Although hailed in his lifetime and in the years following his premature death as one of the greatest American poets, William Vaughn Moody is now largely forgotten. The figure critics once compared to Milton and more accurately to Shelley--is now unread.

William Vaughn Stoy Moody was the son of Francis Burdette Moody, a New Yorker who had migrated to Indiana and become a steamboat captain, and Henrietta Stoy Moody, who was descended from one of southern Indiana's oldest pioneering families. Born in Spencer, Indiana, William Vaughn Moody grew up in New Albany, Indiana, across the river from Louisville, Kentucky. His father had abandoned life on the river in 1862 to become an entrepreneur in Spencer; but he achieved only modest prosperity as a businessman and in 1870 moved his family back to New Albany, where he worked for his wife's brothers as secretary of the Ohio Falls Iron Works. Young...