Thomas Taylor
The Hymns of Orpheus, Thomas Taylor, translator
The complete poetry and prose of ... - Google BooksSince its first publication in 1965, this collection has been widely hailed as the best available text of William Blake's poetry and prose. It is now expanded to include a new foreword by Harold Bloom, his definitive statement on Blake's greatness.
Dark figures in the desired country ... - Google BooksToward the end of his life, William Blake produced a beautiful sequence of 28 watercolor drawings to illustrate Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. These rarely seen drawings show him at the peak of his powers, radically reinterpreting one of the central texts of English literature. Gerda Norvig's book, with its stunning color reproductions, offers the first detailed study of these important works of art.Norvig sets the watercolors in the context of Blake's lifelong engagement with Bunyan's myth and in relation to the Puritan writer's own artistic and critical methods. She shows how deeply Blake's love-hate relationship with Bunyan influenced not only these particular drawings but also Blake's revolutionary theories of art and poetics. With judicious use of psychoanalytical and post-structuralist critical theory, she demonstrates that Blake's pictorial interpretation of The Pilgrim's Progress tells a contemporary, self-reflexive tale about interpretation. Blake implicates author, narrator, and reader in a dream-protagonist's never-ending search for a proper stance on the relations of self and other. Toward the end of his life, William Blake produced a beautiful sequence of 28 watercolor drawings to illustrate Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. These rarely seen drawings show him at the peak of his powers, radically reinterpreting one of the central texts of English literature. Gerda Norvig's book, with its stunning color reproductions, offers the first detailed study of these important works of art.Norvig sets the watercolors in the context of Blake's lifelong engagement with Bunyan's myth and in relation to the Puritan writer's own artistic and critical methods. She shows how deeply Blake's love-hate relationship with Bunyan influenced not only these particular drawings but also Blake's revolutionary theories of art and poetics. With judicious use of psychoanalytical and post-structuralist critical theory, she demonstrates that Blake's pictorial interpretation of The Pilgrim's Progress tells a contemporary, self-reflexive tale about interpretation. Blake implicates author, narrator, and reader in a dream-protagonist's never-ending search for a proper stance on the relations of self and other.
THOMAS TAYLOR, THE PLATONIST.\
This from:
(A Biographical and Bibliographical Sketch. BY WILLIAM E. A. AXON. ) The singular and interesting man who is known to us as
Taylor, the Platonist, was born in London in the year 1758, and
his parents we are told were "obscure but worthy." His father
was Joseph Taylor, staymaker, of Round Court, St. Martins-le-
Grand, where the future Platonist was probably born.
He was a weakly child, and signs of consumption induced his family to
send him into Staffordshire. He returned to the metropolis in
his ninth year, and was admitted at St. Paul's School, April ,1767.
His parents designed him for the Nonconformist ministry.
His affection for philosophy, as distinguished from
the mere verbal acquaintance with classics, was so marked, that
when an ethical or specially grand sentence occurred in an
author he was construing, the surmaster, Mr. William Rider,
would say, " Come, here is something worthy the attention of
a philosopher."
He early discovered critical powers, which
enabled him to notice and correct a blunder in the printing of a
Latin Testament. He had now to disappoint his father, whose
reverence for the ministerial office led him to regard it as
"the most desirable and most enviable employment upon earth",
and who was correspondingly troubled when he found that his
talented son had no desire to occupy that office, and had so great
a dislike to the public school teaching and languages as it then
was that he begged to be taken home again.
At home young Taylor picked up a copy of Ward's Young
Mathematician's Guide, and this gave him a turn for mathematics,
in which he afterwards excelled, and to which he himself as-
cribed no small share of his success afterwards as a translator
of Greek philosophy. Owing to his father's opposition his early
studies in mathematics were pursued in hours stolen from rest,
and he slept with a tinder-box under his pillow. He was sent
at fifteen to work under an uncle-in-law at Sheerness Dockyard,
but rather than endure this unpleasant situation he attempted to
fall in with his father's views and became pupil to a dissenting
minister. He studied Greek and Latin in the day, courted Miss
Morton in the evening, and at night read Simson's Conic Sections
in the Latin edition. His judgment on Newton, after reading
the Principia, was that he was a great mathematician but no
philosopher ! Miss Morton's father intended his daughter for
a richer man, but the young couple decided upon the imme-
diate performance of the marriage ceremony, whilst postponing
married life until the return of the bridegroom from Aberdeen
University, where he was to finish his education.
The stepmother of Taylor found out the secret, and the young\couple had a bad time of it. The bride's father was induced whendying to leave any payments to her to the discretion of a rela-
tive whose fault was not that of open-handed liberality. For
about a year the philosopher and his wife had only about seven
shillings a week on which to live. Taylor obtained a situation
as usher, and was only able to see his wife upon the Saturday
afternoon. He next obtained a position in Lubbock's Bank at a
salary of fifty pounds, paid quarterly, and endured great priva-
tions from want of money, so that frequently from want of food
he would be in a fainting condition on reaching home. Even
under these discouraging circumstances Taylor did not neglect
study, and turned his mind to the unprofitable consideration of
Becker's Physica Subterranea and quadrature of the circle.
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