Richard Henry Stoddard's poetry is not original; it did not have a significant influence on his contemporaries nor on the poets of future generations. It is still of interest, however, to scholars of nineteenth-century American culture. One can trace in Stoddard's career how the Romanticism of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, and James Russell Lowell became the stock-in-trade of the literary establishment of New York during the middle of the century. As an editor of collections of British and American verse and various parlor-table compendia, Stoddard helped popularize the culture of Romantic and Victorian poetry, and as a poet, he prided himself on his ability to satisfy the desire for sentimental verse that he had helped to create. He is most often remembered today as the husband of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard, whose Gothic, realist novels The Morgesons (1862) and Two Men (1865) are a scathing parody...