Determined to be recognized as a great poet, John Payne left behind hundreds of pages of poems as well as a worshipful John Payne Society. Neither the poetry nor the Society has endured. His best legacy was his translations of Villon, The Decameron, The Arabian Nights, and other exotic poems and tales. 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. His early poems were well received. Over the years, however, 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 Dante Gabriel Rossetti or A. C. Swinburne. Despite his helping found the Villon Society and promoting Stéphane Mallarmé's work among his friends, Payne's...