Combining a native New England idealism with an ardent reverence for the classical Greek and Roman writers, George Edward Woodberry, teacher, poet, and scholar, produced a fairly large body of poetry and literary criticism. As a young man he heard Emerson's last lecture and helped catalog the library of James Russell Lowell, his mentor at Harvard who no doubt helped kindle his love of the classics and spark his ideality. Joel E. Spingarn, one of Woodberry's students, characterized his former professor in the Dictionary of American Biography as a thinker who attempted to mingle the individualism of the transcendentalist with the European Platonic and Roman Catholic tradition. This curious mixture of conflicting forces reveals itself in Woodberry's critical canon. Expressed with a refinement which one might not expect to see in the works of a man once described as "rebellious," his opinions brought the idealistic tenets of Lowell...