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African American Poetry (1870-1928): A Digital Anthology

Areas of Interest: Topics and Themes

As we've been adding poetry to this collection, we've been marking various thematic areas of interest. These tags can be a good way to explore our collections and see patterns and begin to emerge between and among authors featured on this site.

Historical Events and Tribute Poems

African American Poetry of World War I. This tag will be especially interesting to readers interested in African American writers responding to World War I. At least one of the poets represented on this site, Leslie Pinckney Hill, was a World War I veteran, but many others engaged with the war, sometimes with a critical eye to how Black soldiers were treated, and the difficulty of mustering patriotic feeling in a society that treated Black folks as second-class citizens)
Spanish-American War. Poems dealing with African American soldiers fighting in the Spanish-American war, including the Philippine War that followed.
Slavery. Many of these writers were writing in living memory of the slavery era, and had relatives who had been enslaved. Paul Laurence Dunbar, for instance, was born to parents who had been enslaved. For Black writers in this period, grappling with the legacy of slavery was an important and ongoing topic.
Lynching. Thousands of African American people were brutally murdered in extrajudicial mob killings -- lynchings -- in this period. This was a topic that was widely covered in the Black press, especially in magazines like The Crisis. A few poems directly address this horrific phenomenon.
Frederick Douglass Tribute poems for Frederick Douglass.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Tribute poems for Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Abraham Lincoln. Poems by Black poets commemorating President Abraham Lincoln.
Civil War. Poems by Black poets commemorating the Civil War.

Social and Political Themes

Race. We have created two tags dealing with racial themes, "race" and "racism." Poems tagged with "Race" might deal with racial identity and Blackness.
Racism. Poems tagged with "racism" deal explicitly with racialized hostility, segregation, and racialized violence.
Progress and Uplift. Poems thematizing racial progress, uplift, and the civil rights movement. This is a newer tag, so it is still in progress
Homoeroticism. Poems dealing with same-sex desire or LGBTQIA identities.
Motherhood. This is a rich topic, especially for poets from the 1910s. Some of the most memorable poetry thematizing motherhood is written by Georgia Douglas Johnson.
Interracial , Multiracial, and Race Relations. Poems dealing with relationships that cross racial borders, including friendships, antagonistic relationships, and romances. We also use this category for poems that reference mixed-race people, such as Georgia Douglas Johnson's "The Octoroon."
Religion. Poems representing engagement with religion, including both the affirmative embrace of Christianity in the interest of civil rights and more critical engagements.
Labor Poems dealing with class and labor relations.
Travel/Migration. This was a period in which many African American writers were on the move, and this tag references poems that deal with travel in Europe or Africa. It is also used for poems dealing with the Great Migration, the massive movement of Black folks from the U.S. south to northern amd midwestern cities that began in the early 1900s and continued through the 1940s.

Places / Regions / Institutions

Harlem. As is well-known, Harlem was the epicenter of the Black cultural community that emerged in the 1920s, and many poets celebrated it in their writing, including Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and many others.
HBCU. Many Black writers from this period were associated with Historically Black Colleges and Universities in some way. Some -- notably Langston Hughes -- attended HBCUs and received degrees there. Others, including Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston, taught at HBCUs. There are many references to universities like Fisk University, Howard University, Atlanta University, and so on in the poetry of this period.
Africa. Poems that thematize Africa in some way. Imagining Africa was an important theme for many Black poets in the early 20th century -- both those involved with the UNIA and Garveyism and more broadly. Africa was especially vivid to Langston Hughes, as he had a memorable visit to West Africa early in his career.
Caribbean Writers like Claude McKay and Eric Walrond had direct Caribbean connections, and often wrote about it in their works. But others -- especially Langston Hughes -- also engaged the Caribbean in their writing. The Caribbean was also important to Arthur Schomburg, who immigrated to the U.S. from Puerto Rico in 1891.

Other Themes

Sonnet. Poems using the sonnet form. This was surprisingly prevalent at the time. Claude McKay famously used sonnets in many of his most influential political poems. Writers like Georgia Douglas Johnson and Carrie Williams Clifford also found the sonnet form appealing, again, in connection with social justice-oriented poetry.
Music. The emphasis on music in poems by Langston Hughes is well-known, but in fact many Black poets from this period were interested in the connections between music and lyricism.
Intertextual. Poems that allude to other authors, including white authors.
Black Vernacular (AAVE) Poems using AAVE. There were active debates at the time among Black poets about the use of language that was sometimes seen as caricaturing Black voices.
Poetry for children. Many well-known African American writers of this period wrote poems for children on occasion, including especially Langston Hughes and Jessie Fauset.