Edward Taylor was a colonial American poet, pastor and physician. Taylor’s poems, in leather bindings of his own manufacture, survived him, but he had left instructions that his heirs should “never publish any of his writings,” and the poems remained all but forgotten for more than 200 years.

In 1937 Thomas H. Johnson discovered a 7,000-page quarto manuscript of Taylor’s poetry in the library of Yale University and published a selection from it in The New England Quarterly.

The appearance of these poems, wrote Taylor’s biographer Norman S. Grabo, “established [Taylor] almost at once and without quibble as not only America’s finest colonial poet, but as one of the most striking writers in the whole range of American literature.”