ABSTRACT
Readers of seventeenth-century religious poetry have often sensed an erotic strain in the devotional meditations of English poets: Herbert details his seduction by "Love" in The Temple, and Donne in the Holy Sonnets pleads with God to "ravish" him. What many readers do not know is that this theme fascinated poets on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Not only did the three major American Puritan poets-Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, and Edward Taylor-all make use of eroticism in their religious poetry; they brought it to a level of intensity that would surprise anyone who believes that Puritans were "puritanical" about sex. In fact, the imagery in which they embodied their relation to God would probably strike their self-styled descendents as downright pornographic. Latter-day "puritans" might be particularly shocked by the efforts of Wigglesworth and Taylor, whose work shows the stress of a different kind of erotic strain: the tension these male poets felt when addressing a male God as a lover, a tension that both tormented and inspired them.
