John Taylor (poet)

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Portrait of John Taylor on the title page of his poetry anthology from 1630

John Taylor (born August 24, 1578 in Gloucester , England , † December 1653 in London ) was an English poet . He called himself The Water Poet (the water poet).

biography

John Taylor was born on August 24, 1578 in Gloucester , England . After training to be a bargee on the Thames , he served in the Essex fleet and was involved in the conquest of Cadiz in 1596 . For much of his civil life he worked as a member of the Watermen , a guild of sailors who carried passengers on the Thames at a time when London Bridge was the only link between the districts. He rose in the association and eventually became part of the oligarchic leadership by serving as its secretary. It is thanks to his written works that historiography knows the conflicts of the Watermen , who in 1641 and 1642 aimed to democratize the leadership.

To improve his finances, he wrote poems and dedicated them to well-off regulars on his ferry. In addition, he achieved great fame through his travels, which outsiders described as "crazy", which he then described in lively poems and prose . For example, he drove from London to Queenborough in a boat made entirely of paper with oars made of stick fish attached to wooden sticks and nearly drowned in the attempt. This undertaking was repeated by the Time team in 2006 . In his book The Pennyless Pilgrimage , Taylor describes how he traveled from London to Edinburgh , Scotland, on foot and without money .

In 1620 he traveled to Prague and was invited to her court by the Queen of Bohemia . With the beginning of the English Civil War in 1642 Taylor moved to Oxford and wrote royalist pamphlets there . With the abandonment of the city in 1645, he returned to London and ran a restaurant there called The Crown or later The Poet's Head .

A restaurant called The Water Poet in Folgate Street in London still commemorates the poet today .

Literary work

A Swarm of Sectaries, and Schismatiques , 1641

Taylor describes the conflicts among the Watermen in his 1641 pamphlets Iohn Taylor's Manifestation [...] , To the Right Honorable Assembly [...] (Commons Petition) and in John Taylor's Last Voyage and Adventure . The points of contention between the Watermen and the theater companies, which relocated the performance venues from the south to the north side of the Thames in 1612, as a result of which the number of passengers on the ferries decreased, are the subject of The True Cause of the Watermen's Suit Concerning Players , the he wrote in 1613 or 1614. The coachmen of London are the subject of his works An Errant Thief (1622) and The World Runnes on Wheeles (1623).

John Taylor was the first poet to address the deaths of William Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont in a printed work. In his poem The Praise of Hemp-seed, written in 1620, he wrote :

In paper, many a poet now survives
Or else their lines had perish'd with their lives.
Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,
Sir Philip Sidney, who the laurel wore,
Spenser, and Shakespeare did in art excell,
Sir Edward Dyer, Greene, Nash, Daniel.
Sylvester, Beaumont, Sir John Harrington,
Forgetfulness their works would over run
But that in paper they immortally
Do live in spite of death, and cannot die.

John Taylor was a very prolific writer and published over 150 publications in his life. Many of these have been brought together in the compilation All the Workes of John Taylor the Water Poet , and the Spenser Society published a corresponding anthology. Although his work was not particularly demanding, he was nonetheless a close watcher of the people and manners of the 17th century, which is why his poems are still widely analyzed by social historians today. A good example of this is Taylor's Motto from 1621, which includes a list of contemporary card games and entertainment options.

John Taylor is one of the first authors to write a real palindrome : "Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel" (1614), in German roughly "I lived lewd and behaved really badly". He also wrote a poem about Thomas Parr , who is said to be 152 years old. John Taylor is also the inventor of the constructed language Barmoodan .

Much of John Taylor's work was distributed by subscription ; That is, he offered a book with certain contents and asked for interested parties willing to pay until he had a sufficient number to compensate for the printing costs. With this method he was able to win over 1,600 subscribers for his book The Pennylesse Pilgrimage in 1618 . Those who failed to meet their commitment to accept the document were severely scolded the following year in his brochure A Kicksey Winsey, or, A Lerry Come-Twang :

By wondrous accident perchance one may
Grope out a needle in a load of hay;
And though a white crow be exceedingly rare,
A blind man may, by fortune, catch a hare.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Capp (1994) , p. 7.
  2. ↑ a b Merriam-Webster (1995) , p. 1096.
  3. ↑ channel4.com: Queenborough Kent. Cameo corner: Making a paper boat. March 12, 2006, accessed August 4, 2011 .
  4. ↑ Risa Stephanie Bear: The pennyless pilgrimage. (PDF) The Money-lesse perambulation, of Iohn Taylor, Alias ​​the Kings Majesties Water-Poet. January 2008, accessed August 4, 2011 .
  5. ^ The Water Poet. Retrieved August 4, 2011 .
  6. ↑ John Taylor: The Praise of Hemp-seed. 1630, archived from the original on May 20, 2009 ; accessed on August 4, 2011 .
  7. ^ John Taylor: All the Workes of John Taylor, the Water Poet . Scolar Press, 1973, ISBN 978-0-85417-997-8 (English, facsimile, hardcover).
  8. ^ John Taylor: Works of John Taylor, the water-poet, comprised in the folio edition of 1630 . In: Spenser Society (Ed.): Publications of the Spenser Society . No. 2-4 . Manchester, 1869 (English, babel.hathitrust.org - first edition: London 1630, reprint). Supplemented by: John Taylor: Works of John Taylor, the water poet, not included in the folio volume of 1630 . In: Spenser Society (Ed.): Publications of the Spenser Society . tape 1-5, 1870-1878 , no. 7, 14, 19, 21, 25 , 1873 (English, books.google.de - reprint).
  9. ↑ Carmine G.Di Biase (ed.): Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period . Approaches to Translation Studies. Editions Rodopi BV, 2006, ISBN 1-4237-8826-5 (English, books.google.com ).

literature

  • Bernard Capp: The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet. 1578-1653 . Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 1994, ISBN 0-19-820375-6 (English).
  • John Chandler, John Taylor: Travels Through Stuart Britain. The Adventures of John Taylor, The Water Poet . Sutton Publishing, Thrupp, Gloucestershire 1999, ISBN 0-7509-1944-2 (English).
  • Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature . Merriam Webster, Inc., Springfield, Mass. 1995, ISBN 0-87779-042-6 (English).

Web links

Wikisource: John Taylor  - Sources and full texts (English)
personal data
SURNAME Taylor, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Water Poet, The
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English poet
DATE OF BIRTH August 24, 1578
PLACE OF BIRTH Gloucester
DATE OF DEATH December 1653
Place of death London