William Stanley Braithwaite

Poet, scholar, and writer

• Born: December 6, 1878
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: June 8, 1962
• Place of death: New York, New York

A prolific poet, literary critic, and anthologist of British and American poetry, Braithwaite wrote in classic lyrical forms that made no references to race.

Early Life

William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite (BRAYTH-wayt) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the second of five children. Braithwaite’s father, William Smith Braithwaite, was a Caribbean medical assistant who had attended medical school in London but was unable to complete his studies. Braithwaite’s mother, Emma DeWolfe, was the biracial daughter of a former slave who escaped north to freedom. William Stanley Braithwaite was reared in the isolation of the African American community, and he was taught at home in the British tradition. When Braithwaite was seven, his father died, and with that Braithwaite’s life changed. He entered public school for several years, but he could not remain because of his family’s need for him to earn an income. He received no formal education beyond those few years of schooling, yet he continued to pursue his interests in literature and writing through self-study and exposure to the elite educational community in which he lived.

Braithwaite traveled to New York and performed odd jobs. While working at a printing press, he became familiar with and was inspired by the writing of John Keats and William Wordsworth. He pursued his interests in writing their style of poetry. He intentionally wrote without reference to his race or to racial issues, so that he could be successful in getting his work published. In spite of this strategy, his first work, “The Quality of Color,” was published in 1902 in the Colored American Magazine. Thereafter, he never published or wrote racially based literature.

Braithwaite married Emma Kelley in 1903 and returned to Boston, where he furthered his writing career by seeking support from the literary elite who resided in the area. His first poems were published in The Boston Journal and the Boston Transcript, and he continued to write poetry and reviews for the publications throughout his career.

Life’s Work

Braithwaite’s first volume of poetry, Lyrics of Life and Love, was published in 1904, followed by The House of Falling Leaves in 1908. During this period, he edited a trilogy of British anthologies of poetry, The Book of Elizabethan Verse (1906), The Book of Georgian Verse (1908), and The Book of Restoration Verse (1909). He became well known and mingled with great authors and intellectuals in the Boston area. He was offered membership in the Boston Authors Club by Colonel T. W. Higginson, who wrote an introduction to one of his books, and in the Poetry Society of America. He formed the New England Poetry Club with writers Conrad Aiken, Amy Lowell, and Edward O’Brien.

The centerpiece of Braithwaite’s work is his voluminous production of criticism and anthologies of other writers. He compiled an annual volume, The Anthology of Magazine Verse (1913-1929, 1958), which became the definitive publication in which emerging poets were recognized. He was so successful in this endeavor that he is credited for launching the successful careers of many famous mainstream American authors. As editor of the contemporary poetry series, Braithwaite compiled the book of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poetry, and Braithwaite also provided exposure to such African American artists as Countée Cullen and Fenton Johnson. He was considered a colleague of W. E. B. Du Bois and Benjamin Brawley, who admired him greatly. In 1918, Braithwaite received the coveted Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His leverage as a poetry kingmaker grew when he became editor of The Poetry Journal and The Stratford Magazine, among many other prestigious publications.

Braithwaite published heavily in magazines and journals, and he edited an anthology of poetry in support of World War I entitled Victory (1919) and an anthology of Roman Catholic verse. During the 1930’s, he moved his wife and seven children to Atlanta, where he taught English literature for ten years. At the end of his tenure at Atlanta University, he moved to New York City. He wrote a literary biography of the Brontë family entitled The Bewitched Parsonage: The Story of the Brontës (1950). He also published another volume of his own poetry before his death after a brief illness in 1962.

Significance

As American artists were defining their unique voice and identity, Braithwaite’s enthusiasm and commitment to poetry created an atmosphere in which modern American poetry flourished. He is often credited for single-handedly advancing American poetry. While making British poetry accessible through his anthologies, he simultaneously made American poetry popular by producing consistently literary reviews and anthologies for mainstream readership. There was not a great American poet or author who did not consult him; Braithwaite conferred with William Faulkner. Although an African American, Braithwaite muted his racial voice and earned respect through assimilation among the traditional and lyrical poets of the early twentieth century. He also enjoyed collegial relationships with African American literary leaders and was considered a mentor to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance.

Braithwaite’s poetry, in keeping with the British traditions of Elizabethan, Victorian, and Georgian verse, prioritizes the universal expression of life’s mysteries, human emotions, and the wonders of nature. Braithwaite’s poetry is not experimental or crafted in free verse. He remained true to the use of sonnets and other traditional forms to express his poetic vision. Therefore, he differed from modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot. Braithwaite’s work was also in direct contrast to that of other African American writers of his day, such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, who, though competent in lyric Romantic poetry, published only in dialect. Although Braithwaite’s literary heritage was steeped in the British tradition, he valued and cultivated an American aesthetic that was nonracial, nonpolitical, and fundamentally based in universality.

Bibliography

Braithwaite, William Stanley. The Bewitched Parsonage: The Story of the Brontës. New York: Coward-McCann, 1974. Braithwaite recounts the lives of the literary family. This account was first published in 1950.

Bucher, Philip, ed. The William Stanley Braithwaite Reader. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. A good compilation of Braithwaite’s works, with analysis by the editor.

Szefel, Lisa. “Encouraging Verse: William S. Braithwaite and the Poetics of Race.” The New England Quarterly 74, no. 1 (March, 2001): 32-59. Explores Braithwaite’s positions on matters of race and literature.