Abstract
For months, he lugged around the alphabet. In his job setting type at Ginn and Company, the sixth largest publisher of textbooks in the country, William Stanley Braithwaite nimbly arranged letters and words, spaces and punctuation marks, into the square three feet by two feet case. Then one morning, in December 1893, while setting text at the company’s newly opened Athenaeum Press on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, fifteen-year old “Willie” (as his boss called him) experienced an “Annunciation.” After placing the last words in the shallow steel box, he stood back to admire his handiwork. The final two lines from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats read:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of the races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty.1
—W. E. B. Du Bois (1903)
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Notes
Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1907 [1903]), 164.
Mencken to George Sterling, quoted in From Baltimore to Bohemia: The Letters of H. L. Mencken and George Sterling. Ed. S. T. Joshi (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 29.
Quoted in Lisa Steinman, Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 45.
Quoted in Lara Vetter, Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 11.
Daniel Albright makes clear that the relationship between modernists and science was not without problems or contradictions. D. H. Lawrence, for example, invoked Jewish stereotypes to criticize Einstein, while Wyndham Lewis and Pound found his theories more congenial to the hazy, insubstantial poetry and poetics of the Victorians. “Einstein deeply offended that section of the Modernist movement that doted on solidity, aggressive edges, and Sachlichkeit,” Albright argues. Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13.
Pound did not actually use the phrase “Make it New” until the 1930s. See Kurt Heinzelman, “‘Make It New’: The Rise of An Idea,” in Make It New: The Rise of Modernism. Ed. Kurt Heinzelman (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 2004): 131–34.
In their three-volume study of the role of women in twentieth-century literature, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar document the “sexualized visions of change and exchange”: No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. I: The War of Words (New York: Yale University Press, 1989); Vol. II: Sexchanges (1989); Vol. III: Letters from the Front (1995).
In On Beauty and Being Just (New York: Princeton University Press, 1999), Elaine Scarry traces the gendered division of beauty to the eighteenth century when Kant divided aesthetics into two categories, deeming beauty a mere charm, with female associations, and elevating the masculine-associated sublime, with its ability to move individuals. Also see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 5, 202–10. Ezra Pound, meanwhile, referred to The Golden Treasury as “that stinking sugar teat Palgrave,” and built his critical opinions in contrast to the book’s contents. Frank Lentricchia discusses Pound’s views of Palgrave in Modernist Quartet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 55–61.
See Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).
Craig S. Abbott, “Modern American Poetry: Anthologies, Classrooms, and Canons,” College Literature, 17 (1990) 2/3, 209–21.
Timothy Morris, Becoming Canonical in American Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
Gerald Graff, Professing Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
For more on black culture in this period, see Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–1919. Eds. Barbara McCaskill, Caroline Gebhard (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
Nina Miller, Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 210–11, 216. Marureen Honey makes this argument as well in Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 2–3, 6–7, 20–21.
Guiney was quoting Charles Lamb when she said this. Horace Gregory, Marya Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry, 1900–1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 83.
In 1890 there were 8,125 African Americans in Boston, which constituted 1.8 percent of the total population. By 1920 that number had increased to 16,350 (2.2 percent), 5,334 of whom lived in Cambridge. A full two-thirds of Boston’s black citizens lived in integrated settings. In 1904 the Boston Sunday Herald featured the headline “Boston as the Paradise of the Negro” with quotes from prominent black Bostonians. Mark Schneider, Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890–1920 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), x, xii, 4, 7.
Braithwaite, “The House under Arcturus,” Phylon 2 (1941) 1, 132.
Braithwaite, “Arcturus,” Phylon, 2 (1941) 2, 135–36.
See Stephen Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York: Atheneum, 1970).
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Social and Political Criticism (New York: Macmillan Co., 1920 [1869]), 31.
Braithwaite, “Some Contemporary Poets of the Negro Race,” Crisis, April 1919. Quoted in BR, Butcher, 53.
For a discussion of aesthetics among African-American artists, authors, and academics, see Russ Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Jeffrey Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, 1883–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 69–72.
James Weldon Johnson, Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922), 18. In 1906 Braithwaite had lobbied unsuccessfully to find a publisher for an anthology of African-American verse; he handed over the idea to Johnson who, fifteen years later, was able to find a publisher and reap a hefty profit. Braithwaite, who worked on the anthology with Johnson for eighteen months, received no financial recompense. Alain Locke to Charlotte Mason, 25 February 1931, Box 69, Folder 1, ALHU.
Braithwaite, “Arcturus,” Phylon, 2 (1941) 2, 136.
Braithwaite, “Arcturus,” Phylon, 3 (1942) 1, 35.
Braithwaite, The House of Falling Leaves: With Other Poems (Boston: John W. Luce and Company, 1908), 61.
