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
Matsuo Bashō
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.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 59%
Blended 59%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Matsuo Bashō, born in 1644 and dead on 28 November 1694, occupies a singular place in Japanese literature: he was at once a professional poet, teacher, traveler, theorist, editor, correspondent, and restless seeker after a way of seeing. His name is now inseparable from haiku, although the compact poems for which he is famous were called hokku in his own lifetime and originally functioned as opening verses for collab…
“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
In time
Edward Taylor
Matsuo Bashō
1642
1729
They overlapped for 51 years (1644–1694).
When Matsuo Bashō was born, Edward Taylor was about 2.
Edward Taylor was about 52 when Matsuo Bashō died.
On the map
About 9,471 km separate Sketchley, Leicestershire, England from Ueno, Mie Prefecture, Japan. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
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
Edward Taylor: sketchley, leicestershire, westfield, harvard college, elizabeth fitch, james fitch, the lay-man’s lamentation, upon wedlock, and death of children. Matsuo Bashō: ueno, iga province, tokugawa shogunate, tōdō yoshitada, kai ōi, minashiguri, haikai, haibun.
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
Matsuo Bashō
Emotional landscapes
Edward Taylor: Spirituality, Sorrow, Despair. Matsuo Bashō: Peace, Wonder, Spirituality.