Although primarily a poet, Lizette Woodworth Reese published at least fourteen short stories, which appeared in various literary magazines, including Harper’s, Lippincott’s, and Outlook. Five of these fictional pieces are reprinted in her semiautobiographical work The York Road (1931). In A Victorian Village: Reminiscences of Other Days (1929), Reese reminisces about her girlhood in and around Waverly, a hamlet on the outskirts of Baltimore. Reese’s only other major work is the unfinished Worleys (1936), a fictional piece published after her death. She also wrote a few essays on teaching and published several magazine poems that were not included in any of her books.

By the time Lizette Woodworth Reese retired at the age of sixty-five from her position as a public school English teacher, she had published only about half of her poems. Yet to come were the poems in Wild Cherry, the new work contained in The Selected Poems of Lizette Woodworth Reese, and the long elegy Little Henrietta. Also still to come was the somewhat belated recognition as a significant contributor to the mainstream of American lyricism. By 1924, Reese began receiving the awards and honors that she deserved. The College of William and Mary initiated Reese as an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1925, the Tudor and Stuart Club at The Johns Hopkins University selected Reese for honorary membership.

The most public expression of recognition occurred on December 15, 1926, when the George H. Doran Company, publisher of The Selected Poems of Lizette Woodworth Reese, hosted a testimonial dinner for Reese at the Brevoort Hotel in New York. Many prominent literary figures of the day attended, including DuBose Heyward, Edwin Markham, Carl Van Doren, Elinor Wylie, William Rose Benét, and Robert Frost. Other honors followed: In 1931, Reese received the Shelley Memorial Award for achievement in poetry; in the same year, an honorary doctor of letters degree from Goucher College; and in 1934, designation as National Honor Poet of Poetry Week.

Ultimately, Reese’s place in American literary history may depend on the impetus that she gave to a modern, native lyricism. This impetus dates from the publication of her first book in 1887, more than twenty years before the flowering of the Imagist movement. Reese, who styled herself a “conventional traditionist” and spoke unflatteringly of the “precious imagists,” was, nevertheless, a poet whose work is characterized by many of the qualities that the Imagists praised: simplicity, concentration, sharp sensory appeal, and, as Ezra Pound demanded, “direct treatment of the thing.” David Perkins says in A History of Modern Poetry (1976) that Reese handled images “in a way that anticipates Imagist poetry,” and other critics have noted the modern texture of her verse, lying under the traditional structure of rhymed quatrain and sonnets. Forgiving her lapses into “poetic” diction and inversions (“hath,” “grasses green”) and stock rhymes (“fall/all,” “spring/thing”), one still detects a genuine voice, a voice that breaks with the genteel tradition to which Reese has been unfairly assigned.

Ironically, Reese has been to some extent the victim of the success of her famous sonnet “Tears.” First published by Scribner’s Magazine in 1899, and later included in A Wayside Lute , “Tears” has been anthologized so frequently that even a serious student of American poetry might conclude that Reese wrote one brilliant sonnet and little else of merit. H. L. Mencken said that “we have here a sonnet that no other American has ever approached.” Such singular praise for “Tears” from Mencken and others (Padraic Colum said that he knew it by heart) tended to distinguish it as the Reese poem,...