William Ellery Leonard was an eccentric poet, professor, and critic whose romantic ideals were set against a world whose aesthetics were fast turning away from his own. He lived a life marked by both success and dramatic failure, both personally and professionally. His first wife's suicide would haunt him and mark one of his greatest poems, the sonnet sequence Two Lives; his translations of Lucretius and Beowulf stood as hallmarks of the craft for decades after they were published; and his political satires written in response to the University sphere he lived and worked in remain as effective today as they once were.