AMERICAN NEGRO POETS AND POETRY

Address Delivered at Howard University

April 10, 1924

Introduction

"American Negro Poets and Poetry" has the sound of a strictly cultural subject, and I shall try to treat it as such. But you should not be surprised if, occasionally, I bring to bear upon the general civil status of the Negro in the United States such light as this inquiry into Negro literature may shed.

Indeed, one of the most lamentable things about the Race Question in these states is the almost impossibility of freeing our

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minds from it, no matter what question we are considering. It colors
nearly all our thoughts and affects nearly all our actions.

I am here reminded of Gunersindo Rivas, the official mouth-
piece of Cypriano Castro, one time dictator of Venezuela.

But the matter of Aframerican poets and their poetry does
have a distinct bearing on the Race Question. It may be stated as an
aphorism that a people may become great through many means, but there
is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowl-
edged - that measure is the amount and standard of the literature and
art they have produced. Or, we may say, the world does not know that
a people is great until that people produces great literature and art.
Or, no people that has produced great literature and art has ever

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been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

## The Art Approach

It is because of this fact that I have great hope in what I call the art approach to the race question. It is through the arts that we may find the easiest approach to the solution of some of the most vital phases of our problem as a particular group in this country. It is the path of least friction. It is the plane on which all men are more willing to meet and stand with us.

We might argue in the abstract that the Negro possesses intellect, that he has high ideals, that his soul is sensitive to the most delicate nuances of spiritual reactions, and yet not convince those with whom we argue. But the production of sublime music, of

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inspired poetry, of great drama, of beautiful painting or sculpture,
is that which was to be demonstrated. There is no argument about it.

I can conceive of nothing that will go farther to raise the
status of the Negro in America than work done by great Aframerican
creative artists.

My Hope the Greater Because of
Negro's Special Art Endowment

My hope in the art approach is the greater because of the
Negro's special artistic powers. He has emotional endowment, original
artistic conception and, what is more important, the power of creating
that which has universal appeal and influence. He has already proved
the possession of these powers by being the creator of the only things

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artistic that have yet sprung from American soil and been universally acknowledged as distinctive American products.

These creations may be summed up under four heads. The first two are the "Uncle Remus stories" collected by Joel Chandler Harris, and the "spirituals" or slave songs originally made famous by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. The Uncle Remus stories constitute the greatest body of folk-lore America has produced, and the "spirituals" the greatest body of folk-song.

The other two creations are modern dancing and popular music. American modern dance forms both on the stage and in the ballroom come directly from the Negro. And it is the Negro who has given

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America the popular medium for its national expression musically. And I go straight to the statement that this popular music is the one artistic production by which America is known the world over.

Of course, these creations are what may be termed lower forms of art, but they give evidence of a power that will some day be applied to the higher forms.

### Curious Power of the Negro to Suck up National Spirit from the Soil and Create Something Artistic

This power of the Negro to suck up the national spirit from the soil and create something artistic and original which, at the same time possesses the note of universal appeal is due to a remarkable racial gift of adaptability; it is more than adaptability, it is a

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transfusive quality.

Cite:

Pushkin - Dumas - Coleridge-Taylor

State why the Aframerican has produced no
Pushkin, Dumas or Coleridge-Taylor

Creative Genius of Negro Too Large
a Subject for This Hour

It would be interesting to continue with a discussion of
the Negro's creative genius, to trace the origins and effects of
what it has achieved in the United States, and even to go back and
see how its achievements in Africa have influenced the modern
plastic arts in Europe and America, but the subject is too large,
and if we follow it much farther we shall never get down to our

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poets. Indeed, we shall not have time to cover the whole field of
the poets. We can take only a bird's eye view, lighting for a moment
here and there.

Survey of Negro Poets
From Wheatley to Dunbar

Aframerican poets may be grouped into three distinct periods.
We may arbitrarily term these: the early period, the middle period,
and the modern period. There is also now what might be called the
period of the younger poets. One or two of the individual poets bridge
over from one period to another - and there is one Aframerican poet
who does not fit into any of these classifications. There have been
something over one hundred Aframericans who have published poetry in

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pamphlet or book form.

## The Early Period

The early period comprises the poets from Wheatley to Dunbar.
In my estimation, Dunbar bridges the early and middle periods. He is
both the culmination of the former and the beginning of the latter.
The outstanding figures in the early period are: Phillis Wheatley,
George Horton, Frances Harper and Abbery Whitman.

Of these Phillis Wheatley is the best known, and deservedly so,
because although by no measure was she a great poet she was by every
measure an important one. She is important because she was great
among her contemporaries, the earliest American poets. The statement

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that Phillis Wheatley is not and never was a great poet may distress
the large number of Aframericans who still believe her such, without
ever having read her poetry. But judged by the work and standards of
her own day, she stands out as one of the most important characters in
the making of American literature.

