Edward Taylor
(1642–1729)

Edward Taylor's poems provide the modern reader with little that seems familiar. His world can seem as distant or strange as another galaxy. Its setting is the wilderness of 300 years ago; its subject is religious salvation.

Considered the best poet of colonial America, Taylor was unknown in his own time and for almost 200 years thereafter. Some people write to clarify their own thoughts. This need probably motivated Taylor's best work, Preparatory Meditations. These poems were written as part of his religious practice as a minister.

Religion was part of all the important events of Taylor's life. He was born into a Puritan family in England in 1642. By the time he was a schoolteacher in the 1660s, it was difficult for Puritans to teach, preach, or practice their religion in England. Taylor's refusal to sign the 1662 Act of Uniformity most likely kept him from a teaching or clerical career. Taylor ultimately exiled himself and sailed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1668.

After arriving in Boston, he enrolled at Harvard College. A Harvard education, designed to prepare ministers, included Latin, Greek, Hebrew, logic, philosophy, and astronomy. Soon after his graduation, he met with some men from a farming village at the western edge of the Bay Colony. These men from Westfield were looking for a minister for their town. Taylor accepted their offer and stayed in Westfield until his death 58 years later.

The villagers built Taylor a log house. The next year they built a church, strong enough to be useful if hostile Native Americans attacked Westfield. Taylor married Elizabeth Fitch, the well-educated daughter of a minister, in 1674. Their union produced eight children, but five died before their first birthdays. Elizabeth Fitch Taylor died at age 39. Marrying again when he was 47, Taylor and his second wife, Ruth Wyllys, had six children.

Taylor had a long career as a minister and distinguished citizen of Westfield. He tended his own farm and served as physician for the town. His grandson later wrote that he was "A man of small stature but firm: of quick passions–yet serious and grave."
Taylor had an impressive library for his time––220 books. Many of these he copied by hand from borrowed volumes, as books were rare in the colonies. The only book of English poetry in his library was Anne Bradstreet's "The Tenth Muse."

From the 1670s until his death in 1729, Taylor wrote the poems for which he is now esteemed and remembered. They were meant to be inspirational. The speaker is directly involved in the struggle of faith. In the tradition of the English poets he studied, Taylor often uses striking comparisons in unusual language. He combines religious ideas with images of the daily life of New England or the English countryside of his youth.

The only publication during his lifetime was two stanzas from one poem, quoted in another minister's sermon, which was then published in England. Late in his life, Taylor bound 400 pages of his poems in a leather binding. The volume was passed on to his descendants. A great-grandson donated the volume to the Yale University library, where it was rediscovered in the 1930s.

When the English first came to North America, they brought with them many diseases to which Native Americans had no natural immunity. Smallpox could wipe out as much as 75 percent of a native settlement's people in weeks.

Beginning in the 1630s, thousands of Puritans came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to establish what they envisioned as God's kingdom on earth. The decimated native population seemed to reinforce the Puritans' belief that New England was God's intended homeland for true believers. Efforts were made to bring the natives under the laws of the colony and to convert them to Christianity.

In 1675, after pressure from the English in Plymouth Colony to give up their land and pay taxes, a Wampanoag Indian chief known as King Philip attacked English settlements in Plymouth and the Bay Colony. Other tribes joined both sides, and King Philip's War began.

For a while it appeared that the Native Americans might drive the colonists from New England, but Philip's forces were seriously outnumbered. Fierce fighting by the colonists, and the capture and killing of Philip in 1676 ended the war. Many on both sides lost their lives, making this the bloodiest war, relative to the population, in American history.

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