When Trumbull Stickney died at age thirty of a brain tumor, one year after he had returned from doctoral studies at the Sorbonne to teach classics at Harvard University, only one collection of his poetry, Dramatic Verses (1902), had been published, and a second was still in the planning stages. After his friends published a memorial volume, The Poems of Trumbull Stickney in 1905, "it was discovered," the Oxford Companion to American Literature (1983) observes, "that he was a representative poet of his period." The estimate is unjust. Although his reputation faded rapidly, his poetry continued to earn the admiration of poets such as Conrad Aiken (who introduced T.S. Eliot to Stickney's poetry in about 1908), William Rose Benét, Louis Untermeyer, Allen Tate, Mark Van Doren, W.H. Auden, and Oscar Williams--all of whom included his work in their anthologies--and of Edmund Wilson, who wrote an important essay on...