"It seemed my destiny," wrote Bryan Waller Procter with typical self-effacement, "to float along from the cradle to the grave on the happy stream of mediocrity." Donald H. Reiman, editor of the Garland facsimiles of books by "Barry Cornwall," offers a blunt twentieth-century judgment of the poet's canon: "The poems of 'Barry Cornwall' are, perhaps, the best example we possess of the futility of a poet with neither philosophic depth nor extraordinary command of poetic language trying to follow in the footsteps of the great poets. Every sublime theme of the Elizabethans and Romantics that Procter touched turned to either triviality or bombast."

While Procter and his poetry are unknown today, however, his works were widely reviewed and even esteemed by contemporary British and American readers. After establishing friendships with Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb in 1817, he remained closely acquainted with all the major and most prolific writers...