Why did Cotton Mather Defend Poetry?

Aside from having the sickest center part of all time, you may remember Cotton Mather as being the guy who tried to get every young woman of a certain age in Salem Massachusetts burned at the stake for witchcraft. He was a proud shoe-buckle-wearing Puritan, a literary polymath, and a religious zealot. The era he lived, the early 1700’s, was whatever the opposite of tolerant is. He was anti-woke in nearly all the worst ways.

However.

This dude, this man of letters (of the biblical kind), this minister, who saw the hand of God in most everything, and the hand of Satan in many other things, was a nut for poetry. He was a voracious learner, reader, and scholar. He believed that good poetry was like a “sauce” that you needed to taste as a break from heavy literary “food”. He believed that poetic style was possible in everyone, as distinct to you as your gait. He claimed that he would never begrudge a man his poetic gait.

Cotton Mather wanted you to have a little poetry. As a treat.

In his 1726 essay Of Poetry, and of Style, Mather clearly elucidates his defense of Poetry in a time when being too quirky was so dangerous that women were being tied up, weighted down, and flung into lakes. And not in the fun way. He begins the essay laying out what he means by poetic prose, explaining that much of the creative output in the world is written by sinners for sinners (this sounds great to me personally).

He actually states that Homer was “one of the greatest apostles the Devil ever had in the world” based on his morality. Well.

Continuing on, however, he makes clear argument that poetry is a victual for the soul. That pure heavenly beauty can shine through the page and play music in your heart. He wraps up by calling literary critics a bunch of salty rats who need to shut the hell up, and further reminds the reader that most stuff is sinful.

“You may… make a little recreation of poetry in the midst of your more painful studies.”

Why should you care?

If you’ve read this far I am impressed, because I started this post with nothing in mind as to why you SHOULD care. But I think I figured it out.

Cotton Mather lived straddling the year 1700. He lived at a time that none of us can possibly contextualize or imagine ourselves existing — we have no capacity for it. Nothing about today is reminiscent of that time. People died every day for various reasons and it was just accepted as God’s Will. Even reading poetry or plays was seen as something that could open yourself up to the Devil taking you. There was no Whole Foods hot bar.

What a time to be alive!

One obvious thing Cotton was doing was to push against being too extreme. He wasn’t allowing his better sensibility to be utterly drowned out by superstition and “unmusical” tyranny. Some poetry would make you sin, sure, but some poetry was just beautiful. Some poetry was the break you needed from the rest of the tedious religious reading you were doing.

The lesson I’m taking away from Of Poetry, and of Style, is that the world is so much more nuanced than popular culture would lead us to believe. Find your own truth in everything — don’t let the whims of the day be the arbiter of your consumption.

Now get out there and read some sinful poems.