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Puritan Genealogies: Robert Lowell, Perry Miller, and the Postwar Jonathan Edwards

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2023

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Abstract

Robert Lowell challenged the mid-century canonization of the eighteenth-century Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. He objected to the way the influential historian Perry Miller instrumentalized Edwards to buttress support for US imperialism, exceptionalism, and Cold War politics. Challenging received views about the Puritan rhetoric of the most recognizable of postwar poets, this article contrasts Miller's captivating thesis of the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness” with Lowell's implication of Edwards in acts of colonial expansion and slavery. Lowell's Edwards emerges as a contradictory figure who, in Lowell's 1962 poem “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” is brought into discourse with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosopher-scientists Francis Bacon and Blaise Pascal. Lowell fashions a Puritan genealogy within which Edwards is a cosmopolitan interlocutor and forebear of confessionalism; however, the theologian's flawed moral self-scrutiny occasions the poet's self-reflexive satire, as well as his model for a faltering, self-correcting rectitude.

Type
Essay
Information
PMLA , Volume 138 , Issue 2 , March 2023 , pp. 274 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

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