Taylor, (James) Bayard b.January II, 1825; KennettSquare, Pennsylvania d. December19, 1878; Berlin, Prussia
Voluminous travel writer, journalist, poet, and lecturer. As a lecturer on German literature and translator of Goethe’s Faust, he earned a place as one of the earliest American Germanists and as a popularizer of what he called “the great age of German literature.” Taylor, whose father was of English Quaker lineage and whose grandmothers were both of south German descent, began his career as a writer in 1840 with an account of his visit to the battlefield at Brandywine that appeared in the West Chester Register.
The following year his first poem, “Soliloquy of a Young Poet,” was published in the Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia. His literary career, however, received its first important impulse from Rufus Griswald, an influential editor who encouraged him, and to whom Taylor dedicated his first book of poetry, Ximena, or, The Battle of the Sierra Morena, and Other Poems (1844). Leaving behind a position as a printer’s apprentice, the young author sailed for Liverpool in July 1844, embarking on a two-year journey around Europe. Upon his return, he published the widely popular Views A-Foot, or, Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff, the first of many travel accounts that would highlight his writing career.Although he ventured into the publishing business briefly in 1846 with the joint purchase of a small weekly newspaper in Pennsylvania, Taylor gave this up after a year, moving to New York, where he would soon make a name for himself in the established literary and journalistic circles. A lifelong association with Horace Greeley and the New York Tribune began in 1848 when he was hired to manage its literary department. As its correspondent, he was sent to California to report on the gold rush, as well as to numerous countries all over the world, and from his pen came a prodigious number of articles, books, and poetry inspired by these travels.
In 1850 he recounted his California experience in El Dorado, or, Adventures in the Path of Empire, and in the same year he married Mary Agnew, who would succumb to a longstanding illness two months later. The collection Poems of the Orient, containing his best-known poem, “The Bedouin Song,” appeared in 1854. In 1855 Taylor left for Germany, there meeting and marrying hissecond wife, Marie Hansen of Gotha, and returning with her and their new daughter, Lilian, in 1857. The year 1859 saw the publication of Taylor’s varied accounts of travels, At Home and Abroad: A SketchBook of Life, Scenery and Men, the second series of that title appearing in 1862. In addition, he shared his experiences abroad in lyceums across the country, gaining a widespread reputation as a lecturer.
A measure of Taylor’s esteem is evident from his appointment to a nonresident professorship of German literature at Cornell University in 1869, despite his lack of formal higher education. The period of his greatest professional accomplishments in the field of German literature now lay before him. Beginning in 1870, during his tenure at Cornell (until 1877), Taylor gave a series of lectures, published posthumously as Studies in German Literature, that focused on early German literature and especially the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, including Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Gottfried Herder, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller. These lectures, which served to introduce an important period of German literature to the American public, further solidified Taylor’s role as a cultural intermediary between America and Germany. His greatest contribution, however, was his translation of both parts of Goethe’s Faust in original meters (1870—1871), accompanied by lengthy critical notes. Taylor himself viewed it as the English translation, and it was long considered the best.
As a popular figure and respected German American, Taylor also saw public service that went beyond the lecture circuit to include both poetry written for delivery at public occasions and diplomatic service.
At the age of twenty-five he had been chosen to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard University. In 1862 he was appointed secretary of legation at St. Petersburg, Russia, where the warmth of his personality won him many friends, in addition to securing support for the Union during the Civil War. The following year his brother Fred was killed at Gettysburg, and in 1869 he wrote an ode presented on the dedication of the monument to the battle there. On July 4, 1876, he delivered the national ode before an enthusiastic audience during the centennial celebrations in Philadelphia. Capping his service to his country, Taylor was chosen to be minister plenipotentiary to Germany in 1878 and departed in that year for Berlin. However, his health failed and he died there shortly after his arrival.Robert L. Kusmer
See also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, and the United States; Travel Literature, German-U.S.
References and Further Reading
Krumpelmann, John T. Bayard Taylor and German Letters. (Britannica et Americana, vol. 4.) Hamburg: Cram, De Gruyter, 1959.
Smyth, Albert H. Bayard Taylor. (American Men of Letters.) Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896.
Wermuth, Paul C. Bayard Taylor. (Twayne’s United States Authors Series, vol. 228.) New York: Twayne, 1973.