THE VISION

By: William Stanley Braithwaite
March 23, 2026

A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.

Frontispiece to Fridtjof Nansen’s In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times, 1911

You are the vision, you are the image of the
     dream,
The voice among the stars, the silence in
     the stream;
A breath of the infinite poise, where space
     and time are spun,
And the circling orbits wheel their planets
     round the sun.
Beyond the outer margin where nothing
     calls to God
Leaps the fiery symbol to bloom wherever
     your feet have trod;
Here is the earth resurgent with color and
     bloom of spring,
Glorying the dream and the vision of the
     song you bring.

— Published in The Crisis, July 1911

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RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.

Categories

Poetry, Radium Age SF

Tags

Afrofuturism, radium-context, radium-poem

See All Posts by William Stanley Braithwaite

William Stanley Braithwaite (1878-1962) was a leading light in American literature in the early 20th century. As one of the very few Black critics employed as a regular columnist and reviewer for a mainstream newspaper in the 1910s and 20s, Braithwaite had outsized importance as a literary critic in his day. He wrote regularly for the Boston Evening Transcript between 1905 and 1931, and his positive reviews were eagerly sought by then-aspiring peers like Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, or Amy Lowell. Between 1913 and 1929, Braithwaite edited a series of poetry anthologies called the Anthology of Magazine Verse. Braithwaite also published two books of poetry in his own right.