As a technician she does not depart a hair's breadth from the path
blazed by Pope and Gray. It is easy to see that Pope was her model. She
must have known him by heart. Had she come later and fallen under the
influence of Keats or Shelley, or Byron or Wordsworth, she would have
done much better work.

Of Horton and Mrs. Harper little more can be said than that they
wrote. They both had poetic talent, but they were both amateurish and

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crude. Whitman, however, merits attention and study. Of the thirty odd Aframerican poets between Wheatley and Dunbar, Wheatley and Whitman alone show in any marked degree a combination of poetic inspiration, imagination and technique.

## Middle Group

The outstanding figures of the middle period are: Dunbar, D. Webster Davis, James Edwin Campbell and James D. Corrothers. Dunbar towers above the others so as to dwarf them. He was the first Aframerican poet in the United States to show a combined mastery over poetic material and poetic technique, to reveal innate literary distinction in what he wrote and to maintain a high level of performance. I do not

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take away from the praise due Dunbar when I say, however, that I do not
believe the fine work done by Corrothers has ever been fully appreciated.

Davis wrote dialect poetry, but without the delicacy and finish
of Dunbar. Campbell did some rather good work in dialect and straight
English.

## The Modern Period

Fenton Johnson, Bertram Johnson, Joseph S. Cotter, Lucian B. Watkins, Roscoe Jamison and Claude McKay — the women being well represented by Georgia Douglass Johnson, Jessie Fauset and Anne Spencer.

Of these McKay shows the greatest range of imagination, the richest resources of material and the highest perfection of technique. He possesses both power and delicacy. He is both an Aframerican poet and a cosmic poet.

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Anne Spencer stands out not only as an Aframerican poet but as a woman poet of America. She disdains the sentimentality in either material or form so generally associated with women poets. Her work is close-knit, involved, crystalline, almost cryptic. And yet she is not cold; she possesses both power and passion.

(My discovery of Anne Spencer)

All the poets of this group merit study.

Braithwaite falls under no particular classification as an Aframerican poet. Indeed, except for such amount of Negro blood as may be in his veins, he is simply an American poet. His work can be measured only by the identical standard and measure applied to American

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literature as literature. He has never asked for any allowance or re-
ward, either directly or indirectly, on account of his race.

The Period of the Younger Poets

This is a period, as yet, one more of promise than of performance,
but of a promise - I might say - that promises much. Among the younger
group are Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Miss Gwendolin
Bennett and others.

Development of Race Consciousness as
Manifested in the Work of the Aframerican
Poets

The poets and the periods I have named could be discussed in
many phases of their work and of their tendencies. But we shall confine

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ourselves to two. I wish first to consider the development of group
consciousness and racial protest as manifested in the work of the
Aframerican poets. In doing this we do more than merely study the
poets; we study a vital element in our special group psychology. This
is the key, the touchstone to an analysis and a comprehension of the
basic spiritual values of any group at any period. It is the poets
who reflect them, who voice them.

We need not go back to Jupiter Hammon; the few poems he wrote
are merely religious exhortations.

We begin with Phillis Wheatley. Only very seldom does Phillis
Wheatley sound a race conscious note. Four times in single lines she

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refers to herself as Afric's muse. In a poem of admonition addressed
to students at Harvard University she refers to herself as follows:

"Ye blooming plants of human race divine
An Ethiop tells you 'tis your greatest foe."

But one looks in vain for some outburst against the bondage of
her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land. In two
poems she refers to Africa as her home, but in each instance there
seems to be under the sentiment of the lines a feeling of almost smug
contentment at her own escape therefrom.

Phillis never found out her own true relations to life and to
her surroundings.

George Horton wails about his slavish chains, but he does
nothing but wail. We hear him:

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"You can sigh o'er the sad-eyed Armenian
Who weeps in her desolate home.
You can mourn o'er the exile of Russia
From kindred and friends doomed to roam.

But hark! from our Southland are floating
Sobs of anguish, murmurs of pain,
And women heart-stricken are weeping
O'er their tortured and slain.

Have ye not, oh, my favored sisters,
Just a plea, a prayer or a tear
For mothers who dwell 'neath the shadows
Of agony, hatred and fear?

Weep not, oh, my well sheltered sisters,
Weep not for the Negro alone,
But weep for your sons who must gather
The crops which their fathers have sown."

In Whitman we go a step farther. He stops often in a long poem
and digresses to discuss the race question, and discusses it from many
angles. In Whitman we find not only the expression of a sense of
wrong and injustice, but we hear a note of faith and a note also of

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defiance. And there is something still newer in Whitman; he not only urges his race forward, but he arraigns it for its timidity. Listen to this new note:

" 'Tis hard to judge if hatred of one's race,
By those who deem themselves superior-born,
Be worse than that quiescence in disgrace,
Which only merits - and should only - scorn.
Oh, let me see the Negro night and morn,
Pressing and fighting in, for place and power!
All earth is place - all time th' auspicious hour,
While heaven leans forth to look, oh, will he quail or cower?

