Chapter III: The Artist

Taylor has been pronounced the most skilful of our metrists after Longfellow. One illustration only can be given of his interest in the mechanism of verse, and that is his poetic romance _The Picture of St. John_. The poem was not published until sixteen years after its first conception. Possibly its growth was a little retarded by the structural peculiarities.

The poem contains three hundred and fifty-five eight-line stanzas (iambic pentameter) grouped into four books. The ‘ottava rima’ was chosen as ‘better adapted for the purposes of a romantic epic than either the Spenserian stanza[57] or the heroic couplet.’ But the question with the poet was,--how to avoid the ‘uniform sweetness’ of a regular stanza while obtaining the ‘proper compactness and strength of rhythm’ which (in his belief) only a stanza could give. His device was to allow himself freedom of rhyme within the stanza, and this ‘not to escape the laws which Poetry imposes,’ but rather to impose a different law in the hope that the form would ‘more readily reflect the varying moods.’ When finally the poem was finished Taylor found that the three hundred and fifty-five stanzas contained ‘more than seventy variations in the order of rhyme.’

Only an enthusiast in the study of form would have undertaken the task of reproducing _Faust_ in the original metres. Taylor’s success was so great that his work as a translator has obscured his fame as a poet. Doubtless so nearly perfect a version had been impossible without that wonderful grasp of the spirit of the original. But it must not be forgotten how much it owes to the years of study and practice Taylor gave to the technique of his art.