Taylor, William

(1765-1836)

   Born in Norwich, where his father was an export manufacturer, he was educated at a school run by Anna Letitia Barbauld (see entry) and Rochemont Barbauld. Taylor treasured her friendship for many years, and at the school he formed a lifelong friendship with Frank Sayers (see entry). He traveled extensively in Europe and became a competent translator. His father retired from business in 1791, having made his fortune, and William devoted his life to literature and became a leading member of Norwich intelligentsia and a political radical who applauded the French Revolution. Goethe ordered his publisher to issue a special edition of Taylor's 1793 translation of his (Goethe's) Iphigenie auf Tauris (1790). Taylor died, unmarried, in Norwich, and was buried in the graveyard of the Unitarian Octagon chapel. In his time he wrote over 1,700 literary reviews to various journals. William Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads of 1798 arose out of Taylor's translations of German Romantic literature. Some of his poems: "Absolution," "Ellenore," "Female Caution," "Hull Ale," "Penance," "The Dropsical Man," "The Mistake," "The Resurrection," "The Vision."

   Sources: Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry. Alan F. Pater, ed. Monitor Book Company, 1980. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). The National Portrait Gallery. (www.npg.org.uk). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford University Press, 1993. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).