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 February
is Black History Month in the United States, and it seems appropriate
this month to look at the works of black poets. Black History
Month evolved from a concept originated by the historian Carter
G. Woodson (1875 – 1950), founder of the Association for the Study
of Negro Life and History. Woodson chose February because even
though the 13th Amendment to the constitution, which abolished
slavery, was signed in January, slaves did not start to hear of
the news until February. For a while, in 1925, Langston Hughes
(of whom we will speak later) worked in Woodson’s office in Washington
D.C.
The first
black poet in the United States to be published was Phyllis Wheatley
(1753 – 1784). Born in Senegal, Africa, around 1753, she was transported
to Boston in 1761 to be sold on the slave market. John Wheatley,
a tailor from Boston, purchased her as a child to serve his wife.
Soon Wheatley
was accepted as a member of the family and Mary Wheatley, John's
daughter, was made her personal tutor. She learned English with
remarkable speed and although she never attended a formal school,
also learned Greek and Latin.
At the age
of 13 Wheatley began writing poetry. Her first published poem
“On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” appeared in the Newport Mercury
in 1767. In the following years, a number of poems appeared in
various publications in and around Boston.
 The
publication of a poem on the death of the evangelical preacher
George Whitefield in 1770 made Wheatley a sensation. As a result
Countess Selina of Huntingdon, a close friend of Whitefield, invited
Wheatley to England and assisted the young woman in the publication
of her poems. In 1773, a volume was published in London as Poems
on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Most of the 39 poems
reflect her religious and classical New England upbringing. Written
in heroic couplets, many are elegies or stress the theme of Christian
salvation. In all Wheatley's work only one line makes any allusion
to racial inequality: 'Some view our sable race with scornful
eye'. A poem published in 1776, dedicated to George Washington,
brought her further acclaim.
The deaths
of Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley left Wheatley struggling to support herself
as a poet and seamstress. In 1778 she married John Peters, a free
black man who ran a small grocery store in Boston. The business
was unsuccessful and Wheatley was forced to find work as a servant
to support her children.
Wheatley
continued to write poetry up to her death but was unable to find
a publisher. In 1784, several poems celebrating the end of the
American Revolution were published under the name Phillis Peters.
She died in poverty in Boston on 5th December 1784.
Here is an
early poem of hers: On Being Brought from Africa to America:
‘Twas mercy
brought me from my pagan land,
Taught my beknighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Savior too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their color is a diabolic dye."
Remember Christians; Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
The poem
that brought her fame, On
the Death of the Rev. Mr. George
Whitefield (1770) is our first poem of this week. The
Countess referred to in it is the Countess Selina of Huntingdon,
mentioned above.
Another of
her poems of interest in relation to this week’s topic is To
S. M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works. This begins:
O show
the lab'ring bosom's deep intent,
And thought in living characters to paint,
When first thy pencil did those beauties give,
And breathing figures learnt from thee to live,
How did those prospects give my soul delight,
A new creation rushing on my sight?
Still, wond'rous youth! each noble path pursue,
On deathless glories fix thine ardent view:
Still may the painter's and the poet's fire
To aid thy pencil, and my verse conspire!
 The
next black poet to achieve a reputation in the United States was
George Moses Horton (1797 – 1883). He was born in North Carolina
as the 'property' of Chatham County yeoman farmer William Horton,
and taught himself to read using an old speller and a copy of
the Methodist hymnal. He didn’t learn to write until he was grown,
but he was fascinated by poetry, and composed what were described
as ‘psalm-meter’ verses in his head. He was often sent by his
then master, James Horton, to Chapel Hill to sell produce. His
unusually sophisticated vocabulary caught the attention of university
students, who encouraged his orations and, later, the recitation
of his own verse.
He began
to sell poems that he dictated to students to send to their sweethearts,
charging extra for acrostics based on the young ladies’ names.
For several decades he was able to purchase his own time from
his master James for twenty-five cents a day, and later from James’s
son Hall Horton for fifty cents. Here is a description of this
in his own words:
My old
master having come to the conclusion to confer part of his servants
on his children, lots were cast, and his son James fell heir
to me. He was then living on Northampton, in the winter of 1814.
In 1815 he moved into Chatham, when my opportunities became
a little expanded. Having got in the way of carrying fruit to
the college at Chapel Hill on the Sabbath, the collegians who,
for their diversion, were fond of pranking with the country
servants who resorted there for the same purpose that I did,
began also to prank with me. But somehow or other they discovered
a spark of genius in me, either by discourse or other means,
which excited their curiosity, and they often eagerly insisted
on me to spout, as they called it. This inspired in me a kind
of enthusiastic pride I was indeed too full of vain egotism,
which always discovers the gloom of ignorance, or dims the lustre
of popular distinction. I would stand forth and address myself
extempore before them, as an orator of inspired promptitude.
