringing together for the first time the best work in this growing field the present anthology fills a number of important needs. It is at once a valuabale and accessible introduction for students, a summing-up of a new enterprise, and a guide for further studies.

Edward Taylor's dilemma as Puritan, preacher, and poet was to discover a way in human language to express the ineffable Divine. This first book-length study of Edward Taylor's prose suggests that Taylor's use of language illustrates the very theological truths he struggled with as a minister and a writer. Taylor's poetic metaphors have long been noted for their vitality and linguistic absurdity. This penetrating study of Taylor's Christographia sermons concludes that Taylor intentionally forces his types and metaphors into failure to illustrate how necessary it is for the incarnate Christ to redeem both the medium and the messenger. The author places Taylor in historical, theological, and stylistic contexts and then looks at how both types and metaphors used by Taylor tend to follow the pattern of establishment, failure, and redemption. By focusing on the typological images of Moses, David, and the Jewish religious ceremonies, for example, Taylor shows how such images both point toward Christ and obscure the truth of Christ. By using metaphorical images of light, plants, and "living buildings," Taylor attempts to paint a portrait of Christ for his congregation, all the while insisting that human language can never illustrate the Divine.

An introduction to and advice on book collecting with a glossary of terms and tips on how to identify first editions and estimated values for over 20,000 collectible books published in English (including translations) over the last three centuries-about half are literary titles in the broadest sense (novels, poetry, plays, mysteries, science fiction, and children's books); and the other half are non-fiction (Americana, travel and exploration, finance, cookbooks, color plate, medicine, science, photography, Mormonism, sports, et al).

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