A prolific travel writer, lecturer, novelist, playwright, and technically proficient poet, Bayard Taylor is best remembered today for his metrically faithful translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1808- 1832), which was the best English translation of its time. Known by his peers as the "Great American Traveler," a term he despised, Taylor wrote travel narratives for several magazines and newspapers. The books he subsequently published about his travels around the world were at the time unprecedented in their exotic descriptions of other cultures and landscapes. Taylor always claimed that the only reason he wrote prose was to fund his true passion, writing poetry, but as a product of the genteel tradition, his poetry was characteristically sentimental, insipid in subject matter, full of romanticized language, and often imitative. Largely unread today, Taylor was popular in his own age for his revealing travel narratives and his dedication to expanding the readership of German literature and propagating its scholarship in America.
