Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913 Including the Magazines and the Poets - a Review

Cambridge: Issued by W.S.B.. Very Good. 1913. First Edition. Hardcover. 87 pages; Contents clean and secure in original binding of brown cloth spine with brown boards, printed paper titles label on front board. Some wear to cloth at spine ends, corners rounded. William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite (1878 – 1962) was an African-American writer, poet, literary critic, anthologist, and publisher. His work as a critic and anthologist was widely praised and important in the development of East Coast poetry styles in the early 20th century. Braithwaite was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1878. According to Jill Lepore, his father "came from a wealthy British Guiana family; his mother was the daughter of a North Carolina slave." The surveys that Braithwaite published in the Boston Evening Transcript led him to begin his most important life work: publishing an annual anthology of "Magazine Verse." These anthologies covered a wide range of poets, from the conservative to the avant-garde, the established to the new, as well as an introduction in which Braithwaite discussed his perspective on the current state of poetry. The works published were culled from both commercial magazines and modernist little magazines. They also included indexes of published verse and other information that provided insight into publishing trends of the day. Braithwaite indicated favored works in these lists with an asterisk, establishing in this way his own "canon" of poets and poems. An attractive copy of the hardbound issue of the first volume of this important series -- including the first appearance in book form of "A Likeness" by Willa Cather and "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer. Other contributors include Vachel Lindsay, John G. Neihardt, Sara Teasdale, Charles Hanson Towne, and Willard Huntington Wright. .