The relative obscurity of Richard Le Gallienne's literary reputation is perhaps due to his excess of romantic sensibility in an age of irony. By the time he got to Paris in 1927, Le Gallienne's heyday had passed.

Born Richard Thomas Gallienne at Liverpool in 1866, he was hailed by members of the Decadent Movement with the publication of Volumes in Folio (1889). Publishing prolifically not only in John Lane's controversial Yellow Book, whose editors included Aubrey Beardsley, but in a dozen other newspapers and magazines, he began, as he tells in The Romantic '90s (1925), to associate with such figures as Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. But Le Gallienne was not primarily of the Decadent spirit which he once called "limited thinking, often insane thinking." He was first and always the romantic author of The Quest of the Golden Girl (1896).

When he moved to the United States in 1903, Le...