Beatrice Witte Ravenel (August 24, 1870 – March 15, 1956) was an American poet associated with the Charleston Renaissance in South Carolina.
[1] She also wrote editorials for newspapers edited by her brother-in-law William Watts Ball, including The State and the Post and Courier.
[1] Ravenel originally wrote poems in a late Victorian sentimental mode, but after exposure to modernist—and especially Imagist—poets in the early 1920s through her founding membership in the South Carolina Poetry Society, she began writing a dramatically different kind of free verse notable for its vivid imagery and precise language.
[1][2] She became a friend of such modernist poets as Amy Lowell, who advised her on the sole book of poems published in her lifetime, The Arrow of Lightning (1926).
[2] One critic notices that although she evokes history like many of the Charleston Renaissance writers, it is not in the typical nostalgizing vein for a lost antebellum world; instead, she insistently gives voice to those forgotten by history: Native Americans, soldiers, mothers, pirates, slaves.
She traveled widely and wrote little, though she did produce one sequence on the West Indies that was only published long after her death.