The brutalities of American life have left deep scars in our literature, few more evident than the long absence of African American poets. Among the exceptions, at least two black poets published work before the American Revolution, Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806) and Phillis Wheatley (1753–84). Another early poem of the period, by Lucy Terry (1730–1821), was orally transmitted for generations until published in the nineteenth century, while perhaps just before the American Revolution the black mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806) wrote the hilarious “A Mathematical Problem in Verse,” not collected until decades after his death. All were Northern slaves except Banneker, whose parents were Maryland free blacks. There were otherwise few known black poets until long after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Though guaranteed the vote by the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), black men, especially in the South, could not exercise the franchise freely until the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, if not later. Until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, my Florida university, despite admitting few black students, maintained the segregated restrooms and water fountains common throughout the South. In the town’s much-beloved hamburger joint, one of the well-preserved waitresses confided that blacks were not allowed to eat inside until almost a decade later.
Little important black poetry arose until the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, when that stuttering, at times difficult, advance was supported by major publishers like Harper and Brothers, Viking Press, and Alfred A. Knopf. One of the forerunners of that renaissance (more birth than rebirth) was W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), the turn-of-the-century sociologist and socialist, student of William James at Harvard, and fierce opponent of Jim Crow. Early black poets, when lynching in the South was not uncommon, had to write as if black humanity were still in question, requiring an argument wrapped inside a plea. Consider one of Du Bois’s signature poems:
I am the smoke king,
I am black.
I am swinging in the sky,
I am ringing worlds on high;
I am the thought of the throbbing mills,
I am the soul of the Soul toil kills.
[“The Song of the Smoke”]
Such high-flown rhetoric proved the great defect in contemporary white poets as well, often a stale infatuation with Keats and Shelley. The diction of any age is subject to the weathering and lichen that corrupt
tombstones:
Dark daughter of the lotus leaves that watch the Southern sea!
Wan spirit of a prisoned soul a-panting to be free!
The muttered music of thy streams, the whispers of the deep
Have kissed each other in God’s name and kissed a world to sleep.
[“The Woman in Black”]
O mist-blown Lily of the North,
A-bending southward in thy bloom,
And bringing beauty silver sown
And pale blue radiance of snows . . .
Where, over moon-mad shadows whirled,
The star-tanned mists dim swathe the sky
In phantasy to dream and die—
A wild sweet wedding of the World!
[“In God’s Gardens”]
Grandiloquent stumpery was long the emblem and symptom of what made poetry poetry. Once that age was over, such diction was no more useful than great-grandmother’s wedding frock except in a fashion museum. To judge from the high-school poetry textbooks still in use in the 1960s, such language was long poetry’s stigmata. Late- and post-Victorian men and women apparently could not be poets unless they bore triple-barreled names.
Du Bois, who remained an amateur at poetry though a professional in other fields, found it difficult to resist phrasings like “Picture the wide and Peaceful Ocean,/ Stretched like the living emerald/ Between the soft sierras and the sun” (“El Dorado”) or “I walked in the weird night watches,/ When the moon and stars are dim,/ When Souls are wan and weary,/ And Earth looks grey and grim” (“Sorrow”). This is a long way from the modernist poems T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound wrote during and after World War I, poetry that retains its electric charge. Born three years after the Civil War, Du Bois survived into the last months of the Kennedy Administration. Half a century after his early work, he wrote an angry poem against the execution of the Rosenbergs.
James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) was a transitional figure. Diplomat, song writer, founder of ascap, one of early leaders of the naacp, later the first black professor at nyu, he was also the first black admitted to the Florida bar since Reconstruction. He wrote the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” called the Negro National Anthem. Though Johnson was important to the Harlem Renaissance, like Du Bois he was significantly older than the other writers. Johnson’s poems embrace the same high Romantic blather:
O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrel’s lyre?
[“O Black and Unknown Bards”]
O whitened head entwined in turban gay,
O kind black face, O crude, but tender hand,
O foster-mother in whose arms there lay
The race whose sons are masters of the land!
