Bayard Taylor

Taylor, Bayard, 1825–78, American journalist and author, b. Kennett Square, Pa. His romantic verse in Ximena … and Other Poems (1844) secured him a long-standing assignment as correspondent for the New York Tribune. His trips to California, Mexico, Europe, Africa, and East Asia provided him with material for lectures, novels, and travel books. His contemporaries found these fascinating, but their popularity did not last. Perhaps the best of his poetry is in Poems of the Orient (1854) and in his verse drama Prince Deukalion (1878). His most ambitious work was his metrical translation into English (1870–71) of Goethe's Faust, which earned him appointment as U.S. minister to Germany in 1878. He died in Berlin.