Ridgely Torrence occupies what must charitably be called a minor position in American literature. He is remembered primarily as a friend of better-known poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson, William Vaughn Moody, and Robert Frost, with whom he became acquainted less because of his poetic talents than because of his geniality, charisma, and powerful position as poetry editor at the New Republic (1920-1933). Yet Torrence was himself a writer of no mean skill: a playwright, essayist, and biographer, he actively pursued a multifaceted literary career for more than half a century, and in the 1920s he was regarded as a promising poet. His lifetime poetic output was slight, a fact noted with something akin to despair by those who had recognized the promise in his 1925 collection, Hesperides; and his best-known poems--widely anthologized, republished in magazines, and familiar to readers throughout the United States--often were not among his better...