The immediate reception and the subsequent treatment of Joyce Kilmer's poem "Trees" show to an extreme and disturbing degree the twentieth century's widening gulf between popular and academic tastes. While it is true that "Trees" first appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (August 1913), a magazine acclaimed for its early publication of many noteworthy modern poems (including Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" and T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), Kilmer's work has never gained the esteem of leading literary critics. Its immense and world-wide popularity has been with more ordinary, less exalted readers. Still recollected fondly seventy years after its publication, it appears in textbooks and anthologies--if it appears at all--only to be ridiculed. Fortunately, Kilmer was a more interesting and accomplished writer than "Trees" suggests.

Alfred Joyce Kilmer spoke of himself as half-Irish, perhaps seeing his natural exuberance and love of food and company as...