Mather, Cotton

Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was a Puritan minister and a prolific writer. The son of Increase Mather, a well-known minister in his own right, Cotton impacted politics, science, and religion. His work definitively helped to transform colonial culture, encouraging the idea of the American democratic experiment as a religious as well as political endeavor. Mather advocated for the use of smallpox inoculations, arguring that inoculations were not sinful nor against the will of God. However, Mather is also known for his less admirable role in the Salem witch trials. Mather helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for these horrible trials, and it seems that he never apologized for his actions nor publically recanted his beliefs regarding these events. 
=="The Blue Buildings in the Summer Air" ==
Cotton Mather figures prominently in Stevens' poem "The Blue Buildings in the Summer Air," published in Parts of a World (1942). 
 Cotton Mather died when I was a boy. The books 
 
 He read, all day, all night and all the nights, 
 
 Had got him nowhere. There was always the doubt, 
 
 That made him preach the louder, long for a church 
 
 In which his voice would roll its cadences, 
 
 After the sermon, to quiet that mouse in the wall. (Stanza I)
The opening stanza sets the tone for the rest of the poem, a poem whose main theme is similar to the theme of Stevens' well known poem "Sunday Morning." For the speaker, God and Christianity have lost relevance in the modern world; the speaker feels that even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cotton Mather must have sensed that his religion was inadequate. The speaker later directly addresses Mather: 
 Look down now, Cotton Mather, from the blank. 
 
 Was heaven where you thought? It must be there. 
 
 It must be where you think it is, in the light 
 
 On bed-clothes, in an apple on a plate. 
 
 It is the honey-comb of the seeing man. 
 
 It is the leaf the bird brings back to the boat. (Stanza IV)
Much like the woman in Sunday morning, the speaker suspects that Cotton Mather would now understand heaven as the joys and sorrows of everyday existence, which though mundane holds within itself the glory of humanity. 
==References ==
1. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose. Library of America, 1997. Page 196.