SOURCE: Aiken, Conrad. “Poetry as Supernaturalism: William Stanley Braithwaite.” In Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry, pp. 126-32. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919.

In the following essay, Aiken contends that Braithwaite's approach to poetry criticism is based on emotional considerations rather than analysis.

The energy of Mr. Braithwaite is unflagging. Not content with bringing out annually the Anthology of Magazine Verse, he has lately entered upon another and even huger enterprise—“A Critical Anthology,” he calls it; and this, too, threatens to become a hardy perennial. In these four hundred pages, which for the greater part consist of his reviews in the Boston Evening Transcript, slightly revised and cast into the form of al fresco conversations between Mr. Braithwaite and three others, Mr. Braithwaite purports to cover the entire field of English and American poetry for 1916. Some fifty odd poets are discussed here, a list long enough surely to...