[“The Black Mammy”]
The poet felt mixed about another problem of early black poetry, the dialect poem. In his preface to God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), he wrote,
At first thought, Negro dialect would appear to be the precise medium for these old-time sermons; however, as the reader will see, the poems are not written in dialect. . . . [A]lthough the dialect is the exact instrument for voicing certain traditional phases of Negro life, it is . . . a quite limited instrument. Indeed, it is an instrument with but two complete stops, pathos and humor. This limitation is not due to any defect of the dialect as dialect, but to the mould of convention in which Negro dialect in the United States has been set, to the fixing effects of its long association with the Negro only as a happy-go-lucky or a forlorn figure. . . . In fact, practically no poetry is being written in dialect by the colored poets of today. . . . [I]n my opinion, traditional Negro dialect as a form for Aframerican poets is absolutely dead.
Nonetheless, he had at times written dialect poems without apparent qualm:
De river is a-glistenin’ in de moonlight,
De owl is set’n high up in de tree;
De little stars am twinklin’ wid a sof’ light,
De night seems only jus fu’ you an’ me.
[“Nobody’s Lookin’ but de Owl and de Moon”]
Shet yo’ eyes, ma little pickaninny, go to sleep[,]
Mammy’s watchin’ by you all de w’ile;
Daddy is a-wukin’ down in de cott’n fiel’,
Wukin’ fu’ his little honey child.
[“You’s Sweet to Yo’ Mammy Jus’ de Same”]
Whatever his reservations, the affected address of such poems may be justified by its origins on the plantation. Brander Matthews, a professor at Columbia and a friend, called Johnson’s dialect verses, in his introduction to the poet’s Fifty Years & Other Poems (1917), “racy of the soil, pungent in flavor, swinging in rhythm and adroit in rhyme.”
The work of black poets who followed Du Bois and Johnson was similarly injured by rhetoric long out of fashion, the poetry often an appeal to be considered equally human at a time when so many white Americans, not just in the South, thought the idea absurd. Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was another poet between realms. Born to two former Kentucky slaves, he grew up in Dayton, Ohio, where one of his best friends was Orville Wright. His dialect poems, published in the 1890s, were lavishly praised, though it’s hard now to recapture that critical taste:
Dey is times in life when Nature
Seems to slip a cog an’ go,
Jes’ a-rattlin’ down creation,
Lak an ocean’s overflow;
When de worl’ jes’ stahts a-spinnin’
Lak a picaninny’s top,
An’ yo’ cup o’ joy is brimmin’
’Twell it seems about to slop . . .
[“When de Co’n Pone’s Hot”]
To understand the times we must understand the literature, but Dunbar’s poems are caught between the jaw-cracking dialect poems and the inflated diction of his other work. Wanting to study law, too poor to attend college, he became an elevator operator in Dayton. Later he made a living reading his poems (making a six-month tour of England) and, for a brief period, as a clerk at the Library of Congress. As with so many other black poets, a barely restrained anger leaked out in poems that worked beyond dialect:
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!
[“Sympathy”]
The first bud opes! The faint perfume from its chalice steals! The musty language damages, while not quite damning, the metaphor of the caged bird.
If the vernacular of dialect poems now seems to fall between quaint and cant, its origin cannot be ignored. Langston Hughes (1901–67), in his essay “200 Years of Afro-American Poetry,” argued that “plantation dialect . . . injected the folk flavor,” though a “now almost unreadable slave English.” To later ears, it unfortunately calls up the minstrel shows that flourished from the 1840s to the end of the century and lingered even longer, shows where white musicians blacked up to perform. Though minstrel blackface is now considered deeply offensive, there were black minstrel shows as well. (Wearing any national costume on Halloween, such as a Mexican serape, has now been called into question. Is it cultural theft or admiration confused with mockery?)
Dialect used to comic ends is little different from minstrelsy, though racially far less suspect. Remember the common appearance of dialect in Southern or rural characters on television comedies like The Real McCoys or Gomer Pyle. Off the set, Walter Brennan and Jim Nabors did not speak like their characters. (The great character-actors Slim Pickens and Andy Devine, however, sounded exactly like the men they played.) Indeed, in one of the most popular radio-shows, Amos ’n’ Andy, the black parts were acted by whites, mimicking black dialect. When transferred to television in the early 1950s, it became the first show whose lead actors were black. The show is still controversial, but the black historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. remarked, “Everybody loved Amos ’n’ Andy—I don’t care what people say today. What was special to us was that their world was all colored, just like ours.” It also featured some of the best comic writing ever allowed on television.
