Born at Beverly, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1855, Woodberry was educated at Phillips Exeter and then attended Harvard University. After graduating from Harvard, he taught at the University of Nebraska and served for a short period on the staff of The Nation. From 1882 to 1891 he settled down to literary work, contributing material to the Atlantic Monthly and acting as literary editor of the Boston Post. His distinguished lifework began in 1891 when he was appointed professor of English at Columbia University. Upon his retirement from his teaching duties in 1904 he devoted his time to writing and lecturing.

His was a long and fruitful writing career. His first book, A History of Wood Engraving (1883), was followed by his biographies of Poe (1885, revised in 1919), Hawthorne (1902), and Emerson (1907). These books gained him a substantial reputation as a scholar and critic. His critical and literary essays breathe a deep and genuine love of literature. Though his work is at present largely neglected, he was an inspiring teacher and highly stimulating critic. His interests covered a wide and varied field. Taking all of Western culture as his demesne, he treated foreign as well as native writers, the past as well as the present, with sympathetic understanding.

The breadth and range of Woodberry's love of literature in all its varied forms is vividly evidenced in The Appreciation of Literature (1907), as well as in such volumes as Studies in Life and Letters (1890), The Torch (1905), Great Writers (1907), and The Inspiration of Poetry (1910). He approached literature not as so much dead matter to be dissected into its component parts, classified, and studied in relation to the milieu, the moment, and the race, but as a vital expression of life. Scholarly without ever becoming pedantic, he never sacrificed the spirit for the letter. Consistently he develops the theme that literature is the foremost of the humanities, one of the most efficacious means of making man more completely human. The appreciation of literature does not depend upon following a set of rules or a body of critical principles but in being responsive to impressions, in being fully alive, open to all the rich suggestions that emanate from a work of art. For the universality of a literary work is an ever-widening circle that begins with the writer's own life and reaches out to include all of humanity. It does more than communicate experience; it communicates experience clarified and ordered. All three approaches to literature—the aesthetic, the historical, and the psychological—are useful, indeed indispensable, if the essential significance of a work is to be brought forth. The characteristic value of a literary work, however, is to be found in its being a work of literature. The aim and end of literature is not instruction but insight into the mysteries of life and fate. To know the truth of life in all its infinite variety—that is the goal in view.

Woodberry rejects the Crocean-Spingarn conception of creative criticism, primarily for the reason that it eliminates both judgment and interpretation and becomes a kind of irresponsible private appreciation enacted in the consciousness of the critic. Adhering to a more traditional conception of criticism, he argues that the world of art possesses an absolute value which it transmits to its works. Once they are born and given to the world, works of art become public possessions, subject to the vicissitudes of time; since they are part of the world of culture, they enter inevitably into relations with other monuments of culture. By thus taking their place in the continuum of time and tradition, they give rise to a history of art, becoming an integral part of a temporal order. When considered from the point of view of their development in time, they fall within the scope of historical criticism.

Woodberry had little sympathy for what passed itself off as scientific criticism: theories which emphasize the objective factors in the genesis and growth of art. These exhaustive labors of analysis and documentation are beside the point, for they tend to get further and further away from the work of art itself, substituting facts and theories for first-hand insight and aesthetic appreciation. If we are to re-create the work of art as it existed in the mind of the artist, we must make sure that our reconstruction is true to the mind and vision of the artist, and for that the historical method is imperative. Though art is universal in its appeal, it manifests itself in diverse ways. The spirit of the past must therefore be reproduced as faithfully as possible. That is the only way to re-create the work of art as it originally came to life in the mind of the artist. Here Woodberry approaches the philosophy of relativism, though without being aware of its modern implications. Other races, other civilizations, create works of art that are to us not only unfamiliar but enigmatic, sometimes bafflingly unintelligible. Art cannot be forced within a logical framework of abstract categories; it can be known only in the concrete. That is why Woodberry clings to historical criticism as the only way of preparing himself for the task of aesthetic criticism.

The function of judgment, however, must also be exercised. It is a mistake on the part of the Crocean to limit the critic too narrowly to the aesthetic field, arbitrarily preventing him from inquiring into the state of the artist's mind or to judge the value of his completed work. Once a work is produced it is a source of intellectual and moral values which may be harmful or beneficial in their effect. Even if the genius behind the work is supremely original, breaking new ground, discovering new forms and devising new methods of expression, the artist does not depart entirely from the uses of the past. Techniques may be legitimately analyzed in the light of tradition. Works of art, part of a long-continuing tradition and long-developed craft, incorporate communal interests and enduring moral values. Criticism must follow the guide of reason in passing judgment on the intellectual and moral values implicit in a work of art. For art cannot be divorced from the life of reason. The mind shapes the material of art as it shapes the material of life, with this difference, that in the former there is the triumph of creatively imposed order and achieved unity.

Historical criticism is but one phase of the critical process. There is the objective expression, the work of art, as perceived by our senses and charged with the artist's personality, his symbols, his vital meanings. If in criticism there is a diversity of interpretation, that is inevitable, since we stamp the artist's image with our own personality, creating it anew each time. Art is thus never fully apprehended; inexhaustible in its power of suggestions, it is never finished, ever growing richer in significance. Then, too, rooted temperamental differences produce differences in appreciation. Each one has his own aesthetic preferences and antipathies, so that we cannot ever re-create the work of art exactly as it existed in the artist's mind at the time he produced it.

If that is a serious handicap, there is ample compensation in the knowledge that with each age the work of art takes on new and fresh accretions of meaning as we strive to master its mystery and assimilate its substance. Art progressively emancipates itself from the mind of its original begetter and enters upon a life of its own, and its immortality lies precisely in this continual renewal in the minds of those who respond to it. Liberal in temper, Woodberry believed in the quality of the universal. Civilization grows by absorbing all that is rich and vital in alien cultures and civilizations. He deplores race prejudice and contempt for the foreigner in American life. His profound love for literature at its best, literature as an inspiring and spiritualizing force, is effectively communicated in his critical work. His "A New Defense of Poetry" which was first printed in Heart of Man in 1899, is still worth reading.