William Ellery Leonard, scholar, teacher, translator, and poet, was highly acclaimed for the heroism and technical achievement in his long poem Two Lives (1923). Calling it "the best poem that has ever come out of America," Howard Mumford Jones wrote in the May 1926 issue of Double Dealer, after B. W. Huebsch had published a second American edition, that it was "certainly the most marvelous long poem in technical achievement, in sincerity, in truth, in high and beautiful accomplishment, yet written by an American poet." "It solves the chief poetic problem of the age," wrote Ludwig Lewisohn, in the Nation (6 June 1923), "the recounting of the exact fates of modern men and women in terms at once analytic and creative, epical and lyric, precise and yet heroic."

William Ellery Channing Leonard, son of William James and Martha Whitcomb Leonard, was born on 25 January 1876 in Plainfield, New Jersey. At a little more...