Poet, literary historian, critic, editor, teacher, and biographer, George Edward Woodberry was one of the preeminent American men of letters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his youth he developed a passion for imaginative experience; he devoted his career to sharing that passion with others. A prolific author, he wrote more than two dozen books; in addition, he edited works by a diversity of major literary Figures, including Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Miguel de Cervantes, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, and Edgar Allan Poe. Although he lived during a time in which society was becoming increasingly preoccupied with science and technology, Woodberry held firmly to his New England idealism and centered his attention on man. His former student John Erskine fondly recalled that "he saw life always as a mass of urges and impulses tending toward the expression of the heart and...