Dialect poetry is so embedded in the era of slavery and the plantation, it can perhaps never be rehabilitated, that hardly means that now the motives of black poets who employed it should be questioned. Black dialect poetry could be said to rescue and sustain, even to honor, an old manner of speech. Imitation by white authors like “Uncle Remus” (Joel Chandler Harris), whose stories now seem curdled and nauseating, even if not meant to be insulting, is very different. Such complicated reservations call up more recent controversies over “ghetto English” in rap and whether white rappers have any right to the form.
The reaction to reading dialect poetry is less mystification than embarrassment, much like watching the demeaning slapstick suffered by black characters in two of Preston Sturges’s most brilliant comedies, Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and The Palm Beach Story (1942). The isolated scenes are profoundly disturbing, though in Sullivan’s Travels there are later scenes in which Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake stay in homeless shelters where black and white drifters eat and sleep side by side. The slapstick trades in humiliation, but the hobo scenes remain hokey in their uplifting humanity. Think of the actor Stepin Fetchit, whose exaggerated black characters were considered hilarious in the Thirties, painfully offensive decades afterward. He was the first black actor to become a millionaire.
What if white poets wrote in their own dialect? I was born in “Bahstun” and can still imitate that lost accent when I say I grew up in the whaling village of “Westpo-aht Point,” between “Fah Rivuh” and “New Bedfud.” What if we spelled Keats’s poems in his Cockney dialect or Wordsworth’s in his northern burr? We don’t denigrate vernacular speech in reggae or rap—it’s part of the authenticity. Is the problem loss of innocence or loss of sophistication? Resisting the dialect poetry of a century and more ago allows us to suppress the memory that the poets were usually children or grandchildren of slaves, trying to recover, and perhaps salvage, a culture already lost. The problem lies more in the quality than the medium.
I’d like to think highly of Sterling A. Brown (1901–89); but, even when his poems show the influence of the blues, they seem tone deaf: “Frankie was a halfwit, Johnny was a nigger,/ Frankie liked to pain poor creatures as a little ’un,/ Kept a crazy love of torment when she got bigger.” His adaptation of the ballad “Frankie and Johnny,” which dates to a St. Louis murder at the turn of the century, must be the worst known. Though his poems occasionally show the stoicism James Weldon Johnson mentions in his preface to Brown’s Collected Poems, like so many black poets Brown was bedeviled by dialect poems that sound forced or faked.
The poets who deserve the deepest attention among black poets of the period include Langston Hughes, the most widely known and fondly remembered of those who formed the Harlem Renaissance. The complicated, original imagination of his poems, even so, often fails in the execution. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” seems to go wrong from the start, and soon it’s floundering in dreamlike hyperbole: “I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young./ I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.” Swollen with sentimentality, the anger beneath the lines doesn’t have access to the surface. He could be a remarkably clumsy writer: “To wander through this living world/ And leave uncut the roses/ Is to remember fragrance where/ The flower no scent encloses.” Hughes’s penchant for lecture and sermon affect many of the poems for which he’s best known, like “I, Too”: “I, too, sing America.// I am the darker brother./ They send me to eat in the kitchen/ When company comes.” W. E. B. Du Bois once remarked, “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda,” but propaganda has a very short shelf life.
Hughes proved less synthetic in the astringent satire of “Madam and the Phone Bill” and “Cross” (“My old man’s a white old man/ And my old mother’s black./ If ever I cursed my white old man/ I take my curses back”). His use of black dialect has unusual subtlety and depth:
Put on yo’ red silk stockings,
Black gal.
Go out an’ let de white boys
Look at yo’ legs.
Ain’t nothin’ to do for you, nohow,
Round this town,—
You’s too pretty.
Put on yo’ red silk stockings, gal,
An’ tomorrow’s chile’ll
Be a high yaller.
[“Red Silk Stockings”]
This invitation to sleep with a white boy in order to have a “high yellow” child who could pass is like a stiletto slipped between the lines.
A little acid in his tea made Hughes almost indelible, as in “Ku Klux”:
They took me out
To some lonesome place.
They said, “Do you believe
In the great white race?”
I said, “Mister,
To tell you the truth,
I’d believe in anything
If you’d just turn me loose.”
Hughes knew that comic irony cuts in many directions. Perhaps he never wrote funnier or more stringent satire than in “Be-Bop Boys”: “Imploring Mecca/ to achieve/ six discs/ with Decca.” Though he was the most gifted poet in the Harlem Renaissance, others who wrote almost as well remain less frequently mentioned.
