There is poetry by Negro poets,—and then there is Negro poetry. It is the latter which we wish to consider, but we must first consider for a moment the distinction by virtue of which it exists. Paradoxically enough, a recent anthology1—itself the best extant compendium of Negro poetry in the racially representative sense—is completely sceptical of any vital meaning or reality in the term “Negro poetry,” and prefers to style itself an anthology of verse by Negro poets rather than an anthology of Negro verse. But even with the emphasis of abstract lyricism and “universal” themes emphasized in the editor’s mind, by actual count the poems non-racial in theme, idiom and allusion have only a preponderance of twenty out of a total of two hundred,—a precarious majority which dwindles to a decided minority when the poems and poets of real distinction are taken into special account,—the editor’s own poems not excepted. All that Mr. Cullen’s strictures can validly mean, then, is a declaration of poetic freedom for the choice and range of the Negro poet and a corrective protest against the general reader’s assumption that Negro poetry means dialect poetry or, at best, a special genre type and province. Even though the basic elements that make it poetry are universally human, an important aspect and significance of the contemporary expression of the Negro poets is the racial one. As a common bond of experience and a social compulsion of spirit, race is stronger than nationality; and re-enforced from within and without, as in the case of the Negro, it is, of the two, far more apt to be both in the foreground and background of consciousness. A deliberate reflection with some, a subtle, emotional identification with others, either as an instinctive urge or as a passionate acceptance, race is for practically all of the Negro poets a primary immediate factor.
But what is Negro poetry, admitting all this,—after all? Is it a matter of theme and subject matter or a question of spirit and attitude,—a distinctive angle on life, or a certain idiom of feeling and emotion? We miss the vital point primarily, I think, because we wish to crowd whatever the Negro elements are into a rigid formula. Race has many diverse ways of reflecting itself in the equation of life; each temperament reflects it just a bit differently and reacts to it just a bit differently. Above all do we neglect this important point, that often the racial factors reside in the overtones of artistic expression and that there is more of race in its sublimations than in its crude reportorial expression. Of course to begin with we have the direct portrayal of the folk life and folk types, with their characteristic idioms of thought, feeling and speech, but contemporary Negro poetry has opened up many another vein of subtler racial expression. There is, for example, the poetry of derived emotional coloring that merely reflects in a secondary way the tempo and moods of Negro life, the school that reflects not a race substance but a race temperament. There is too the vein that emphasizes the growing historical sense of a separate cultural tradition; a racialist trend that is the equivalent of a nationalist background and spirit. Again, we have the poetry of personal expression in which the racial situations induce a spiritual reaction and a particular philosophy of life. Finally we have the vein that directly expresses the sense of group and its common experiences, and partly as poetry of social protest, partly as poetry of social exhortation and propaganda, directly capitalizes the situations and dilemmas of racial experience. For the analysis of Negro poetry these strains of race consciousness and their modes of expression are more important, if anything, than the formal and technical distinctions of the poetic school. It is upon this basis, at least, that we shall proceed in this present analysis.
A basis point for the interpretation of contemporary Negro poetry is the realization that the traditional dialect school is now pretty generally regarded as the least representative in any intimate racial sense. To the Negro poet of today, it represents a “minstrel tradition,” imposed from without and reflecting even in its apparent unsophistication, conscious posing and self-conscious sentimentality. If Negro poetry of this type had addressed primarily its own audience, it would have been good poetry in the sense that the “Spirituals” are. But for the most part it has been a “play-up” to the set stereotypes and an extroverted appeal to the amusement complex of the overlords. Rarely, as in the case of a true folk ballad or work-song, lullaby or love-song, do we have in Negro dialect poetry the genuine brew of naive folk products. Rather have these things presented the Negro spirit in distorted, histrionic modifications, tainted with the attitude of “professional entertainment.” Of course one may argue, so was the poetry of the Troubadours that of professional entertainers,—and so it was, but with this difference—that the tradition was completely shared by the audience and that there was no dissociation of attitude between those who sang and those who listened.
So in the revision of the dialect tradition which the younger Negro poets are trying to bring about, there is more even than in James Weldon Johnson’s well known criticism of dialect as a limited medium of expression “with but two stops,—pathos and humor.” There is the attempt to reinstate the authentic background and the naive point of view, as is successfully achieved at times in Mr. Johnson’s “sermons in verse” of the “God’s Trombones” volume. Here we have the folk spirit attempting at least the “epic role,” and speaking in the grand manner, as in the Judgment Day sermon:
Too late, sinner! Too late!
Good-bye, sinner! Good-bye!
In hell, sinner! In hell!
