Edward Taylor was born about 1642, probably in Sketchley, Leicestershire, England, into a world in which political upheaval and religious conviction entered ordinary life with unusual force. He died on 24 June 1729 in Westfield, Massachusetts, after nearly six decades as that frontier town’s minister, physician, teacher, community counselor, and private poet. During his lifetime he was known chiefly as a learned and…
Compare Poets
Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Poet A
Edward Taylor
Poet B
Thomas Traherne
Compare two related contemporaries
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 78%
Blended 78%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Thomas Traherne, born about 1636 or 1637 and dead on 27 September 1674, was an Anglican priest, theologian, prose writer, and poet whose reputation rests on work that scarcely anyone in his own lifetime knew existed. He published only a little, lived without public literary renown, and died before his fortieth birthday. Yet the manuscripts he left behind, overlooked for more than two centuries, eventually revealed on…
“The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.”
In time
Edward Taylor
Thomas Traherne
1637
1729
They overlapped for 33 years (1642–1674).
When Edward Taylor was born, Thomas Traherne was about 5.
Edward Taylor was about 32 when Thomas Traherne died.
On the map
About 105 km separate Sketchley, Leicestershire, England from Hereford, England. Both have ground in England.
Edward Taylor
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Shared
From the biographies
divine
Edward Taylor: sketchley, leicestershire, westfield, harvard college, elizabeth fitch, james fitch, the lay-man’s lamentation, upon wedlock, and death of children. Thomas Traherne: hereford, anglican priest, centuries of meditations, the salutation, wonder, eden, innkeeper, sir orlando bridgeman.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
The world around them
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
1649
Trial of Charles I
1651
Battle of Worcester
Edward Taylor
1668
Migration to America
Thomas Traherne
1667
Relocation to London
Emotional landscapes
Edward Taylor: Spirituality, Sorrow, Despair. Thomas Traherne: Spirituality, Peace, Wonder.