Edward Taylor's Minor Poetry Taylor's form and manner appear overly predictable due to the Preparatory Meditations' constant six-line, iambic pentameter, ababcc stanza. These poems also tend to be extremely sentimental and weakly constructed. Taylor was a member of Cambridge University and originally from England. He moved to South Carolina at a young age where he trained as an attorney. However, he soon gave up law to write poetry. His first collection was published in 1770 when he was only twenty-one years old. Although this was not a successful effort, it did attract attention from other poets who invited him to contribute to their magazines. In 1773, he married Elizabeth Horry, the daughter of a wealthy family. The couple had three children and then divorced two years later. After his marriage failed, Taylor went back to writing poetry and earned a living by teaching school. He died in 1826 at the age of seventy-two. Minor Poetry contains many poems about love lost and found along with poems about nature and religious topics. According to literary critics, Taylor was a minor poet whose work appeared in several magazines in early American history. His poems show influence from Alexander Pope and John Milton but they are more sentimental than those two authors'.