Born and raised in Jamaica, Claude McKay (1890–1948) was a constable in Kingston before moving to America in 1912, where he studied at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State College. The year he arrived, he published Songs of Jamaica on his home island and Constab Ballads in London. Some of his poems were ham-handed examples of the high Romantic style that crippled white poets as well:
Thou sweet-voiced stream that first gavest me drink,
Watched o’er me when I floated on thy breast;
What black-faced boy now gambols on thy brink,
Or finds beneath thy rocks a place of rest?
What naked lad doth linger long by thee . . . ?
[“Sukee River”]
And so forth. His best lyrics, despite frequent, bathetic descents into that dated manner, were fiercely observed. He could write lines as crisply rendered as “Grass-sheltered crickets chirp incessant song” or pained social observation like “I am bound with you in your mean graves,/ O black men, simple slaves of ruthless slaves.” That suggests what he might have done in a style not past its sell-by date.
McKay wrote poems about being black with more control and pained subtlety. They range from the savage outcry of “Enslaved”:
Oh when I think of my long-suffering race,
For weary centuries despised, oppressed,
Enslaved and lynched, denied a human place
In the great life line of the Christian West . . .
to the intimate portrait of railroad travel in the sonnet “On the Road”:
Roar of the rushing train fearfully rocking,
Impatient people jammed in line for food,
The rasping noise of cars together knocking,
And worried waiters, some in ugly mood,
Crowding into the choking pantry hole
To call out dishes for each angry glutton
Exasperated grown beyond control,
From waiting for his soup or fish or mutton.
At last the station’s reached, the engine stops;
For bags and wraps the red-caps circle round;
From off the step the passenger lightly hops,
And seeks his cab or tram-car homeward bound;
The waiters pass out weary, listless, glum,
To spend their tips on harlots, cards and rum.
Those waiters would have been black. Rail companies and the post office offered blacks among the best positions available to them in the years after the Civil War. George Pullman hired only blacks as porters on the Pullman sleeping cars. The porters were almost always called George—there were no doubt other humiliations. Red-capped station-porters, who date from 1890, still exist. No longer just black, they work for an hourly wage plus tips.
Pullman was apparently drawn to the black man’s well-learned costume of deference. (When I first lived in England in the early 1980s, local ditch-diggers wore old tweed suit-jackets, calling strangers Guv’nor and pulling the forelock.) McKay never consistently forged poems from his shrewd observations of city life. A period style has a lot to answer for—it can make even significant poems smell like dead fish. Take Georgian poetry, at a start.
Jean Toomer (1894–1967) is far better known for Cane (1923) than for his poetry. Though this modernist novel was written in short, stuttering sentences of prose, poetry, and play-like dialogue, the style now seems long outmoded. His poems often look thrown together from torn-up speeches by two-bit politicians: “Spatial depths of being survive/ The birth to death recurrences/ of feet dancing on earth of sand,” “What life force, what sculptor within the body,/ What organ is unseeing save that we are/ Phrased to consciousness?” He wallowed in immensities, including late work heavily influenced by Gurdjieff, after Toomer became a disciple. The poet ultimately joined the Quakers. Most of his poems go wrong in one way or another; but his best, almost all published in Cane, have a very different cast:
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds.
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
[“Reapers”]
Or recall a few lines from “November Cotton Flower”: “Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,/ Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,/ And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,/ Was vanishing.” Had his work pursued this direct style more aggressively, he would stand much higher now among black poets. Toomer, of mixed race, disliked being called black or white.
Arna Bontemps (1902–73) worked as a librarian and a historian—most of his creative work lay in his novels. He did, however, leave behind a pamphlet of some two dozen poems, Personals (1963), published in London a decade before he died. In the preface, he pointed out that the writers and musicians who made Harlem a hotbed of black art and literature in the Twenties and early Thirties had abandoned it by the beginning of World War II:
[T]he people who still gave the area its reputation . . . did not live there any more. . . . [O]ne reason for avoiding the Harlem night streets in 1942 would have been the fear of muggers. Where poets went about singing in the days of the new awakening, angry, frustrated boys now prowled. . . . Harlem remained what it had always been, in essence: a black ghetto and slum.
Not long after the Harlem Renaissance, “hotbed” was used to describe Harlem hotels whose rooms served three shifts of sleepers.