But I soon found it an object of aversion, and considered myself
nothing but a public ignoramus. Hence I abandoned my foolish
harangues, and began to speak of poetry, which lifted these
still higher on the wing of astonishment; all eyes were on me,
and all ears were open. Many were at first incredulous; but
the experiment of acrostics established it as an incontestable
fact. Hence my fame soon circulated like a stream throughout
the college. Many of these acrostics I composed at the handle
of the plough, and retained them in my head, (being unable to
write,) until an opportunity offered, when I dictated, whilst
one of the gentlemen would serve as my emanuensis.
He earned
the admiration and support of John Owen, then Governor of North
Carolina (1828 – 1830); David Lowry Swain (1801 – 1868) who was
also Governor (1832 – 1835), and president of the University of
North Carolina; and the newspaperman Horace Greeley (1811 – 1872),
among others.
The novelist
Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz (1800 – 1856), who was also a professor’s
wife, encouraged him and arranged for the publication, first of
a poem entitled Liberty and Slavery which appeared in the
Lancaster Gazette on April 8, 1829; and later the same year, of
a collection of his poems, The Hope of Liberty. This was
the first book published in the South by a black man. The hope
had been, apparently, that this might raise enough money to purchase
his freedom; but that did not happen. Hentz has been castigated
in the critical literature for what was seen as a romanticized
apologia for slavery in the south: her book The Planter’s Northern
Bride, published in 1845, has come in for some particular
opprobrium. However, Horton clearly had nothing but gratitude:
To the much distinguished Mrs. Hentz
of Boston, I owe much for the correction of many poetical errors.
Being a professional poetess herself, and a lover of genius,
she discovered my little uncultivated talent, and was moved
by pity to uncover to me the beauties of correctness, together
with the true importance of the object to which I aspired. She
was extremely pleased with the dirge which I wrote on the death
of her much lamented primogenial infant, and for which she gave
me much credit and a handsome reward. Not being able to write
myself, I dictated while she wrote; and while thus engaged she
strove in vain to avert the inevitable tear slow trickling down
her ringlet-shaded cheek. She was indeed unequivocally anxious
to announce the birth of my recent and astonishing fame, and
sent its blast on the gale of passage back to the frozen plains
of Massachusetts.
This celebrated lady, however,
did not continue long at Chapel Hill, and I had to regret the
loss of her aid, which I shall never forget in life. As her
departure from Chapel Hill, she left behind her the laurel of
Thalia blooming on my mind, and went with all the spotless gaiety
of Euphrosyne with regard to the signal services she had done
me. In gratitude for all these favors, by which she attempted
to supply and augment the stock of servile genius, I inscribe
to her the following
EULOGY.
Deep on
thy pillar, thou immortal dame,
Trace the inscription of eternal fame;
For bards unborn must yet thy works adore,
And bid thee live when others are no more.
When other names are lost among the dead,
Some genius yet may live thy fame to spread;
Memory's fair bush shall not decline to bloom,
But flourish fresh upon thy sacred tomb.
When nature's crown refuses to be gay,
And ceaseless streams have worn their rocks away;
When age's vail shall beauty's visage mask
And bid oblivion blot the poet's task,
Time's final shock shall elevate thy name,
And lift thee smiling to eternal fame.
Horton spent
his last years in Philadelphia writing Sunday School stories and
working for old North Carolina friends who lived in the city.
He passed away in 1883, although details of his death are unknown.
 Both
Wheatley and Horton wrote poems based on traditional European
forms, and did not write much expressly about the situation of
black people. The third major early black poet was quite different:
she was Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825 – 1911). Frances Ellen
Watkins Harper was born on September 24, 1825 to free parents.
A few years later, she was orphaned. Harper received her education
at a school for free African-Americans run by her uncle, William
Watkins. The school was located at the present day site of the
Baltimore Convention Center. At the age of 13, Harper's formal
education came to an end when she took a job as a nursemaid.
Her first
publication was a collection of poetry and prose entitled Autumn
Leaves, published while she was a teenager. Later, she moved
to Philadelphia, and published another volume of poems entitled
Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1857), which sold over
10,000 copies within its first five years of publication.
