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
William Whiting
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 72%
Blended 72%
Swap sides
Another related pair
William Whiting was born on 1 November 1825 in Kensington, then a rapidly changing western district of London, and died in Winchester on 3 May 1878. He is remembered above all as the author of “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” the hymn later known throughout much of the English-speaking world as the Navy Hymn. That single work has achieved a cultural reach far beyond the scale of its author’s surviving literary reput…
In time
Edward Taylor
William Whiting
1642
1878
Their lives did not overlap.
96 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 142 km separate Sketchley, Leicestershire, England from London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Edward Taylor
William Whiting
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
divine
Edward Taylor: sketchley, leicestershire, westfield, harvard college, elizabeth fitch, james fitch, the lay-man’s lamentation, upon wedlock, and death of children. William Whiting: kensington, winchester, eternal father, strong to save, navy hymn, victorian schoolmaster, winchester college, choristers’ school, hymns ancient and modern.
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
William Whiting
Emotional landscapes
Edward Taylor: Spirituality, Sorrow, Despair. William Whiting: Spirituality, Peace, Tenderness.