"Meditations" each explore scriptural themes and passages, often showing Taylor's own deep understanding of doctrine, as well as his struggle with some of the contradictions within strict Puritanism. His poetry is full of his expression of love of God and of his commitment to serve his creator amid the isolation of rural life. "Taylor transcended his frontier circumstances," biographer Grabo observed, "not by leaving them behind, but by transforming them into intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual universals." Interpretation When a first selection of his work was published, he was called simply “A Puritan sacred poet”. Soon after, however, he was being described as “an American metaphysical” and his poetry typified as ‘Colonial Baroque’. In his work appear such typically Baroque elements as acrostic verse, word play and use of conceits, as well as spoken meditations reminiscent of George Herbert. A later study compared his approach to that of such Baroque Poets as Giambattista Marino and Francisco de Quevedo, who in his time were influencing the Spanish-language poets of the New World. Musical settings Gerald Finzi made two settings from Taylor's Meditations. The first (op. 27.1) was the final stanza of Meditation 12, “Glorious in his apparel", which was composed as a marriage anthem for his sister-in-law in September 1946. The second (op. 27.2) was a setting of two internal stanzas from Meditation 20, “God is gone up with a triumphant shout”, commissioned for the 1951 St. Cecilia Festival Service at St.Sepulchre’s Church, Holborn. Two settings have been made of Taylor's poem "Huswifery". That by Richard K. Winslow (b.1918) for chorus and piano was the winner of the American Music Competition of the Sigma Alpha Iota music fraternity in 1950. It was later set for a cappella chorus by Gordon Binkerd in 1970. Binkerd had earlier set “The Ebb and Flow” for a cappella chorus in 1966. In addition, the meditation "What Love Is This" was set as an anthem for four-part chorus and organ by Timothy Hoekman in 1978. Notes Rowe, Karen E. Saint And Singer : Edward Taylor's Typology And The Poetics Of Meditation. Cambridge studies in American literature and culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ---."Edward Taylor." In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 3rd Edition, Paul Lauter, editor Richard Yarborough, et al., 2 vols., Boston, Houghton Mifflin (1998), vol. 1, pp. 366–407. References Evidence of Medicinal Cannibalism in Puritan New England: External links Biography and sample of