Harper married
the love of her life, Fenton Harper in 1860. In 1869, she published
Moses, A Story of the Nile, and three years later Sketches
of Southern Life. Some of her other works include Poems,
Atlanta Offering, Effie Alton, Eventide, Idylls of the Bible,
and The Sparrow's Fall. Her only novel is Iola Leroy:
On Shadows Uplifted, a book about a wealthy slave owner who
falls in love with and marries an African-American woman.
Harper was,
by far, the most popular poet of her time. Her poetry reflected
her views on the abolition of slavery, women's rights and other
social ills of her time.
This is from
the Underground Railway site of the University of California (Davis):
“In her
early adult life, she moved around in the free states of Ohio
and Pennsylvania where she worked as a teacher. While teaching
at Little York, she was greatly bothered by the inequities and
sufferings that her people had to suffer under the slave laws
and resolved to take part in the effort to abolish slavery.
She became active in the Anti-Slavery movement in the 1850's
by using her gift for language as lecturer. At one time in her
career as a lecturer, she made her home in Philadelphia "at
the station of the Underground Rail Road, where she frequently
saw passengers and their melting tales of suffering and wrong,
which intensely increased her sympathy in their behalf”. Even
during the Civil War, she wrote prolifically, hoping to contribute
to the cause of freedom. The writing she produced during the
Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's assassination further
reveals her eloquence in expressing her hopes and disappointments
with the progress of the fight for equality. She continued arguing
for freedom, equality and reforms in her lectures and writings
until her death.”
Here is the
opening of a poem of hers, An Appeal to my Country Women,
from the collection Poems, published in 1895.
But hark!
from our Southland are floating
Sobs of anguish, murmurs of pain,
And women heart-stricken are weeping
Over their tortured and their
slain.
On their brows the sun has left traces;
Shrink not from their sorrow
in scorn.
When they entered the threshold of being
The children of a King were born.
Each comes as a guest to the table
The hand of our God has outspread,
To fountains that ever leap upward,
To share in the soil we all tread.
When ye plead for the wrecked and fallen,
The exile from far-distant shores,
Remember that men are still wasting
Life's crimson around your own
doors.
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?
 Our
next poet is Claude McKay (1889 – 1948). The following is drawn
from Freda Scott Giles article in America National Biography Online.
Claude McKay, poet, novelist, and journalist, was born Festus
Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, the
son of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards,
farmers. The youngest of eleven children, McKay was sent at an
early age to live with his oldest brother, a schoolteacher, so
that he could be given the best education available. An avid reader,
McKay began to write poetry at the age of ten. In 1906 he decided
to enter a trade school, but when the school was destroyed by
an earthquake he became apprenticed to a carriage and cabinetmaker;
a brief period in the constabulary followed. In 1907 McKay came
to the attention of Walter Jekyll, an English gentleman residing
in Jamaica who became his mentor, encouraging him to write dialect
verse. Jekyll later set some of McKay's verse to music. By the
time he immigrated to the United States in 1912, McKay had established
himself as a poet, publishing two volumes of dialect verse, Songs
of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912).
Having heard
favorable reports of the work of Booker T. Washington, McKay enrolled
at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama with the intention of studying
agronomy; it was here that he first encountered the harsh realities
of American racism, which would form the basis for much of his
subsequent writing.
In 1914 a
financial gift from Jekyll enabled him to move to New York, where
he invested in a restaurant and married his childhood sweetheart,
Eulalie Imelda Lewars. Neither venture lasted a year, and Lewars
returned to Jamaica to give birth to their daughter. McKay was
forced to take a series of menial jobs. He was finally able to
publish two poems, Invocation and The Harlem Dancer,
under a pseudonym in 1917. McKay's talent as a lyric poet earned
him recognition, particularly from Frank Harris, editor of Pearson's
magazine, and Max Eastman, editor of The Liberator, a socialist
journal (originally founded by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831
as an abolitionist paper); both became instrumental in McKay's
early career.
As a socialist,
McKay eventually became an editor at The Liberator, in
addition to writing various articles for a number of left-wing
publications. During the period of racial violence against blacks
known as the Red Summer of 1919, McKay wrote one of his best-known
poems, the sonnet, If We Must Die, an anthem of resistance
later quoted by Winston Churchill during World War II. Baptism,
The White House, and The Lynching, all sonnets, also
exemplify some of McKay's finest protest poetry.
If We Must Die is our second poem of this week.
The generation
of poets who formed the core of the Harlem Renaissance, including
Langston Hughes and Countée Cullen, identified McKay as
a leading inspirational force, even though he did not write modern
verse. His innovation lay in the directness with which he spoke
of racial issues and his choice of the working class, rather than
the middle class, as his focus.
