During his undergraduate years at Harvard, Van Wyck Brooks had ambitions of becoming a poet. His poetry appeared regularly in the Harvard Advocate, and in 1905, he and another aspiring writer, John Hall Wheelock, privately published a small volume of poems entitled Verses by Two Undergraduates. His poetic ambitions were soon superseded by his desire to be a critic, but he remained vitally interested in poetry and dedicated much of his criticism to commenting on the state of American verse. In particular, he campaigned vigorously against the desiccating influence on American poetry of certain nineteenth-century poets; he attempted to establish a sense of tradition and community among poets in this country; and he fought an unrelenting battle against what he considered to be the expatriate, nay-saying, elitist tendencies fostered in American verse by T.S. Eliot. For Brooks, the American poetic tradition centered on the expansive, democratic Walt Whitman, and Eliot was a destructive, misguided interloper.
