PERRY MILLER ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS ARCHIVE

These critical re- flections on his own work contain some of the most interesting and intricate passages in the book.Īs might be expected, the material is taken largely from the history of the Puritans, but Chapter IV, ' Religion and Society in the early literature of Virginia,' stands out as the exception and deserves special notice. They are cleverly united by the bits of literary criticism which the author has written for each of the pieces and in which he interprets his essays in terms of the inner theologic of his researches into ' the uniqueness of the American experience ' (p. Range from an early essay on Thomas Hooker to an essay written in 1953 on ' Nature and the National Ego,' and they have been scattered in the pages of various periodicals. IN this volume Perry Miller has fit ten 'pieces' together around the central idea of the Puritan ' errand into the wilderness.' They

Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Browne's are refractory critics who have not tailored their writing to be helpful to the theorist drawing upon them and he has with too much ease tailored it for them. The difficulty is again the same: a subject whiclh, in its historical confusion and complexity, refuses to submit tamely to the trim analytic categories that have been prepared for it. So all too often the reader suspects that the opposition between convenition and nature broadens out into grooves well traced by such dichotomies as art and nature, form and content, conventionalism anid realism, autonomy and representation-venerable problems beyond the scope of a brief treatise. But his theo- rists furnish him quotations in which the term is used too loosely for any definition emerging from them to gain much in precision. Left with convention and nature as his two prime divisions, he tries valiantly to narrow the nmeaning of poetic convention. Browne, then, has erred in devising supposedly exhaustive cate- gories from which, however, the individually and organically creative imagination has been unjustly excluded. And even Aristotle differentiates the man-made from the natural object in regard to the genesis of its form. In beginning with a crucial distinction between convention and nature, he characterizes the ' natural ' part of the poem as being ' a necessary part of that poem's structure.' Outside the Aristotelian tradition, whatever is 'neces- sary ' in this sense is anything but ' natural ' it is rather the magical gift of our creative powers. It leads him sometimes to overlook the willingness of theorists to accept convention as a starting point provided it under- goes the transmutation which the imagination, in supervising an organic product, would force upon it. Very likely the mechanical nature of his Scholastic approach leads him to neglect organicism, an essential presupposition of most modern theorists. Browne has deserted historic authenticity. In his anxiety to press his ideal, analytic distinctions, Mr. All-imiportant qualifications would be needed in either case. This content downloaded from 193.0.147.66 on Sat, 09:17:58 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsĪs productive. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toModern Language Notes.

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PERRY MILLER ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS ARCHIVE

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at. 553-555Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL. Errand into the Wilderness by Perry MillerReview by: Herbert W.

Perry miller errand into the wilderness