McKay resided
in England from 1919 through 1921, then returned to the United
States. While in England, he was employed by the British socialist
journal, Workers' Drednought, and published a book of verse,
Spring in New Hampshire, which was released in an expanded
version in the United States in 1922. The same year, Harlem
Shadows, perhaps his most significant poetry collection, appeared.
McKay then began a twelve-year sojourn through Europe, the Soviet
Union, and Africa, a period marked by poverty and illness. He
returned to the United States in 1934. . Never able to regain
the stature he had achieved during the 1920s, McKay blamed his
chronic financial difficulties on his race and his failure to
obtain academic credentials and associations.
Assessments
of McKay's lasting influence vary. To McKay's contemporaries,
such as James Weldon Johnson, "Claude McKay's poetry was
one of the great forces in bringing about what is often called
the 'Negro Literary Renaissance.' " While his novels and
autobiographies have found an increasing audience in recent years,
modern critics appear to concur with Arthur P. Davis that McKay's
greatest literary contributions are found among his early sonnets
and lyrics. McKay ended A Long Way from Home with this
assessment of himself: "I have nothing to give but my singing.
All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself
mainly on the poetry of existence. And all I offer here is the
distilled poetry of my experience."
McKay was
one of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, as I have said; this
is a quotation from the web that describes what this signified:
“From 1920 until about 1930 an unprecedented outburst of creative
activity among African-Americans occurred in all fields of art.
Beginning as a series of literary discussions in the lower Manhattan
(Greenwich Village) and upper Manhattan (Harlem) sections of New
York City, this African-American cultural movement became known
as "The New Negro Movement" and later as the Harlem
Renaissance. More than a literary movement and more than a social
revolt against racism, the Harlem Renaissance exalted the unique
culture of African-Americans and redefined African-American expression.
African-Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage
and to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925
by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke (1886 – 1954).
One of the
factors contributing to the rise of the Harlem Renaissance was
the great migration of African-Americans from the southern states
to northern cities (such as New York City, Chicago, and Washington,
D.C.) between 1919 and 1926. In his influential book “The New
Negro” (1925), Locke described the northward migration of blacks
as "something like a spiritual emancipation." Black
urban migration combined with trends in American society as a
whole toward experimentation during the 1920s, and the rise of
radical black intellectuals — including Locke, Marcus Garvey (1887
– 1940), founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA), and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868 – 1963), editor of The Crisis
magazine — all contributed to the particular styles and unprecedented
success of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance period.”
From a poetry
point of view, it is said that the first key event in this was
the poem Spring in New Hampshire by Claude McKay published
in 1920; and in 1924 Countée Cullen won first prize in
the Witter Bynner Poetry Competition.
 Born
in 1903 in New York City, Countée Cullen was raised in
a Methodist parsonage. He attended De Witt Clinton High School
in New York and began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. In
1922, Cullen entered New York University. His poems were published
in The Crisis, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois,
and Opportunity, a magazine of the National Urban League.
He was soon after published in Harper's, the Century
Magazine, and Poetry. He won several awards for his
poem, Ballad of the Brown Girl, and graduated from New
York University in 1923. That same year, Harper published his
first volume of verse, Color, and he was admitted to Harvard
University where he completed a master's degree.
His second
volume of poetry, Copper Sun (1927), met with controversy
in the black community because he did not give the subject of
race the same attention he had given it in Color. He was raised
and educated in a primarily white community, and differed from
other poets of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes,
in that he lacked the background to comment from personal experience
on the lives of other blacks or use popular black themes in his
writing. An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote in the tradition
of Keats and Shelley and was resistant to the new poetic techniques
of the Modernists. He died in 1946. (These notes are from the
Academy of American Poets).
Here is a
sonnet of his, from The Dark Tower:
We shall
not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;
Not everlastingly while others sleep
Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,
Not always bend to some more subtle brute;
We were not made to eternally weep.
The night
whose sable breast relieves the stark,
White stars is no less lovely being dark,
And there are buds that cannot bloom at all
In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;
So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.
