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
Henry Van Dyke
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 75%
Blended 75%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Henry Van Dyke was born on 10 November 1852 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, then a distinct community on the edge of Philadelphia and now part of the city. He died on 10 April 1933 in Princeton, New Jersey. During the eighty years between those dates, he became one of the most recognizable public literary figures in the United States: a Presbyterian minister, popular preacher, Princeton professor, poet, essayist, noveli…
“Are you willing to forget what you have done for other people, and to remember only what other people have done for you?”
In time
Edward Taylor
Henry Van Dyke
1642
1933
Their lives did not overlap.
123 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 5,579 km separate Sketchley, Leicestershire, England from Germantown, Pennsylvania, USA. Shared ground: United States.
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
religious
Edward Taylor: sketchley, leicestershire, westfield, harvard college, elizabeth fitch, james fitch, the lay-man’s lamentation, upon wedlock, and death of children. Henry Van Dyke: germantown, princeton, ellen reid, the story of the other wise man, joyful, joyful, we adore thee, little rivers, fisherman's luck, the poetry of tennyson.
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
Edward Taylor
1668
Migration to America
Henry Van Dyke
Emotional landscapes
Edward Taylor: Spirituality, Sorrow, Despair. Henry Van Dyke: Peace, Wonder, Sorrow.