Edward Taylor

Edward Taylor ( * 1641 in Coventry, England, † June 29, 1729 in Westfield, Massachusetts) was an American poet.

He was born into a Puritan family and studied in England, probably for the priesthood, but was not admitted because of his religious views on the Church of England.

1668 Taylor moved to New England and continued his studies at Harvard College. In 1671 he became pastor and doctor of the small community of Westfield and remained so until his death.

His poems were not printed during his lifetime. The manuscripts he bequeathed to his grandson Ezra Stiles, later president of Yale University was. So they came into the local university library, where they were discovered only in 1937.

Central to his work are his 200 Preparatory Meditations. These poems wrote Taylor every month in preparation for the preaching of the monthly community meeting. You are witness to a God-fearing, yet often plagued by doubts people. Taylor wrote also a Metrical History of Christianity, which retold especially the fate of the early Christian martyrs in blank verse, and God's Determinations Touching His Elect that reflects his religious beliefs, that Calvinist doctrines such as the doctrine of predestination, also the treatises Commentary on the Four Gospels and Christographia, or a Discourse on the Virtue and Character of Christ.