George Edward Woodberry Papers

George Edward Woodberry was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1855, the son of Henry Elliott and Sarah Dane (Tuck) Woodberry. He was descended from colonial New Englanders on both sides; his first American ancestor, John Woodberry, settled in Salem in 1626 and was one of the founders of the settlement at Beverly. Many of G.E. Woodberry’s forbears were sea-captains and sailors.

Woodberry was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire. He entered Harvard College with the class of 1876, but did not graduate until 1877 due to illness and poverty. At Harvard Woodberry was greatly influenced by Henry Adams, and Charles Eliot Norton. He helped to catalogue the library of James Russell Lowell, and he was present at Emerson’s last lecture. Woodberry was a representative of New England Transcendentalism on its more rebellious side, and he was considered a “character” in the “New England sense.”

From 1877 to 1878 and again from 1880 to 1882 Woodberry was professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and this western sojourn greatly influenced his later writing.  For a year, in 1888, he was literary editor of the Boston Post. In 1891 Woodberry was appointed professor of literature at Columbia University, a title that was changed to professor of comparative literature in 1900. His thirteen years at Columbia were the fullest and richest of Woodberry’s life. He was brilliantly successful as a teacher and later built up a graduate department which transformed the methods of higher instruction in literature and left a deep mark on university teaching in the field of English throughout America. Woodberry left Columbia early in 1904 while on a year’s leave of absence, and for the rest of his life pursued activity as an itinerant teacher, traveler and writer.  Most of his time was spent, however, in Beverly, Massachusetts, writing or dreaming in the house occupied for generations by his ancestors.

Woodberry had begun his literary career in his undergraduate days as an editor of the Harvard Advocate, he had been contributing to the Atlantic Monthly since 1876, and to the Nation since 1878, and he became a regular contributor to both until 1891. Woodberry published a number of books, including: A History of Wood Engraving (1883), the life of Edgar Allan Poe (1885), The North Shore Watch and Other Poems  (1890), Studies in Letters and Life  (1890), Wild Eden (1899), Heart of Man (1899), Makers of Literature (1900), a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1902), America in Literature (1903), and a two-volume Life of Edgar Allan Poe (1909). Woodberry’s retirement from Columbia in 1904 was immediately followed by the publication of a number of works largely based on his academic and other lectures. These include: The Torch (1905), The Appreciation of Literature (1907), Great Writers lectures delivered at John Hopkins University (1907), The Inspiration of Poetry (1910), and one of his most important biographies Ralph Waldo Emerson in the English Men of Letters Series (1907).  Woodberry’s work 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 - though 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 published a series of sonnets, Ideal Passion (1917), 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 (10 vols., 1894-1895).

Woodberry was the recipient of several honors and academic distinctions, and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature of England. The Woodberry Society was organized in 1911 and printed several of his writings privately. The Harvard University Library named the Poetry Room in his honor. As a critic Woodberry occupies a position of no mean importance, some of his essays and lectures holding their place side by side with the best that has been written of man’s imaginative life by any American. In his best critical work there is a subtle intuition of the emotional experience that produced the work of literature and a deep sense of its relation to the spiritual background of western man. He is noted for his excellent biography. Woodberry died in his hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts, on January 2, 1930.

Sources Consulted

Malone, Dumas (ed.). Dictionary of American Biography, v.20. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936.

George H. Danton faculty file, RG 28/3, box 28.

Note written by Kamille T.H. Parkinson.