SOURCE: Abbott, Craig S. “Magazine Verse and Modernism: Braithwaite's Anthologies.” Journal of Modern Literature 19, no. 1 (summer 1994): 151-9.

In the following essay, Abbott examines Braithwaite's annual poetry anthologies, maintaining that Braithwaite's critical perspective made him unsympathetic to many of the poets of High Modernism and of the Harlem Renaissance.

William Stanley Braithwaite (1878-1962) has been credited with “bullying and cajoling American readers into accepting modern and unconventional writings,” largely through the annual collections of magazine verse which he edited from 1913 through 1929.¹ Yet that was neither his intention nor his role. As his introduction to the 1913 Anthology of Magazine Verse makes clear, Braithwaite had in mind no poetic revolution. He wanted to counter the public's (and the poets') “disparaging opinion” of conventional magazine verse (p. ix), the kind used at the time as filler in such wide circulation magazines as Century and Harper's.² While his anthologies did generate interest in...