Beauty and William Braithwaite

Although the subject of avid interest among literary scholars today, American poetry of the 1890s appeared to contemporaries to have taken on a pallid cast. Once a vital craft, poetry published in magazines, chapbooks, newspapers, and books now seemed stale, unadventurous, and conventional—a mere parlor pastime composed by dilettantes and housewives. The genteel poetic community that had arisen after the Civil War largely shared common beliefs, interests, and values, and accordingly maintained a set of practices that embodied those values and established mechanisms to recruit and accredit participants. By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, as shifting notions about gender, masculinity, and nationhood altered the contours of the cultural landscape, the ideology, institutions, and relationships of this community resulted in poetry that a significant number of readers now considered sclerotic and irrelevant. Rigor mortis had set in.

While editors such as Richard Gilder at Century and Bliss Perry at Atlantic Monthly bemoaned the quality of poems that reached their periodicals' tables, one young writer marveled at many of the elements found in contemporary verse. William Stanley Braithwaite admired the innovations of his fellow poets, and he decried the bromidic nature of American publishing that, too often, resulted in mere baubles. Poets like himself, Braithwaite believed, had vital contributions to make to literature yet feckless editorial policies dampened initiative. Convinced that enthusiasm, opportunity, and recognition would galvanize the country's inert literary field, he set about arousing public support. Beginning in 1905 with newspaper reviews of magazine verse, then with annual anthologies that ran from 1913 to 1929, and a steady current of letters and lectures, Braithwaite almost single-handedly energized the status of poetry and the stature of poets in America.

Combining a reform impulse with a devotion to art, Braithwaite extolled the virtues of beauty as a source of regeneration, a conduit to revive sensibilities dulled by contemporary spiritual and social turmoil. In a context in which "poetry" and "beauty" had been virtually synonymous, he balanced precariously and intentionally between glorifying pristine and ethereal beauty, as in the genteel tradition, and stigmatizing beauty as suspicious and retrograde, as many of the more avant-garde artists were doing.¹ Updating and yet preserving beauty was a central concern of his not least because contemporary writers and readers still largely concurred in experiencing beauty as a vital and direct communication, offering pleasure, insight, and empathy all in one. For Braithwaite and other aspiring poets of the time, beauty was not a marginal treat or an esoteric ideal but a foundational tenet, crucial to the discernment of meaning, value, and freedom.

A poor African American with only a sixth-grade education, Braithwaite was, nevertheless, a product of the genteel tradition. Indeed, in the early years of the twentieth century, he became one of its most steadfast exponents. Yet if Braithwaite accepted many of the aesthetic ideals of genteel America, he nonetheless was more attuned than most to the need for political and social change. As a result, in his role as literary arbiter, he promoted writers who departed from prevailing norms to explore contemporary issues, such as ethnicity, social strife, and sensuality in their verse.

Beauty, humility, and perseverance formed the major constellation of Braithwaite's universe. His father, William, an ambitious mulatto from Barbados, had nurtured in the young Braithwaite a sense of family honor and of self-worth, a love of British literature, and dreams of studying law at Harvard. In 1886, however, William died suddenly, leaving his eight-year-old son along with four younger siblings in dire financial straits. The burden of providing for the family fell on William's shoulders. Dutifully, he found work delivering papers after school; then at age twelve, he began full-time employment. More than forty years later, he recalled the sting of this disappointment. He never forgot "the mood and temper of regret and struggle which the denial of an opportunity for schooling was to impose. A gentle depression pursued me."²

Nevertheless, Braithwaite resolved that intelligence and determination would compensate for his lack of formal education. Another job at Springer Brothers, a women's clothing store in Boston, reinforced...