12 Facts About Edward Taylor

Edward Taylor's work remained unpublished for some 200 years but since then has established him as one of the foremost writers of his time.

Edward Taylor's poetry has been characterized as "American Baroque" as well as Metaphysical.

The son of a nonconformist yeoman farmer, Taylor is thought to have been born in 1642 at Sketchley, Leicestershire.

Edward Taylor's childhood was spent on the family farm where he enjoyed the stability of a middle-class upbringing.

Edward Taylor continued to develop alone and the extent of his formal education is unknown.

For some time he worked as schoolmaster at Bagworth but following the restoration of the monarchy, Edward Taylor refused to sign the Act of Uniformity requiring worship according the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which cost him his teaching position.

Edward Taylor's Atlantic crossing and subsequent years are chronicled in his-published Diary.

Edward Taylor left a hand-written record of remedies in his 'dispensatory'.

Edward Taylor was twice married: first to Elizabeth Fitch, by whom he had eight children, five of whom died in childhood; and at her death to Ruth Wyllys, who bore him six more children.

Edward Taylor's poems were an expression of his deeply held religious views, acquired during a strict upbringing and shaped in adulthood by New England Congregationalist Puritans, who during the 1630s and 1640s developed rules far more demanding than those of their co-religionists in England.

Edward Taylor's poems are marked by a robust spiritual content, conveyed by means of homely and vivid imagery derived from everyday Puritan surroundings and glorifying the Christian experience.

Edward Taylor's poetry is full of his expression of love of God and of his commitment to serve his creator amid the isolation of rural life.