Analysis of poems
- From 'The Severall Seiges, Assaults, Sackings, And Finall Destruction Of The Famous, Ancient, And Memoriable Citty Of Jerusalem.'
- In Praise Of The Hemp-Seed
- The Description Of Tyburn
- The Olde, Olde, Very Olde Man; Or The Age And Long Life Of Thomas Parr
- The Prayse Of The Needle
The themes John Taylor wrote about
Biography
John Taylor was an English poet who dubbed himself "The Water Poet".
Biography
He was born in Gloucester, 24 August 1578.
After his waterman apprenticeship he served (1596) in Essex's fleet, and was present at Flores in 1597 and at the siege of Cadiz.
He spent much of his life as a Thames waterman, a member of the guild of boatmen that ferried passengers across the River Thames in London, in the days when the London Bridge was the only passage between the banks. He became a member of the ruling oligarchy of the guild, serving as its clerk; it is mainly through his writings that history is familiar with the watermen's disputes of 1641–42, in which an attempt was made to democratize the leadership of the Company. He details the uprisings in the pamphlets Iohn Taylors Manifestation ... and To the Right Honorable Assembly ... (Commons Petition), and in John Taylors Last Voyage and Adventure of 1641.
Taylor discusses the watermen's disputes with the theater companies (who moved the theaters from the south bank to the north in 1612, depriving the ferries of traffic) in The True Cause of the Watermen's Suit Concerning Players (written in 1613 or 1614). He also addresses the coachmen, in his tracts An Errant Thief (1622) and The World Runnes on Wheeles (1623).
Taylor was also the first poet to mention the deaths of William Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont in print, in his 1620 poem, "The Praise of Hemp-seed". Both had died four years earlier.
This text is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
