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
Edward Thomas
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 78%
Blended 78%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Edward Thomas was born Philip Edward Thomas on 3 March 1878 at Lambeth in south London, and died on 9 April 1917 near Arras in France, aged thirty-nine. His name now evokes a particular kind of English poetry: quiet but unsettled, exact in its descriptions of paths, trains, weather, birds, woods, and country speech, yet charged with questions of loss, belonging, choice, and mortality. His poetic career lasted scarcel…
“I write poetry because I cannot help it.”
In time
Edward Taylor
Edward Thomas
1642
1917
Their lives did not overlap.
149 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 143 km separate Sketchley, Leicestershire, England from Lambeth, London, England. Both have ground in England.
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. Edward Thomas: lambeth, first world war, robert frost, adlestrop, the happy-go-lucky morgans, six poems, poems, oxford.
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
Edward Thomas
Emotional landscapes
Edward Taylor: Spirituality, Sorrow, Despair. Edward Thomas: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.