Beyond the reach of the love of God.
And I hear a voice, crying, crying;
Time shall be no more!
Time shall be no more!
Time shall be no more!
And the sun will go out like a candle in the wind,
The moon will turn to dripping blood,
The stars will fall like cinders,
And the sea will burn like tar;
And the earth shall melt away and be dissolved,
And the sky will roll up like a scroll.
With a wave of his hand God will blot out time,
And start the wheel of eternity.
Sinner, oh, sinner,
Where will you stand
In that great day when God’s a-going to rain down fire?
The contemporary school insists on true and objective folk values: not that all of its insistence, however, is upon the serious and almost bardic note which is sounded here. Indeed in secular and less serious moods, the younger school tries equally to purge the false sentimentality and clownishness, and has been even more successful. The folk lyrics of Langston Hughes have spontaneous moods and rhythms, and carry irresistible conviction. They are our really most successful efforts up to this date to recapture the folk soul; from the deep spirituality of
At de feet o’ Jesus,
Sorrow like a sea.
Lordy, let yo’ mercy
Come driftin’ down on me.
At de feet o’ Jesus,
At yo’ feet I stand.
O, ma little Jesus,
Please reach out yo’ hand.
I’m gonna walk to de graveyard
’Hind ma friend Miss Cora Lee.
Gonna walk to de graveyard
’Hind ma dear friend Cora Lee
Cause when I’m dead some
Body’ll have to walk behind me.”
to the homely, secular folkiness of
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
Ever time de trains pass
I wants to go somewhere.
This work of Hughes in the folk forms has started up an entire school of younger Negro poetry: principally in the blues form and in the folk ballad vein. It is the latter that seems to me most promising, in spite of the undeniable interest of the former in bringing into poetry some of the song and dance rhythms of the Negro. But this is, after all, a technical element; the rich substance of Negro life it is that promises to rise in recreated outlines from the folk ballads of the younger writers. And much as the popular interest in the preservation of this peasant material owes to Paul Laurence Dunbar, to “When Malindy Sings” and “When de Co’n Pone’s Hot,” nevertheless there is no comparison in authenticity or naive beauty in the more objective lyrics of today. For example:
Lucy Williams’ “Nothboun’”
O’ de wurl’ aint flat,
An’ de wurl’ ain’t room’
H’it’s one long strip
Hangin’ up an’ down—
Jes’ Souf an’ Norf;
Jes’ Norf an’ Souf….
Since Norf is up,
An’ Souf is down,
An’ Hebben is up,
I’m upward boun’.
Or Joseph Cotter’s “Tragedy of Pete” or Sterling Brown’s “Odyssey of Big Boy” or “Maumee Ruth:”—as a matter of fact, this latter poet is, with Hughes, a genius of folk values, the most authentic evocation of the homely folk soul. His importance warrants quotation at length:
“Tornado Blues,” contemporary though it is, is graphically authentic,
Black wind came aspeedin’ down de river from de Kansas plains,
Black wind came aspeedin’ down de river from de Kansas plains,
Black wind came aroarin’ like a flock of giant areoplanes.
Destruction was a’ drivin’ it, and close beside was Fear
Destruction drivin, pa’dner at his side was Fear,
Grinnin’ Death and skinny Sorrow was abringin’ up de rear….
Newcomers dodged de mansions, an’ knocked on de po’ folks’ do’.
Dodged most of de mansions, an’ knocked down de po’ folks’ do’.
Never knew us po’ folks so popular befo’.
Foun’ de moggidge unpaid, foun’ de insurance long past due,
Moggidge unpaid, de insurance very long pas’ due,
De homes we wukked so hard fo’ goes back to de Fay an’ Jew.
“Memphis Blues” is inimitably fine:
Ninevah, Tyre,
Babylon,
Not much lef’
Of either one.
All dese cities
Ashes and rust
De wind sings sperrichals
Through deir dus’.
Yas another Memphis
’Mongst de olden days
Done been destroyed
In many ways….
Dis here Memphis
It may go
Floods may drown it,
Tornado blow,
Mississippi wash it
Down to sea—
Like de other Memphis in
History.
The modern dialect school—if it may so be styled—has thus developed a simplicity and power unknown to the earlier dialect writers, and has revealed a psychology so much more profound and canny than the peasant types with which we were so familiar and by which we were so amused and cajoled that we are beginning to doubt the authenticity of what for years has passed as the typical Negro.