"Ah! I abhor his protest and complaint!
His pious looks and patience I despise!
He can't evade the test, disguised as saint;
The manly voice of freedom bids him rise,
And shake himself before Philistine eyes!
And, like a lion roused, no sooner than
A foe dare come, play all his energies,
And court the fray with fury if he can;
For hell itself respects a fearless, manly man."

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It would be quite natural to surmise that this spirit of group
consciousness, of racial protest, which we have thus far traced con-
tinued to grow in a constant ratio. That, however, did not happen.
After Whitman it weakened and dwindled. One might think that it would
have risen highest and flared brightest in Dunbar, but it did not. It
is true it appeared again in Dunbar, but rather sporadically and
rather mildly.

The fine sonnet to Douglass (p. 208) is a lament of the evil
days fallen upon the race since that great leader's departure, and a
regret that he is no longer here to fight its battles. The last
lines of the not so fine sonnet to Robert Gould Shaw (p. 221) end on
this note of bitter despair:

"Since thou and those who with thee died for right
Have died, the present teaches, but in vain!"

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The long poem, long for Dunbar, to "The South" is an appeal
to the supposedly finer feelings of that section.

"We Wear the Mask" is a poem in which the forced dissembling
of the Negro to hide his deep hurt and his weakness is pathetically
shown.

"The Haunted Oak" is Dunbar's one strong poem against the
great lynching evil, which flourished at its height while Dunbar
was at his best. Compared with McKay's "Lynchers" it is mild.

In all of Dunbar's work there are less than a dozen "racial
poems"; by racial poems I mean those poems voicing the struggles
and aspirations of the race. This, of course, does not affect the

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estimate of Dunbar as a true poet. He was a great lyricist but he
was not a deep-brained poet, not a poet of elemental passions. And
we are for the moment studying, not poetic gifts in the absolute but
the development of a certain tendency in Aframerican poets, by which
we may guage a certain phase of development in the group.

And, after all, what Dunbar failed to say was not so much the
fault of Dunbar as the fault of his age. It is doubtless true that in
what he did say, he fully voiced the group at that time.

D. W. Davis

We pass over D. W. Davis, who was a writer of some power, but
who, all in all, was merely a writer of dialect poems less delicate
and less finished than those of Dunbar, and in whom the tendency we

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are just now studying hardly appeared at all.

J. D. Corrothers

In James D. Corrothers this note of protest is sounded a bit more definitely, but it still has undertones of pathos, it is still far from the clear, defiant challenge, the imprecations of the moderns.

Listen to this really fine poem, "At the Closed Gate of Justice" (Anthology - page 27). There is a pathetic appeal there which tugs stronger at the heart of the white reader than of the Negro reader. And it is in this that we have the secret to the difference in mental attitude between Corrothers in a poem like "At the Closed Gate of Justice" and, say, McKay in a poem like "If We Must Die." Corrothers is voicing the group to white America and McKay

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is voicing the group to Black America.

It is worth the time to listen to two stanzas of another poem
by Corrothers, "In the Matter of Two Men." (Anthology - page 32)

## The Moderns

We must now hurry on to the moderns. Not because we could
not profitably spend more time on the early period, but because I
want to take up the second part of my talk before the hour is too far
spent.

## McKay

Our classic poet of protest and open defiance is Claude McKay.
Let me quote for you two of the finest examples of this phase of his
work. I say this phase of his work because McKay is far more than a

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poet of protest. He is, too, the cosmic poet, the creator of the
mood of poetic beauty in the absolute. He is, to my mind, the most
talented and powerful Aframerican poet writing today.

Here are the two poems:

"If We Must Die" - (Anthology, page 134)

"To the White Fiends" - (Anthology, page 135)

Fenton Johnson

Now take Fenton Johnson. He may be called the anarch among
Aframerican poets. See how in the following poem he consigns the
whole business, suffering, hope, work, aspiration and everything else,
to oblivion and perdition.

"Tired" - (Anthology, page 121)

Or hear the same note in a different key in

"The Scarlet Woman" (Anthology, page 123)

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Joseph S. Cotter, Jr.

Listen to this note of moral judgment in Cotter - a fine poet who died before the great promise in him could be fulfilled.

"And What Shall You Say?" (Anthology, p.152)

Georgia Douglass Johnson

This note as sounded by Georgia Douglass Johnson is unique. It has a poignancy which the work of no other Aframerican poet holds. Mrs. Johnson, in her work which falls within the particular phase of Aframerican poetry that we are now considering is psychically the mother of the race. She feels for it all the pains of travail, of care and anxiety. Let me illustrate this mood by quoting three little poems

from her volume, "Bronze."

