ABSTRACT
The unity of poetry as a special kind of discourse—it all has line breaks—can sometimes lead one to forget how different are the contexts in which poetry appears. In Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan (see chapter 3), poetry brings Morton’s men and the Plymouth Pilgrims to the brink of violence. The settlers at Mount Wollaston, preparing for a maypole celebration, quite naturally had “a poem in readiness made.” True, it was a bit “Enigmaticall.” The Puritans didn’t appreciate the riddle, thought Morton, because they lacked the knowledge of classical literature to decode it; he gives a lesson in literary criticism to show how little they knew. And true, the accompanying song was performed by the company in a somewhat “Bacchanalian” manner, with the singers not only inviting Indian women to join them but playing at Jupiter and Ganymede among themselves. The Puritans “distasted” such sport. William Bradford, for his part, wrote that Morton “to show his poetry composed sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness.” Or, Bradford writes laconically, “worse practices.”
