With this generation of Negro poets, a folk temperament flowers and a race experience bears fruit. Race is often a closer spiritual bond than nationality and group experience deeper than an individual’s: here we have beauty that is born of long-suffering, truth that is derived from mass emotion and founded on collective vision. The spiritual search and discovery which is every artist’s is in this case more than personal; it is the epic reach and surge of a people seeking their group character through art.
So, significant as these four poets are in their separate individualities among their American contemporaries,—and they notably are—with their common racial background behind them they have still deeper meaning and wider human interest. Though their poetry ranges through all possible themes, it is therefore no spiritual distortion or misrepresentation that their more racially distinctive poems have been selected for this little anthology. For the present-day Negro poet regards his racial heritage as a more precious endowment than his own personal genius, and to the common legacy of his art adds the peculiar experiences and emotions of his folk. For McKay, Africa’s past is not an abandoned shamble but a treasure trove:
‘My soul would sing forgotten jungle songs …
I would go back to darkness and to peace
But the great western world holds me in fee
And I may never hope for full release
While to its alien gods I bend my knee.’
To Toomer, slavery, once a shame and stigma, becomes a spiritual process of growth and transfiguration, and the tortuous underground groping of one generation the maturing and high blossoming of the next. Of this dark fruit of experience he says:
‘One plum was saved for me; one seed becomes
An everlasting song, a singing tree
Caroling softly souls of slavery.’
In Cullen’s Shroud of Color, the vision is one of loyalty, group pride and confidence; a revelation of destiny as that of a chosen people:
‘Lord, I will live persuaded by mine own,
I cannot play the recreant to these;
My spirit has come home, that sailed the doubtful seas.’
And Langston Hughes, with a quite ecstatic sense of kinship with even the most common and lowly folk, discovers in them, in spite of their individual sordidness and backwardness, the epic quality of collective strength and beauty.
Dream-singers all,—
Story-tellers all,—
Singers and dancers,
Dancers and laughers,
Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands of Fate.
My people.
Yet with all their racial representativeness, these poets are of their time and nation. In major magnitude instead of minor twinkling, they help make the brilliance of contemporary American poetry. They are modernists among the moderns, and reflectors of common trends and current tendencies. McKay’s proud spirit links our newly insurgent race pride and consciousness with the rebel poetry of radical thought and social criticism. Jean Toomer’s probing into the sub-soil of Southern life is only a significant bit of the same plowing under of Reconstruction sentimentalism that has yielded us a new realistic poetry of the South. The work of Countee Cullen shares the polished lyricism of Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Frost as much as it does the exuberant flow of an awakening Negro life. And Hughes, Dunbar of his generation, brings to his portrayal of his folk not the ragged provincialism of a minstrel but the descriptive detachment of a Vachel Lindsay and a Sandburg and promises the democratic sweep and universality of a Whitman.
Since Weldon Johnson’s Creation, race poetry does not mean dialect but a reflection of Negro experience true to its idiom of emotion and circumstance. But through these younger poets, the Negro poet becomes as much an expression of his age as of his folk. In the chorus of American singing they have registered distinctive notes whose characteristic timbre we would never lose or willingly let lapse; however more and more they become orchestrated into our national art and culture.