Reader Response Criticism to God's Determinations

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Reader Response Criticism to God's Determinations

For the reader demanding either rational sense or aesthetic pleasure from poetry, reading the preface to Edward Taylor's "God's 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, even the rationalist may regain interest in the succession of images describing the "building" of "this Globe"in what one might expect to be Biblical terms, but any reader looking for any logical relation between these images is quickly lost again, as metaphors for "this globe" shift from a wood-turning, to an iron casting, to a stone edifice, a corse...

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