Another remove from the plain literal transcription of folk life is the work of the “Jazz school,” which as a matter of fact is not native in origin. Vachel Lindsay it was who brought it into prominence at a time when it was only a submerged and half-inarticulate motive in Negro doggerel. Today it too often degenerates into this mere trickery of syncopation. Yet there is powerful and fresh poetic technique in its careful transportation to poetic idiom. But it will never come into its own with an eye-reading public or until its close competitor, the school of free verse, begins to lose some of its vogue. For essentially it is not a school of irregular rhythm like the free verse technique, but a more varied and quantitative scansion based on musical stresses and intervals inseparable from the ear control of chant and oral delivery. Only elaborate analysis will do it justice, but an obvious and masterful example will have to suffice us in a quotation from Jean Toomer:
Pour, O pour that parting soul in song,
O pour it in the sawdust glow of night
Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night,
And let the valley carry it along.
And let the valley carry it along….
O land and soil, red soil and sweet gum-tree,
So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,
Now just before an epoch’s sun declines,
Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee,
Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.
There is more Negro rhythm here, and in a line like “Caroling softly souls of slavery” than in all the more exaggerated jazz of the sensationalists, black and white, who beat the bass-drum and trapping cymbals of American jazz rather than the throbbing tom-tom and swaying lilt of the primitive voice and body surcharged with escaping emotion. Negro rhythms, even in their gay moods, are rhapsodic, they quiver more than they clash, they glide more than they march. So except in occasional patches, the rhythmic expression of Negro idioms in poetry awaits a less sensation-loving audience than we have now, and subtler musicianship than even our contemporary poets have yet attained.
We come now to the more sophisticated expressions of race in American Negro poetry. For a long while the racial sense of the Negro poet was hectic and forced: it was self-consciously racial rather than normally so. These were the days of rhetoric and apostrophe. The emotional identification was at best dramatic, and often melodramatic. As race becomes more of an accepted fact with the greater group pride and assurance of the present day Negro, his racial feelings are less constrained. Countee Cullen’s calmly stoical sonnet “From the Dark Tower,” Arna Bontemps’ “A Black Man Talks of Reaping,” Langston Hughes’ “Dream Variation” or “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” are characteristic now. Yesterday it was the rhetorical flush of partisanship, challenged and on the defensive. This was the patriotic stage through which we had to pass. Nothing is more of a spiritual gain in the life of the Negro than the quieter assumption of his group identity and heritage; and contemporary Negro poetry registers this incalculable artistic and social gain. Occasionally dramatic still, and to advantage, as in Cullen’s “Simon the Cyrenian Speaks” or Lewis Alexander’s sonnets “Africa” and “The Dark Brother,” the current acceptance of race is quiet with deeper spiritual identification and supported by an undercurrent of faith rather than a surface of challenging pride.
Thus,—as in Gwendoln Bennett’s
I love you for your brownness
And the rounded darkness of your breast.
I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice
And shadows where your wayward eye-lids rest….
Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow’s mate,
Keep all you have of queenliness,
Forgetting that you once were slave,
And let your full lips laugh at Fate!
Or again, Countee Cullen’s
My love is dark as yours is fair,
Yet lovelier I hold her
Than listless maids with pallid hair,
And blood that’s thin and colder.
You-proud-and-to-be-pitied one,
Gaze on her and despair;
Then seal your lips until the sun
Discovers one as fair.
A subtler strain of race consciousness flows in the more mystical sense of race that is coming to be a favorite mood of Negro poetry. This school was born in the lines of Claude McKay to “The Harlem Dancer”
But looking at her falsely smiling face,
I knew herself was not in that strange place.
For this mood is born of the recognition that the Negro experience has bred something mystical and strangely different in the Negro soul. It is a sublimation of the fact of race, conjured up nowhere more vividly than in these lines of Langston Hughes:—
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
However, this mystical transposition of race into pure feeling is sometimes so sublimated as not to be explicit at all: many a reader would not detect it in the following two poems, except as it was pointed out to him as a veiled statement of racial emotion or racial experience.
Lewis Alexander’s “Transformation” refers to racial largesse and Negro forgiveness:—
I return the bitterness,
Which you gave to me;
When I wanted loveliness
Tantalant and free.
I return the bitterness
It is washed by tears;
Now it is a loveliness
Garnished through the years.
I return it loveliness,
Having made it so;
For I wore the bitterness
From it long ago.
All the more effective, this—because it might just as well be a romantic lyric of unrequited love or a poem of Christian forgiveness; though very obviously it is the old miracle of the deepest particularity finding the universal. The same is true, I think, of another fine lyric “I Think I See Him There” by Waring Cuney that almost needs the conscious recall of the Negro spiritual
Were you there
When they nailed him to the cross
to sense the emotional background of its particular Negro intensity of feeling and compassion:—
I think I see Him there
With a stern dream on his face
I see Him there—
Wishing they would hurry
The last nail in place.
