History gives us breadth: people in action on a grand stage, consequential ideas with great if unforeseen consequences; the demographer’s statistics and tables distil huge movements into tables we can wrap our minds around. But literature, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether reporting or reflecting, chooses a smaller stage. But it also catches that universal in a distilled moment – in the feelings of a narrator, a character. It may be anecdotal but it’s anecdotal accessible to our sympathy. How much have we changed between 1650 and 2012? In some ways, a lot. Fogel’s charts demonstrate that. In some ways, not so much. We remain human.
Puritan poets are not everyone’s cup of tea the plain style helps them age more slowly, but they are still the product of a culture remarkably different from ours a frontier, theocentric if not theocratic. But a death in the family is always shattering & love for a mate is timeless. I’ll put up the Bradstreet love poems next week, but for today, let’s look at the consolations poets found in their art & their beliefs with the death of children and a spouse. (And the brevity of these children’s lives may help us better understand how large and intimate the changes Fogel describes have been.) Even if their experiences would be uncommon today, parents may still bury children and we find we understand the poet’s feelings (in hearts we recognize at once) and to a lesser degree how they thought (in minds we enter with more difficulty).
(his tables alone are beyond me besides much else). Still, reading him, I pause in delight and gratitude. The very concepts of “premature death,” “wasting,” and “stunting” open windows time becomes different much as Amerians in the mid-nineeenth century saw their horizons recede & enlarge. It stretched their limbs & imaginations: leaving from St. Louis, they knew some of that land would be theirs – earned by sweat as it never could be in the still feudal worlds some came from. Space liberated them. Fogel describes an enlargement of time – time for us, time with and for our children. He also describes productivity, consciousness – the energy to live fully in that time we’re given (the image of French peasants hibernating in the winters to save food doesn’t leave my mind).
pays descriptive tribute: “And what a rich blessing GOD sent us in him, almost Fifty eight Years Experience has taught us.” He was not ordained for 8 years, for “the Town being till then greatly distress’d by the Indian War [
observes, “the social implications of Congregationalism, of the Covenant theology , and of the analogy between New Englanders and the Jewish nation provided little room for a recluse. Consequently, Taylor’s religious life forced him into the activities of his own community.” (Preface). Taylor was a Puritan who quite successfully lived in the world , but equally successfully kept a private & artistic life dedicated to his God. 
argues American culture/literature narrows focus from God to Nation to Self. Paradoxically, such movement also universalizes God seen as a 17th century Puritan did; Nation as an Enlightened American did; but the self ah, going far inward, externals blur. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” or its opposite, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, are accessible whatever a student’s religious background. Understanding that “Self”, though, is also deepened by understanding the vestiges of history buried in our culture, affecting writers newly come to this continent as well as those who self-consciously reject much of that heritage (as do both Emerson and Hawthorne). So the first fourth of the first half of a chronological survey requires us to enter another world in another time with other beliefs to appreciate what they considered important, fought wars over, faced a wilderness to express.