John Payne (poet)

' John Payne''' (1842-1917) was an English poet and translator

Life
He was from Devon. Initially he pursued a legal career, and associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Later he became involved with limited edition publishing, and the Villon Society.

He is best known for his translation of the Diwan Hafez, and praises Hafez as the greatest poet of the world. He is also known for his translations of The Arabian Nights and Boccaccio's Decameron.

Writing
The Dictionary of Literary Biography says that Payne's "own poems, most of them written in the 1870s, ranged from ballads to sonnets to bizarre dramatic monologues and showed impressive ingenuity in versification and imagery." However, through his career "his poems failed to progress beyond their Pre-Raphaelite models in subject, mood, or language. The blast of originality never came that could have lifted Payne's work to a level with that of ... Rossetti or A.C. Swinburne."

Recognition
He was survived by a John Payne Society (now defunct).

Poetry

 * The Masque of Shadows and other poems (1870)
 * Intaglios; sonnets (1871)
 * Songs of Life and Death. (1872)
 * Lautrec: A Poem (1878)
 * The Descent of the Dove and other poems (1902)
 * Poetical Works (1902) two volumes
 * Vigil and Vision: New Sonnets(1903)
 * Hamid the Luckless and other tales in verse (1904)
 * Songs of Consolation: New Poems (1904)
 * Sir Winfrith and other poems (1905)
 * Selections from the Poetry of John Payne (1906) selected by Tracy and Lucy Robinson
 * The Way of the Winepress (1920)

Prose

 * The Autobiography of John Payne of Villon Society Fame, Poet and Scholar (1926)

Translated

 * The Poems of Francois Villon.(1878)
 * New Poems (1880)
 * The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Nights (1882) translation in nine volumes vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3, vol. 4.
 * Tales from the Arabic (1884)
 * The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (1886) translation in three volumes
 * Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp ; Zein Ul Asnam and The King of the Jinn: (1889)
 * The Persian Letters of Montesquieu (1897) translator
 * The Quatrains of Omar Kheyyam of Nisahpour (1898)
 * Poems of Master Francois Villon of Paris (1900)
 * The Poems of Hafiz (1901)
 * Oriental Tales: The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Nights [and other tales]. (1901) verse and prose translation in 15 volumes, edited by Leonard C. Montesquieu Smithers
 * Stories of Boccaccio (1903)
 * Flowers of France: Romantic Period (1906)
 * Flowers of France, The Renaissance Period 1907
 * Flowers of France: the Latter Days (1913)
 * Flowers of France: The Classic Period (1914)