"The Mother" (Bronze, page 41)

"Black Woman" (Bronze, page 43)

"Benediction" (Bronze, page 50)

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James Weldon Johnson

It would be mock modesty not to consider the work of another
writer in this particular connection. I refer to James Weldon Johnson.

In my poems that fall under the head we are discussing, I have
generally used as my favorite weapon Irony. I have generally tried to
drive a barb in deep, to give as cruel a twist as I could, and clinch
it on the other side. I think this is more effective than invesctive.
I have refrained from violent denunciation, because I feel that too
often there is the danger of its veering off into sheer bravado.

For instance, in my poem "Brothers" I do not inveigh against
lynching. I do not appeal for mercy or justice. I do not obviously
denounce the lynchers. Nor do I hold the lynching victim to be

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innocent, and by that make the appeal of the poem hard and biting. I
admit the victim's guilt of the revolting crime of which he is accused;
then I make him place the blame where it rightly belongs; and at the
end of the poem I try to drive home this truth - that the crime of the
lynchers shows them to be lower in the human scale than the victim.

I shall try to repeat the lines of the poem for you:

"Brothers" (Anthology, page 86)

A psychological variation on this same theme you will find in
my poem

"The White Witch" (Anthology, page 80)

Some people have found this poem more or less mystical. If
anyone here fails to understand it I shall be glad to give him or her
the key after the lecture.

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Now, this note of protest and the way in which it has been sounded is by no means the whole of Aframerican poetry; but for the present it is a very significant and important phase. The time will come when as a distinct note it will grow fainter. The younger poets are already trying to avoid it. How soon and how completely they will be able to do so, I am not sure. Generally speaking, propaganda does not make good poetry; and yet some very good poetry has been made out of propaganda.

## Form in Aframerican Poetry

We shall now have onlt a few minutes in which to discuss the second tendency to which we committed ourselves in the beginning. I should like to cover the whole field of Aframerican poetry and discuss

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these poets from various angles of literary criticism; the limitations
of my talk necessarily exclude a number of good poets. But to cover
the whole field would instead fill a book, much more a lecture hour.

The second tendency which I wish to discuss is medium and form.
Dialect, which was once so generally used as a medium has been almost
entirely discarded by Aframerican poets. Much of the subject matter
that went into the making of traditional dialect poetry - 'possums,
watermelons, chickens, etc. - they have discarded altogether, that is,
as poetic material.

It will be a distinct loss if Aframerican poets entirely throw
away this quaint and musical folk-speech as a medium of expression.
And yet, these poets are working through a problem, perhaps, not
realized by themselves consciously. They are trying to break away not
from Negro dialect itself, but from the limitations on Negro dialect

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imposed by the fixing effects of long convention.

The Negro in the United States has achieved or has been placed
in a certain artistic niche.

Dialect is the exact instrument for voicing that phase of
Negro life.

But it is an instrument with only two full stops - humor and
pathos.

Negro life in the United States in this age cannot be treated
adequately or artistically -

The Negro in a log cabin is more picturesque than the Negro in
a Harlem flat, but the Negro in the Harlem flat is here, and he is
the part of a group growing everywhere in the country, a group whose

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ideals are becoming increasingly more vitally important than those of
the traditionally artistic group, even if its members are less pictur-
esque.

The mould in which Negro dialect in the United States has been
set may some day be broken, and the Aframerican poet may be able to
sit down to write in the dialect without feeling that the first line
will put the reader in a frame of mind to expect either a funny or a
sad poem.

To illustrate quote

7 stanzas from "Fifty Years"

2 stanzas from "0 Black and Unknown Bards"

In the meantime there is no reason why the Aframerican poets

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should not continue to do the beautiful things that can be done, and
done best, in the dialect.

A New Form

What I think the Aframerican poet in the United States needs
to do is to work out a new and distinctive form of expression. He
needs to do something like what Synge did for Irish poetry. He needs
to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from
within, rather than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutila-
tion of English speaking and pronunciation. He needs a form that is
freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial
flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns

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of thought, and the distinctive pathos and humor, too, of the Negro,
but which will also be capable of voicing the deepest and highest
emotions and aspirations, and allow of the widest range of subjects
and the widest scope of treatment.

I believe the finding of this distinctive form would be fortunate
for two reasons:

1st: I believe the richest contribution the Aframerican poet
can make to American literature will be the fusion into it of his own
racial genius.

2nd: I believe his chances for achievement and success will
be greatly enhanced.

The chance for achievement and recognition in doing pure white
things in English poetry is almost nil. The simple reason is - the