Robert Herrick was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a genteelly impoverished family that traced its New England lineage back to 1636. Schooled locally, he also graduated from Harvard, where he benefited from a recent interest in encouraging creative writers. For the rest of his life he could impress strangers as the embodiment of Harvard stiffness. After three years as an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he went to the raw, recently established University of Chicago, teaching there until he resigned his professorship of English in 1923. Meanwhile his impetuous marriage to a first cousin had soured before a divorce in 1913 when, of three children, only their son Philip Abbot was still living. The move to the Midwest shook his values less than might be expected. However, after a phase of chauvinism, he reacted to World War I with reflective skepticism; likewise the stock-market crash of 1929, in which he...