ABSTRACT
Agustín Santayana died in full confidence of his sons genius, but without much evidence of it beyond the pieces in undergraduate magazines. A year after his death the son brought out his first book, Sonnets and Other Verses. It was followed at regular intervals over the next fifty-nine years by a stream of articles, verse, reviews, and books small and large. Santayana's diction in verse, until very late in life, was fatally a pastiche of Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson, and of Greek and Latin verse as translated by the Victorians. His cadences were as much Spanish and Italian as English, while his eye for cliche was dull. Santayana may be grouped with a minor school of poets who passed through Harvard within a few years of him. They include Hugh McCullough, Thomas Sanborn, George Cabot Lodge, William Vaughn Moody, Robert Herrick, Robert Morse Lovett, and Trumbull Stickney.
