Background.

The periodicals that began to materialize during the early years of the republic served as important vehicles for literary criticism, publishing reviews and essays on literary topics. One of the most important such periodicals was the Monthly Anthology, founded in Boston in 1803. Its first editor, David Phineas Adams, was unable to make the journal a financially viable enterprise and abandoned it after publishing six issues. In 1804 William Emerson, the father of poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, took over as editor, and the following year a group of leading Boston intellectuals—including Joseph Buckminster, William Tudor, and Joseph Tuckerman —joined Emerson. To give the enterprise a firmer institutional basis they formed the Anthology Society. In that year the subscribers to the Anthology numbered 440, but their efforts extended the life of the Anthology only temporarily, and it folded in 1811.

The Impact of the Anthology.