Stedman examines the causes of certain American poets' successes and failures. He discusses "Early and Recent Conditions," the "Growth of the American School," as well as poets such as Whittier, Lowell, Whitman, Longfellow, and Poe. This 1885 volume is a sequel to his earlier Victorian Poets (1875); the two works formed the most symmetrical body of literary criticism yet published in the United States up to that time.