Howard Meyer, Colonel of the Black Regiment: The Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), 162.
Meyer, Colonel, 296. Although three volumes of Dickinson’s Poems were published between 1890 and 1892 and sold well, the punctuation marks, syntax, and structure were altered significantly. Her influence expanded when Thomas Johnson restored the texts to their original versions in a three-volume edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Belknap Press, 1955). Even those did not convey with complete accuracy Dickinson’s writing. For an examination of Dickinson’s manuscripts, see Betsy Erkkilia, “The Emily Dickinson Wars,” The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Ed. Wendy Martin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–29.
Gary Williams, Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 1, 136. Toward the end of his life, Higginson sided with Booker T. Washington’s plan for racial uplift through compliance over the strategy of Du Bois. In 1909 Du Bois invited the then eighty-five-year-old Colonel to attend the organizational meeting of what became the NAACP, but Higginson declined.
OHCU, 74. For a full discussion of the racial issues that colored Braithwaite’s life and career, see Lisa Szefel, “Encouraging Verse: William S. Braithwaite and the Poetics of Race,” New England Quarterly (March 2001), 32–61.
Quoted in Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 255.
Braithwaite, “Poetic Criticism,” The Poetry Journal, 1912, 38–40.
Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold. Ed. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 306.
Spingarn, “The New Criticism,” Criticism in America: Its Function and Status (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1924), 11.
Braithwaite, “The Year in Poetry,” Bookman, March 1917. Quoted in BR, Butcher, 35.
After reading Braithwaite’s admiring 1910 review of The Town Down the River (dedicated to Roosevelt), Robinson sought out Braithwaite in Boston, beginning a long and strong friendship. Louis Coxe, Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Life of Poetry (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 82. In 1920, Braithwaite encouraged Robinson to press Macmillan to issue a collected edition of his verse. Robinson initially desisted but, when Braithwaite insisted, finally relented. The volume sold well and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Hagedorn, Robinson, 325. Robinson refused, however, Braithwaite’s scheme to get poets and their work onto film. In the 1920s, Robinson came to the aid of his friend several times. Braithwaite recalled that if it were not for the interventions of Robinson, Bliss Perry, and Robert Hillyer, his financial situation would have been completely untenable. Braithwaite to Edith Mirick, 16 January 1930, Box 17, WBVA.
Braithwaite, “Percy MacKaye and the Nation’s Rebirth,” BET, 12 January 1916.
Braithwaite, “Three Poets of the New Age,” BET, 19 December 1914.
The Lyric Year: One Hundred Poems. Ed. Ferdinand Earle (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), 132–37.
Matthew Bruccoli, The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerley: Bookman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1986), 59–60.
Poetry (September 1913), 131. Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Random House, 2001), 76, 78–79.
Braithwaite, “The Fine Art of An American Poet,” review of Louis Ledoux, The Story of Eleusis, BET, 28 October 1916.
Braithwaite, “More Recent Verse,” BET, 1913.
Braithwaite, “Robert Frost, New American Poet: His Opinions and Practice—An Important Analysis of the Art of the Modern Bard,” BET, 8 May 1915, 4.
W. D. Howells, “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s Magazine, 131 (JuneNovember 1915), 635.
Quoted in Lawrence Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 5, 519.
Kline, “William S. Braithwaite,” BET, 30 November 1915.
H. T. Schnittkind, “The Aims of The Stratford Journal” (Autumn 1916), 3–4. The journal was published from 1916 until 1925, though Braithwaite’s work on it was limited. See also Lorenzo Thomas, “W. S. Braithwaite vs. Harriet Monroe: The Heavyweight Poetry Championship, 1917,” in Aldon Nielsen, Reading Race in American Poetry: “An Area of Act” (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 84–106.
Edward Butscher, Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 86, 92, 110, 149, 157, 469.
Lindsay, The Congo and Other Poems (New York: Macmillan Co., 1915 [1914]), 3–11.
Monroe, “Review of Vachel Lindsay, The Congo and Other Poems,” Poetry, 5 (March 1915) 6, 296–99.
Quoted in Walter Daniel, “Vachel Lindsay, W. E. B. Du Bois, and The Crisis,” The Crisis (August–September 1979), 292 [291–93].
For critical readings of the poems, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 87–97.
Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 140–43.
Quoted in Kenny J. Williams, “An Invisible Partnership and an Unlikely Relationship: William Stanley Braithwaite and Harriet Monroe,” Callaloo 10 (Summer 1987), 520.
Braithwaite, “Five Women and the Muse,” BET, November 1914.
Braithwaite, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1916 (New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916), xiv–v.
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© 2011 Lisa Szefel
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Szefel, L. (2011). Rescripting Gender Codes, Redrawing the Color Line: Anthologies and the Dream of Aesthetic Universalism. In: The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118973_5
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