 The
other major voice in the Harlem Renaissance was James Langston
Hughes (1902 – 1967). His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, was
a stenographer with a mining company in Joplin, Missouri, and
his mother was Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, who wrote poetry
and acted in amateur theatricals. His father departed for Cuba
and then Mexico, and his mother took Langston to Lawrence, Kansas,
where she had grown up. Once there, they lived in a state of poverty
with her mother, Mary Langston. Carrie married Homer Clark, and
in 1915 on the death of his grandmother, Langston joined his mother
and stepfather in Lincoln, Illinois. In 1916, he graduated from
the eighth grade, and was named class poet. He entered Central
High School in Cleveland, Ohio, where his parents, now employed
in a steel mill, lived. He began to publish poems in the Central
High Monthly Magazine. His work shows the influence of Walt Whitman
and Carl Sandburg. In 1921, he published The Negro Speaks of
Rivers in The Crisis. Supported unwillingly by his
father, by this time a successful businessman and landowner in
Mexico, he entered Columbia University, where he met Countée
Cullen. In 1922, he completed his courses and left Columbia. In
1923, after visiting a Harlem cabaret, he wrote The
Weary Blues; and then sailed out on a steamship trading
on the west coast of Africa. On a second voyage in 1924, he jumped
ship and settled in Paris, where he began to write poems influenced
by jazz rhythms. He returned to America, and lived with his mother,
now in Washington, D.C. In April of that year The Weary Blues
won first prize in Opportunity magazine’s literary contest; and
in January 1926 it was published to good reviews.
Over the
next several years, Hughes spent much of his time traveling, writing
books and plays; and only in 1942, with the publication of Shakespeare
in Harlem did he return to the themes and forms of the 1920’s,
including the blues.
This information
is extracted from a much more detailed chronology in The Collected
Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David
Roessel (1995).
Most commentators
these days, while expressing the importance of Langston Hughes
as a figure in the Harlem Renaissance and the evolution of recognition
of the importance of black poets in the U.S., do not have a high
regard for his poetry itself: it has been said that as a poet
he does not compare well with the major figures of 20th century
poetry, such as Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot; or with his Harlem
Renaissance rival, Countée Cullen.
However,
in part because of his importance in the growth of black poetry,
and because of the way it illustrates the nature of his argument
with Cullen about the difference between a poet who happens to
be black as opposed to a black poet, I will select The
Weary Blues as my third poem of this week.
 Gwendolyn
Brooks (1917 – 2000) was born in Topeka, Kansas, and raised in
Chicago. I have quoted one of her poems in an earlier piece: We
Real Cool. She wrote more than twenty books of poetry, the
first of which was A Street in Bronzeville (1945). She
received the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen (1949). In
1968 she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, after
the death of Carl Sandburg, and from 1985 – 1986 she was Consultant
in Poetry to the Library of Congress. These are just a few of
the many awards she received. In 1967, she attended Fisk University's
Second Black Writers' Conference and began to rediscover her blackness.
After the conference, Brooks decided to become more involved in
the Black Arts movement, and her poems become angrier in tone.
She began to market her work through black publishers. In the
terms of the Hughes/Cullen debate, Gwendolyn Brooks became a black
poet (instead of a poet who just happens to be black).
In her autobiography
Report from Part One (1972) Gwendolyn wrote: “The Black
woman must remember, through all the prattle about walking or
not walking three or twelve steps behind or ahead of ‘her’ male,
that, sweet as sex may be, she cannot endlessly brood on Black
Man’s blondes, blues, blunders. She is a person in the world—with
wrongs to right, stupidities to outwit, with her man when possible,
on her own when not. And she is also here to enjoy. She will be
here, like any other, once only. Therefore she must, in the midst
of tragedy and hatred and neglect, mightily enjoy the readily
enjoyable: sunshine and pets and children and conversation and
games and travel (tiny or large) and books and walks and chocolate
cake.”
I include
her here not only because of her quality as a poet, but because
she lived all her life in Chicago, and presents a distinctly different
urban black voice to the New York based Harlem Renaissance poets.
Here is her The Sonnet/Ballad:
Oh mother,
mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover's tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won't be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate--and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, "Yes."
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
I wish I
were able to give examples of more black poets, particularly newer
voices, such as Etheridge Knight (1931 – 1991), a member of the
Black Arts Movement, and Rita Dove (1952 - ), the first African
American writer to become poet laureate (1993 – 1995); but space
does not permit.
I would like
to close with a work from a black musician, and it has to be Huddie
Ledbetter (1885 – 1949): “Ledbelly – King of the 12-String Guitar”.
He is worth an article to himself, and eventually I may get round
to it, but for the moment here is Black Girl:
Black Girl,
Black Girl,
Don’t lie to me,
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the
pines, in the pines,
Where the sun never shines,
And I shivered the whole night through.
My husband
was
A railroad man
Killed a mile and a half from here.
His head
was found
In the driver’s wheel
And his body haven’t never been found.
Black Girl,
Black Girl
Where will you go?
I’m going
where the cold wind blows
You caused
me to weep
And you caused me to moan
You caused me to leave my home.
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