And I wonder, had I been there,
Would I have doubted too
Or would the dream have told me,
What this man speaks is true.
One would, of course, not foolishly claim for race a monopoly of this sort of spiritual discipline and intensification of mood, but at the same time there is no more potent and potential source of it in all modern experience.
We next come to that strain of Negro poetry that reflects social criticism. With the elder generation, this strain was prominent, more so even than today,—but it began and ended in humanitarian and moral appeal. It plead for human rights and recognition, was full of bathos and self-pity, and threatened the wrath of God, but in no very commanding way. Finally in bitter disillusionment it turned to social protest and revolt. The challenge vibrated within our own generation to the iron notes and acid lines of Claude McKay. Weldon Johnson’s title poem “Fifty Years and After” represents a transition point between the anti-slavery appeal and the radical threat. To the extent that the radical challenge is capable of pure poetry, Claude McKay realized it. But contemporary Negro poetry has found an even more effective weapon and defense than McKay’s
If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot
or the mood of his terrific indictment “The Lynching”
All night a bright and solitary star
Hung pityfully oe’r the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.
For Negro protest has found a true catharsis in a few inspired notes, and has discovered the strength of poetic rather than intellectual irony. A point of view this is that has yet to give us its full yield, it promises perhaps a more persuasive influence than any literary and artistic force yet brought to bear upon the race question in all the long debate of generations. Certainly in beautiful anticipation we have that note in Langston Hughes’ “Song for a Dark Girl:”—
Way down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross-roads tree.
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.
Way down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.
Finally we come to the most sophisticated of all race motives,—the conscious and deliberate threading back of the historic sense of group tradition to the cultural backgrounds of Africa. Undoubtedly this motive arose in a purely defensive and imitative reaction. But it has grown stronger and more positive year by year. Africa is naturally romantic. It is poetic capital of the first order, even apart from the current mode of idealizing the primitive and turning toward it in the reaction from the boredom of ultra-sophistication. There is this Caucasian strain in some of the Negro attitude toward Africa at the present time. But it is fortunately not dominant. It is interesting to notice the different approaches from which the younger Negro poets arrive at a spiritual espousal of Africa. Of course, with the minor poetical talents, this is rhetorical and melodramatically romantic, as it has always been. But our better poets are above this. Mr. Cullen, who has a dormant but volcanically potential “paganism of blood”—(he himself puts it “My chief problem has been that of reconciling a Christian upbringing with a pagan inclination”)—is torn between the dilemma of the primitive and the sophisticated tradition in more poems than the famous “Heritage” which dramatizes the conflict so brilliantly. For him the African mood comes atavistically, and with something of a sense of pursuing Furies:—he often eulogizes the ancestral spirits in order to placate them:—
So I lie, who find no peace
Night or day, no slight release
From the unremittant beat
Made by cruel padded feet
Walking through my body’s street.
Up and down they go, and back,
Beating out a jungle track.
But if Cullen has given us the exotic, emotional look on the race past, Hughes has given us what is racially more significant,—a franker, more spiritual loyalty, without sense of painful choice or contradiction, a retrospective recall that is intimate and natural. For him,
We should have a land of trees
Bowed down with chattering parrots
And not this land where birds are grey.
The moods of Africa, the old substance of primitive life, are for this growing school of thought a precious heritage, acceptable as a new artistic foundation; the justification of the much discussed racial difference, the source of new inspiration in the old Antaean strength. But if there is to be a brilliant restatement of the African tradition, it cannot be merely retrospective. That is why even this point of view must merge into a rather culturistic transposition of the old elemental values to modern modes of insight. This is just on the horizon edge in Negro poetry and art, and is one of the goals of racialism in the new aesthetic of Negro life. No better advance statement has been made than Mae Cowdery’s lines:—
I will take from the hearts
Of black men—
Prayers their lips
Are ’fraid to utter
And turn their coarseness
Into a beauty of the jungle
Whence they came.
If and when this is achieved the last significance of race in our art and poetry will have manifested itself beyond question or challenge.
To trace Negro poetry in the way we have done, does some necessary violence to the unity of individual writers who combine several strands in their poetic temperaments. It also overlooks some of the purely universal and general poetry which others have contributed. However, criticism that would trace the underlying motives of Negro expression must necessarily do this and put asunder what the gods of song have joined together. Fortunately Negro poets, on the whole, are not as doctrinnaire as their white brothers. Their rationalizations come after, not before. And their critics are perhaps even more of an imposition.