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
John Milton
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 68%
Blended 68%
Swap sides
Another related pair
John Milton, born in London on 9 December 1608 and dead there on 8 November 1674, lived through one of the most violent and intellectually fertile passages in English history. He was a poet, polemicist, scholar, civil servant, religious controversialist, educator, translator, and theorist of political liberty. To many readers he is above all the author of Paradise Lost, the English epic that retells the rebellion of…
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”
In time
Edward Taylor
John Milton
1608
1729
They overlapped for 33 years (1642–1674).
When Edward Taylor was born, John Milton was about 34.
Edward Taylor was about 32 when John Milton died.
On the map
About 142 km separate Sketchley, Leicestershire, England from London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
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
puritan
religious
Edward Taylor: sketchley, leicestershire, westfield, harvard college, elizabeth fitch, james fitch, the lay-man’s lamentation, upon wedlock, and death of children. John Milton: london, paradise lost, areopagitica, comus, lycidas, christ's college, puritan, galileo galilei.
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
John Milton
1652
Milton Becomes Blind
Emotional landscapes
Edward Taylor: Spirituality, Sorrow, Despair. John Milton: Peace, Spirituality, Wonder.