Born August 24, 1870, Beatrice Witte was the third daughter of Charles Otto and Charlotte Sophia Witte. Like her sisters, she attended the Charleston Female Seminary. As a young woman, she was accepted at the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women at Cambridge, Massachusetts, better known after 1893 as Radcliffe College.  Her early poetry is noteworthy primarily for its novel use of the picturesque Carolina Lowcountry locale. After 1920, her ornate sentimental writing style began to change. Amy Lowell inspired her to write in the sharp precision of free verse and to create the vivid and evocative imagery of the new modern Imagists. She went on to publish in the Atlantic Monthly, the Advocate, Scribner’s Magazine, Harper’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and the Harvard Monthly. In Charleston, she was awarded the Poetry Society Prize 1922 for her collection of poems entitled Yemassee Lands. Critics now argue that her book, The Arrow of Lightning, was her finest achievement.  In both of these exceptional works, one begins to see that Walt Whitman was her most influential author. In 1956, at the age of eighty-five, Beatrice Witte Ravenel died.