Dreamy and unambitious, Bontemps’s best poems have a deeply rooted bitterness, one that might have flourished and deepened. His lines are often unexpectedly melancholy, like the beginning of “Prodigal” (“I shall come back when dogwood flowers are going/ and passing drakes are honking toward the south/ with eager necks, I shall come back knowing/ the old unanswered question on your mouth”) or the end of “Southern Mansion”:
The years go back with an iron clank,
a hand is on the gate,
a dry leaf trembles on the wall.
Ghosts are walking.
They have broken roses down
and poplars stand there still as death.
Too many poems were defeated or deflated by the same stylistic problems that troubled his peers in Harlem.
The poems of Countee Cullen (1903–46) work hard to make their points. At times you seem to be hearing a high-school debate by the Thesaurus Club:
With subtle poise he grips his tray
Of delicate things to eat;
Choice viands to their mouths half way,
The ladies watch his feet
Go carving dexterous avenues
Through sly intricacies;
Ten thousand years on jungle clues
Alone shaped feet like these.
Cullen took his undergraduate degree from nyu and a master’s in English at Harvard. He married the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, but the marriage foundered after Cullen revealed he was gay. He’s perhaps best represented by the killing irony of his shorter poems, including “For an Anarchist” (“What matters that I stormed and swore?/ Not Samson with an ass’s jaw,/ Not though a forest of hair he wore,/ Could break death’s adamantine law”) and “For a Pessimist” (“He wore his coffin for a hat,/ Calamity his cape,/ While on his face a death’s-head sat/ And waved a bit of crape”).
Black poetry of this era was predominantly reacting to a condition, the condition of being black and descending from slaves. The metaphor of infection lies nearby, though rarely employed. The touch of black man or black woman was considered loathsome by many whites. When the basis for art is so often pathos, the pathos of the rejected and denied, it’s difficult to turn poetry away from anger, away from plea.
A poetry anthology based on the history of black labor would be of serious interest. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, one of the few occupations available to black men was that of the barber. (The favored and feared weapon of the black man was, perhaps irrelevantly, not the knife but the folding razor, easily concealed in a boot.) By the time there were more than a few black poets, the country had changed, but few poets ever served the post office or George Pullman.
The poets of the Harlem Renaissance were largely professionals. William Blake no doubt saw his chimney sweep as he walked through London, as Dickens did his crossing sweepers—yet why are there not more poems, from the 1870s forward, about black shoeshine boys? When black poets became lawyers and professors, their experience of working-class life was not rare, simply rejected as a subject.
What’s missing from the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, and the period after, is any deep wrestling with the far more powerful conduit of black life found in the blues. Though many of these poets loved the blues, especially Sterling A. Brown and Langston Hughes, they remained caught between the poles of romantic overwriting and imitation vernacular. Black poets sometimes called their poems blues, but these rarely have the grit or flavor of the real thing, developed decades earlier through the South and after the turn of the century in cities like St. Louis and Chicago. Like jazz, this homegrown artistic form remained a truth suspended between counterfeit virtue and vulgarization. Imitation may be flattery, but the flattery rarely displaces or challenges the original. What’s lacking in the black poetry of the day, even when not gauzy or dreamy, is the vernacular’s corrosive irony and sexual heat, which the blues kept close.
He boiled my cabbage
And he made it awful hot.
Then he put the bacon in
And overflowed the pot.
[Traditional, “Empty Bed Blues”]
My first night in Chicago,
My friends they really treated me fine,
Then overnight they all changed
Like Daylight Savings Time.
[Lonnie Johnson, “Chicago Blues”]
Here comes my baby,
Flashin’ her new gold tooth.
Well, she’s so small
She can mambo in a pay-phone booth.
[Charles Calhoun (Jesse Stone) and
Lou Willie Turner,“Flip, Flop, and Fly”]
I heard a woman scream,
Yeah, and I peeked through the door.
Some cat was workin’ on Annie,
Lord, with a two-by-four.
[Robert Geddins, “Tin Pan Alley”]
I’ve drawn these verses from Squeeze My Lemon (2003), Randy Poe’s blues collection. Such lines show what the blues could do that black poetry by and large did not, and they read more like poetry than most white poetry of the era. Though the genres had different expectations, the unlettered blues singer knew far more deeply how to carve emotion from language without asking for the wringing of hands or dabbling of tears. Blues lyrics are unfortunately missing from the best anthology of American black poetry, Kevin Young’s Library of America volume, African American Poetry (2020). His book otherwise records the slow progress, during the century after the birth of modernist poetry and the end of World War I, toward an America where black poetry in both traditional and experimental verse has flourished.
