William Taylor (man of letters)

William Taylor ( born November 7, 1765 in Norwich, † March 5, 1836 in Norwich) was an English author, essayist, translator and critic.

Life

Taylor was born in Norwich, the only child of a wealthy manufacturer with ties to continental European trading partners and was a prominent education and training in Palgrave, Suffolk. For some years he traveled extensively on the European continent ( first to Italy, France, Holland, then mainly to Germany ) for learning foreign languages. After five months in Detmold with Pastor Röderer 1871, he understood and already read Klopstock, Lavater before he traveled for more than a year large parts of Germany and people like Schlozer, Kaufmann, Goethe (?) Met. He sympathized - as well as his father - with the ideas of the French Revolution. With the collapse of the economic situation of the father he turned to full of literature and became a great admirer of German poetry. He translated many German classics into English, including " Nathan the Wise" ( Lessing ), "Iphigenie en Tauride " (Goethe), gods calls ( Wieland). He was a prolific literary critic and reviewer. As his most important work applies the three-volume Historic Survey of German Poetry ( 1828-30 ). He was in his late years, by Thomas Carlyle an adversary and critic.

Importance

It can be considered temporally before the strictly conservative Thomas Carlyle as the first Englishman who has systematically used for the knowledge and understanding of German literature and Romanticism in England.