Background
He was born Jan. 25, 1876, in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. His parents, admirers of the transcendentalist movement, named him after William Ellery Channing, a mentor to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
essayist teacher scholars poet
He was born Jan. 25, 1876, in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. His parents, admirers of the transcendentalist movement, named him after William Ellery Channing, a mentor to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Leonard attended his mother's class for five years, studied with his father at home, and did not enter public school until he was nine. He was educated at Boston University, Harvard, Göttingen, Gottingen, and Columbia.
From 1906 to 1944 he was a teacher at the University of Wisconsin. Leonard's poetry is marked more by vigorous wit and sonority than by melody, but his restoration of the sonnet as an instrument for revealing intense subjective experience was a notable accomplishment. Like his life, Leonard's writing was channeled by the psychic defeat recounted in The Locomotive God (1927). His most notable poetry is collected in Two Lives (1925) and A Son of Earth (1928), and his outstanding contributions to scholarship are his translation (1916) and critical edition (1942) of Lucretius and his translation of Beowulf (1923).
Leonard suffered from lifelong agoraphobia.
He married Charlotte Freeman, the daughter of his landlord, in 1909. The marriage was short-lived. From 1914 until their divorce in 1934, he was married to Charlotte Charlton. In 1935, he married a student, Grace Golden, who divorced him two years later. Three years after that, he remarried his second wife.