In 1813 William Cullen Bryant, then a law student at Yale University, had a run-in with his tutor, Samuel Howe. Howe had caught Bryant reading William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and warned young Cullen not to waste his time. From the standpoint of the history of American poetry the time was not wasted, but Bryant's submission to the authority of the then-popular English romantics caused later generations to dismiss his criticism as derivative, as a mere recasting of his youthful reading. However, Bryant's reading was far more extensive than his detractors knew. In addition to Wordsworth Bryant was familiar with the critical works of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson, Archibald Alison's Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), the essays of the Scotch rhetoricians, and a smattering of the Greek and...