Despite controversies about the significance of his critical writings, James Russell Lowell stands alongside Edgar Allan Poe as one of the two most important literary critics America produced before 1850. Unlike Poe, however, Lowell became in his own time an influential arbiter of literary taste and value, a popular spokesman for genteel American culture, and a widely read and internationally respected man of letters. In 1878 Edward Fitzgerald, the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, declared Lowell "altogether the best critic we have; something of what Ste. Beuve is in French," and even today the largest professional organization of literary scholars and critics, the Modern Language Association, annually awards the outstanding book by one of its members the James Russell Lowell Prize. During his life Lowell published four collections of critical essays, and after his death admirers gathered his fugitive pieces in another half-dozen volumes. In this century his...