Though little known today, Philip Bourke Marston was in his own time an enormously popular poet both in England and in America. An intimate friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and A. C. Swinburne, Marston was a prolific writer who had three collections of poetry published in his brief lifetime and contributed numerous short stories and reviews to Scribner's, the Athenaeum, and other magazines of the day.

For the poet Philip Bourke Marston, life, both literally and figuratively, was dark. An accidental blow in childhood severely damaged his vision, and this handicap, coupled with the losses of several family members and close friends over a twelve-year period, haunted him and led one critic to comment that "'I believe in death' seems to be the first article in the poet's gloomy creed."

Marston's early years held little hint of his subsequent sorrows. The only son of affectionate and indulgent parents...