As one of Amy Lowell's young Harvard acolytes left Boston for a new life in Greenwich Village, the poet sent him off with this warning: “The only thing I beg of you is not to be fooled by Greenwich Village. There are no good people there. They are just failures who agreed to admire each other, since the world refuses to do it for them.” Lowell had good reason to distrust the denizens of Greenwich Village. Though they shared similar artistic tastes and a similar drive to reform American literature, their ends differed dramatically. Lowell's was a conservative, anti-unionist, capitalist, pro-war mindset. The bohemians of the Village, on the other hand, believed in free love, labor reform, socialism, and pacifism. And yet Lowell's snide admonition, however unwittingly, gets at one of the most compelling paradoxes of bohemian Greenwich Village: a belief in failure as the only real mark of success in an America that the activists, anarchists, feminists, artists, writers, and poets who made it their home saw as increasingly smug, acquisitive, and anti-intellectual. Where Lowell notoriously pitched her writing to the general public, working to make the avant-garde accessible and commercially lucrative, the Villagers reveled in rejection by this same audience. They believed art could enlighten minds, shatter social prohibitions, even ameliorate inequities among the classes, and when middle-class audiences responded to their work with confusion and derision, they felt confident they had hit their mark. In rejecting the bourgeois desires of mainstream America, with its hunger for social position and material success, they turned the Village into a place where art reigned supreme as the highest, most noble human achievement.