1900s; three books of poems appeared between
1906 and 1910, and his first Harlem Renaissance–
era volume was published in 1916. Margetson con-
tinued to write and to publish during the Harlem
Renaissance, and his works were included in highly
respected anthologies, newspapers, and in the SAT-
URDAYEVENINGQUILL,the first African-American
literary journal produced in BOSTONduring the
Harlem Renaissance.
Margetson, who was born in St. Kitts in 1877,
was educated at the Bethel Moravian School on
the island. In 1897, two years after he graduated
with honors from the school, he emigrated to the
United States. Once here, he found work in a vari-
ety of fields. According to the biographical note
published in one anthology that included his
poems, he ultimately pursued a career as a station-
ary engineer (White and Jackson, 168). He married
Elizabeth Matthews, of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
in 1905, and the couple had several children. He
may have been related to the celebrated Edward
Margetson, a St. Kitt’s native who settled in NEW
YORKCITY, studied music at Columbia University,
became a well-known composer, a HARMONFOUN-
DATIONAWARDwinner, and the founder of the
Schubert Music Society.
Margetson’s pre–Harlem Renaissance publica-
tions included England in the West Indies: A Ne-
glected and Degenerating Empire(1906), Ethiopia’s
Flight: The Negro Question; or, The White Man’s Fear
(1907), and Songs of Life(1910). In 1916 he pub-
lished The Fledgling Bard and the Poetry Society,a
100-page poem about a poet’s quest to “find the
new, the modern school, / Where Science trains the
fledgling bard to fly, / Where critics teach the igno-
rant, the fool, / To write the stuff the editors would
buy.” It was this work that was anthologized most
during the Harlem Renaissance. Margetson’s writ-
ing also explored traditional religious themes and
constituted classical poetic invocations of the muse.
In “A Prayer,” the work that NEWMANWHITEand
WALTERJACKSONincluded in their anthology of
African-American poetry, Margetson’s speaker
prays earnestly for God to “[c]harge my soul with
sacred fire, / To consume each low desire, / Let my
raptured spirit rise, / In sweet cadence to the skies.”
Margetson was an enterprising writer who did not
hesitate to invest in his own career. He self-pub-
lished his first two books, and their success led to
respectable contracts with Boston publishers. The
firm Sherman, French, which is perhaps best
known as the publisher of the first edition of JAMES
WELDONJOHNSON’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ANEX-
COLOURED MAN (1912), published Margetson’s
Songs of Life.The Boston firm of R. G. Badger pub-
lished his most successful work, The Fledgling Bard.
Margetson appears to have published one addi-
tional work during the early years of the Harlem Re-
naissance. His volume The Immortal Twenty-Sixth
Yankee Division appeared in 1919. James Weldon
Johnson, who included a selection of Margetson’s
writing in THEBOOK OFAMERICANNEGROPOETRY
(1922, 1931), noted that Margetson’s poems “have
been written in such moments as he could seize for
that purpose.” Johnson, commenting on Margetson’s
talent, also observed that “[a]mong Aframerican
poets he has a good claim to originality, even though
his originality may contain echoes from Byron.”
Margetson became a member of the Boston-
based SATURDAYEVENINGQUILLCLUBand was
one of the contributors whose work appeared in
the first issue of the club’s notable journal, the Sat-
urday Evening Quill.Margetson, who lived in Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts, during this time, was part of
a prolific literary group that included WARING
CUNEY,EUGENEGORDON,ALVIRAHAZZARD,HE-
LENEJOHNSON,DOROTHYWEST, and others. Mar-
getson also saw his work included in WILLIAM
STANLEY BRAITHWAITE’s 1916 anthology of
poems. Margetson’s poems also were included in
James Weldon Johnson’s celebrated Book of Ameri-
can Negro Poetry(1922), in ROBERTKERLIN’s im-
portant collection entitled NEGRO POETS AND
THEIRPOEMS(1923), and in Newman White and
Walter Jackson’s ANTHOLOGY OFVERSE BYAMERI-
CANNEGROES(1924).Bibliography
“Biographical Notes.” Saturday Evening Quill (June
1928).Marinoff, Fania SeeVANVECHTEN,FANIA
MARINOFF.“Marked Tree, The”Charles Chesnutt(1924,
1925)
An absorbing short story about southern folk and
superstition by CHARLESCHESNUTTthat appeared332 Marinoff, Fania