Barrett Wendell and the Harvard Literary Revival

"DURING the past two years the college has been going through a literary revival," reported an editor of the Harvard Crimson in 1886. He was referring to the first half year of publication of the Harvard Monthly, a new journal seeking to rescue Harvard from its literary doldrums. Since the Civil War, Harvard's role in the nation's literary life had been declining, but, by 1885, Harvard students and faculty were trying to recreate a literary climate. "Some sort of yeast was stirring at Harvard," observed novelist Robert Herrick in "The Idols of My Youth," an essay on the Harvard of the late 188o's and early 1890's. Herrick often recalled his years as an editor of the Monthly and as a student of his idol, Professor Barrett Wendell. Then an English instructor, Wendell was on his way to become one of the most popular-and eccentric-members of the faculty. According to Herrick, who once compared Wendell's classes to an atelier, he had "a greater influence upon the craftsmanship of the writer than any other American man-of-letters." Wendell's boyhood dream had been to "carry on in Boston the tradition of our New England Literature." After his graduation in 1877, he began his teaching as a theme corrector in 1880. During moments salvaged from his schedule of theme grading, he tried to fulfill his literary yearnings by writing novels, two of which were published in the mid-1880's.l It was in the spirit of his promise as a writer that he introduced an advanced, noncredit course in the spring of 1884 to train undergraduates in the art he was practicing in his free moments. In the course, Wendell promoted the systematic practice of English composition in a manner never before attempted. Instead of insisting on following rhetorical principles