SOURCE: "George Edward Woodbury, 1855-1930: An Appreciation," in George Edward Woodberry, 1855-1930: An Appreciation, edited by R. R. Hawkins, The New York Public Library, 1930, pp. 3-7.

In the following essay, Erskine gives a laudatory assessment of Woodberry as a poet, critic, and teacher.

George Edward Woodberry was first and last a poet. He used to say that his life had somewhat missed its aim, since he enjoyed the leisure to produce only a few volumes of verse; his time was necessarily taken up with teaching and with the miscellaneous writing of the man of letters. But the importance of his teaching lay precisely in the fact that he treated all literature as creative, as poetic, in the larger and truer sense, and his essays and biographies are memorable precisely because he envisaged poetry as the most natural as well as the noblest activity of man. Whether he spoke...