George Edward Woodberry

Woodberry built his reputation the hard way — through close reading, honest criticism, and a conviction that literature was not a career subject but a moral one. He studied at Harvard under Charles Eliot Norton and James Russell Lowell, earning his A.B. in 1877, and spent the next decade producing work that got him noticed: a biography of Edgar Allan Poe in 1885, followed by Studies in Letters and Life in 1890. When Columbia appointed him Professor of Comparative Literature in 1891, he was thirty-six years old and had already earned the position. He taught there for thirteen years and shaped a generation of American writers and critics who carried his standards forward long after he was gone.

His departure from Columbia in 1904 was not a quiet retirement. He left following a sustained dispute with President Nicholas Murray Butler over the direction of the university — what it owed its students, what it stood for. Woodberry had built a department around a certain seriousness of purpose, and Butler’s institutional ambitions pulled in a different direction. Woodberry resigned rather than adapt. He was forty-nine. It cost him his platform and his professional footing, and he knew it. He spent the rest of his life writing, and the work he produced after Columbia — The Torch, the two-volume Life of Poe, Wendell Phillips — is as good as anything he did before.

The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard was established in 1931, the year after his death, in recognition of what he had contributed to American letters. His Poe biographies remain the most rigorous scholarly treatment of that subject produced in his era. He matters now for the same reason he mattered then: he wrote about literature as though it was worth getting right.