Edward Taylor was likely born in 1642 in Sketchley, Leicestershire, England. He was raised on a farm, leading to his poems containing a lot of farm and countryside imagery. As a young adult, Taylor taught school for a short time, but as a Protestant dissenter, he refused to sign the Act of Uniformity of 1662, which kept him from teaching school and from worshiping in peace. He left for the Massachusetts Bay Colony on April 26, 1668.
Before leaving England, Taylor wrote his first poems. These poems show his lifelong love of the Protestant cause and his anti-Anglican, anti-Roman position. He attacks the Church of Rome in The Metrical History of Christianity and praises dissenting preachers in “The Lay-mans Lamentation.”
After sailing to America and disembarking in Boston in July, Taylor entered Harvard College. During his time at Harvard, Taylor wrote several elegies, including ones for members of the Board of Overseers and the president of Harvard. The poems showed Taylor’s love of acrostic-style poems, but serve more historical than literary purposes. His later elegies, including one for his wife, were better contributions to the genre as a whole.
Following his graduation from Harvard College in 1671, Taylor eventually decided to head south and become a minister in the small farming community of Westfield. He remained there for the rest of his life, aside from rare visits to Boston and other places in New England. There was a break in his poetic writing during King Philip’s War, but by about 1862, Taylor was composing his major poem, Gods Determinations touching his Elect: and The Elects Combat in their Conversion, and Coming up to God in Christ together with the Comfortable Effects thereof (long titles were typical of the time period). The poem is bold and argumentative, implying that he might have intended to publish and distribute it as a persuasive tool. The themes of predestination, creation, original sin, saving grace, redemption, and others are all contained within the poem.
In 1682, Taylor also began a series of more than two hundred poems, Preparatory Meditations before my approach to the Lords Supper. This work remained unpublished until the 20th century, but they give us a deep understanding of the religious and psychological history of the time period.
When his first wife died in 1689, Taylor wrote a moving elegy that describes the joys and sorrows of their married life, including the deaths of five of their children:
Five Babes thou tookst from me before this Stroke.
Thine arrows then into my bowells broake,
But now they pierce into my bosom smart,
Do strike and stob me in the very heart.
Taylor was diverse in his subject matter. In June of 1705, large bones were discovered near Albany, New York. After Taylor examined two of the teeth that were found (claiming one to be five pounds and the other two pounds), Taylor composed a poem of 190 verses entitled “The Description of the great Bones dug up at Claverack…” He also had a long poem that ran well over 20,000 lines! In the final years of his life, his poetry changed to things like “Upon my recovery out of threatening Sickness” and “A Valediction to all the World preparatory for Death.”
Taylor died on June 24, 1729 and was buried in his home of Westfield, Massachusetts.