Essay on Reader Response Criticism to Gods Determinations

Reader Response Criticism to Gods Determinationsnbsp;nbsp; For the reader demanding either rational sense or aesthetic pleasure from poetry, reading the preface to Edward Taylors Gods Determinations is humbling in ways unintended by the 17th century Puritan minister and poet. Rationality per se seems rejected at the start, where we are asked first to comprehend Infinity, and then to envision it (everything) beholding all things(also everything). Things get no clearer as we progress, as we find whatever infinity beholds in not everything but nothing, and that nothing itself to become the building material for all. Identifying the paradox, perhaps, as that which begins the Biblical account of the Creation,†¦show more content†¦Granted, logical incoherence might not trouble the reader demanding beauty from a poem, but even the poems most vivid images--rocks, rivers, curtains, a bright gem of some unmentioned size and color--dont offer nearly the delectable view found in a poem of Taylors contemporary Anne Bradstreet. Although Taylor certainly meant to humble his reader in the preface to his long poem, he certainly did not have a modern rationalist or aesthete audience in mind when he wrote it. His intended readers were rather his parishioners, 17th-century Puritan men and women for whom poetry was more a rhetorical than an aesthetic exercise, and for whom Gods ways were understood to be inscrutable--what we might call irrational--to the sons of Adam. Part of a people who left for the New World in order to enjoy a more perfect relation with their God, now in a third generation Taylors audience was beginning to forget what was for an orthodox Puritan their proper place among all things. Gods Determinations was Taylors way to remind his readers of that place. Taylor begins his poem by limning the first verses of Genesis, but from line 3 to line 19, nearly half the poem, he asks questions--questions which amplify Gods physical might and unimaginable power while they invite readers to remind themselves of a time (before their recent lapse in faith) when they had evinced a more proper respect for that power. In this sense, the very senselessness of TaylorsShow MoreRelatedMachiavelli s View Of A Good Ruler1232 Words   |  5 Pagespolitician, and historian from Italy who lived during the Renaissance Philosophy era of Europe. 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