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 Drummond
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 Drummond of Hawthornden was born on 13 December 1585 at Hawthornden, the family estate overlooking the River Esk near Lasswade in Midlothian, and died there on 4 December 1649. He belongs among the most accomplished Scottish poets of the early seventeenth century, though his reputation has long been complicated by the apparent contradictions in his work and character. He was a Scottish laird who wrote chiefly…
“A friend is a second self.”
In time
Edward Taylor
William Drummond
1585
1729
They overlapped for 8 years (1642–1649).
When Edward Taylor was born, William Drummond was about 57.
Edward Taylor was about 7 when William Drummond died.
On the map
About 388 km separate Sketchley, Leicestershire, England from Hawthornden, Midlothian, Scotland. 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
Edward Taylor: sketchley, leicestershire, westfield, harvard college, elizabeth fitch, james fitch, the lay-man’s lamentation, upon wedlock, and death of children. William Drummond: hawthornden, midlothian, teares on the death of meliades, poems: amorous, funerall, divine, pastorall, forth feasting, edmund spenser, sir philip sidney, wars of the three kingdoms.
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
Edward Taylor
1668
Migration to America
William Drummond
Emotional landscapes
Edward Taylor: Spirituality, Sorrow, Despair. William Drummond: Sorrow, Spirituality, Wonder.