His best-known poem is "An Ode in Time of Hesitation," on the Spanish-American War; others include "Gloucester Moor," "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines," "The Brute," "Harmonics" (his only sonnet), "Until the Troubling of the Waters," "The Departure," "How the Mead-Slave Was Set Free," "The Daguerreotype," and "The Death of Eve."

In style they evoke a mastery of the verse-craft of his time and also the reach and depth derived from his intensive studies of Milton and of Greek tragedy.

Among his close friends were the historian Ferdinand Schevill, the editor Norman Hapgood, the author, academic, activist and diplomat Robert Morss Lovett, and the poet Trumbull Stickney.

After a time he resigned his teaching post at the University of Chicago, commenting (as his friend John Matthews Manly quotes him in the introduction to the posthumous collection of his works), "I cannot do it; I feel that at every lecture I slay a poet."

His complete works, including The Death of Eve, a fragment of the third member of the proposed trilogy mentioned above, were edited with an introduction by John M. Manly (1912).