George Edward Woodberry was a prominent American poet, literary scholar, essayist, and editor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Background
George Edward Woodberry was born on May 12, 1855, in Beverly, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of Henry Elliot and Sarah Dane Tuck Woodberry. Many of his forebears were sea captains and sailors, and his own poetic preoccupation with the sea and his taste for wandering in strange places show that he was of their blood.
Education
George Woodberry was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1872. Then he entered Harvard College though on account of illness and poverty he was unable to graduate until 1877. In his undergraduate years, he was also an editor of the Harvard Advocate and began contributing to the Atlantic Monthly in 1876.
Career
George Woodberry began his career as an editor of the school newspaper. After graduating, he continued contributing to Atlantic Monthly and to the Nation. From 1877 to 1878 and again from 1880 to 1882, he was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska. This brief experience of western life left a deep impression on him, in the way peculiar to his genius.
His first book, A History of Wood-Engraving (1883), was hardly more than a higher form of hackwork. It was followed two years later by his life of Edgar Allan Poe, which attracted attention and dissent because of the cold impartiality with which the defects of Poe were analyzed in all their detail. Woodberry did not like Poe, but he endeavored to be scrupulously fair. And certainly, no lover of Poe has brought to light more material for the study of Poe's life and genius, both in this work and elsewhere, culminating in the two-volume Life of Edgar Allan Poe twenty-four years later.
In 1890, he published The North Shore Watch and Other Poems and Studies in Letters and Life, and these established his reputation as a poet and as a critic. The title-poem of the former was an elegy on the death of a friend, sincerely and even passionately felt, though full of echoes of Shelley and other masters of the elegiac form. And throughout the volume, which contained the fine philosophic poem "Agathon" and the well-known sonnets "At Gibraltar," the Platonic tradition of European poetry mingles with deep American patriotism.
The Studies in Letters and Life largely made up of his Atlantic and Nation articles, emphasized the relation between literature and the imaginative and other experience that had produced it, and exhibited his characteristic combination of a virile idealism with a certain feminine sensibility.
In 1891, upon the recommendation, he was appointed professor of literature at Columbia University, a title that was changed to professor of comparative literature in 1900. The thirteen years at Columbia were the fullest and richest in his life. He was brilliantly successful as a teacher. Under his guidance, the undergraduate society of King's Crown was formed. A new undergraduate periodical, the Morningside, was founded, and a volume of Columbia Verse published.
Later he built up a graduate department that transformed the methods of higher instruction in literature and left a deep mark on university teaching in this field throughout the country. The series of Columbia University Studies in Comparative Literature in which his students' work appeared represented an important academic departure in that the studies were not the dry bones usually associated with doctoral dissertations but, at least in intention, real books both in form and in content. During this period Woodberry published two volumes of verse (Wild Eden, 1899; Poems, 1903), two volumes of essays (Heart of Man, 1899; and Makers of Literature, 1900), a biography (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1902), and a brief history of American literature (America in Literature, 1903).
In Wild Eden, there is some of his most charming verse, with a new note of lyric intensity. His America in Literature is characterized by a certain detached insight, but it exhibits a narrowness of sympathy which brushes aside the racier writers like Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Herman Melville. And this is equally true of his later article on "American Literature" in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The biography of Hawthorne is written with a subtle perception of the character of that shy genius and represents Woodberry's high-water mark as a biographer. His Heart of Man contains striking essays on "Democracy" and "A New Defence of Poetry," and is perhaps his most characteristic book. It is an interpretation of the imaginative elements common to poetry, religion, and politics.
Woodberry's very success as a teacher, as well as his informal and somewhat unacademic mode of life, the reticences of a New England "character," and other causes, led to jealousy and controversy. And suddenly, for reasons still obscure, he resigned his chair early in 1904 while on a year's leave of absence.
His retirement from Columbia was immediately followed by the publication of a number of works largely based on his academic and other lectures (The Torch, 1905; The Appreciation of Literature, 1907; Great Writers, lectures delivered at the Johns Hopkins University, 1907; The Inspiration of Poetry, 1910), as well as one of his most important biographies (Ralph Waldo Emerson in English Men of Letters Series, 1907) and several volumes of verse.
A series of lectures on Race Power in Literature delivered before the Lowell Institute of Boston in 1903, The Torch is probably the fullest expression of his philosophy of literature and exhibits the deep sense of race and tradition which was fundamental in his thought. But it should be borne in mind that for Woodberry "race" represented not so much an ethnic entity as a spiritual quality of mind made up of imaginative memories and experiences.
During the last fifteen years of his life he added little of importance except for a series of sonnets, Ideal Passion (1917), steeped in the atmosphere of the Mediterranean and containing some of his finest and most mature verse, and The Roamer and Other Poems (1920), in which most of his poetry is collected. Besides the work already enumerated, he edited a considerable number of books, including The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1892) and with E. C. Stedman The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1894). His lecture on Wendell Phillips (1912) had been a noble protest against all the injustices and deteriorations of American life.
Despite his respectable status in the world of letters, Woodberry's final years were marked by a growing feeling of alienation from the world. Toward the end of his life, he retired to his ancestral home, seeking solace in the writings of Plato, a philosopher with whose ideas he passionately defended all his life. He died there at the age of seventy-five.
Views
A proponent of an idealistic approach to literature, which some critics have termed "Ideality," Woodberry believed that literature should celebrate beauty, sublime ideas, and noble aspirations, ignoring the vicissitudes of material and historical reality.
Woodberry himself noted, with some melancholy, that his world view was at odds with the prevalent orientations in literature. He persevered in his efforts to defend his ideas, his horizons, as commentators have suggested, narrowing, and focusing on an idealized conception of the past.
The importance of his teaching lay precisely in the fact that he treated all literature as creative, as poetic he envisaged poetry as the most natural as well as the noblest activity of man.
Quotations:
"Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure."
"To feel that one has a place in life solves half the problem of contentment."
"The willingness to take risks is our grasp of faith."
"I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge."
Membership
George Woodberry was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and undergraduate society of King's Crown, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1911, he became a member of the Woodberry Society.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"He would always be cherished by those who sat in his classes rather as a great teacher, a great spirit. In the truest and finest sense, he was the friend and guide of youth." - Melville Cane
"A lost and bewildered romantic, Woodberry was filled with a nostalgia for worlds that he had missed, he knew not how." - Van Wyck Brooks