Richard Hovey, one of the most popular poets at the turn of the century, is chiefly remembered for the virility, camaraderie, and bohemianism of his poems in Songs from Vagabondia (1894) and his Dartmouth Lyrics (1924). Much inspired by Walt Whitman, he sang of the open road and the masculine friendship he found in his college fraternity and with Thomas Meteyard and Bliss Carman during their summers in the outdoors. Through such verse Hovey, along with Edwin Markham, James Whitcomb Riley, and Eugene Field, challenged the poetry of the genteel tradition that prevailed in the barren time after the era of Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Nevertheless, Hovey's work is informed by serious literary and social concerns. "If any suffering of mine may make the lot of women easier and happier," he wrote to Amélie Rives in February 1889, "I welcome that suffering...