Clarissa Scott Delany: Author Page
Clarissa Mae Scott Delany, born on May 22, 1901, in Tuskegee Alabama, was a distinguished poet, essayist, educator, and social worker. Raised in an intellectually stimulating environment, her father Emmett Jay Scott (a prominent figure in African American education and politics) played a significant role in shaping her social consciousness. Delany graduated from Wellesley College and was academically gifted and an active member of her community, participating in numerous clubs and sports.
Best known for her evocative poetry, Delany’s work was featured in esteemed publications like The Crisis, Opportunity, and Palms; however, she also had other occupations. Her award-winning poem “Solace” reflects her multi-faceted career interests, as “[her] life is fevered” with “a restlessness” that “at times…possesses [her].” Delany taught at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. for three years and worked as a social worker in New York City, where she researched the welfare of Black children in the city.
Through Delany’s poetry, rain and wind are a pathetic fallacy to be a counterpart to the speaker’s emotions and seem to offer the writer some distance from anguish. This distance is addressed directly in “The Mask;” the speaker is so emotionally detached that she refers to herself in the third person until a betrayal, where Delany slips into the first person. Delany writes not only of masking the “bitter black despair” of social and personal defeat but also transcendence in “Interim,” where “Another day will find me brave / and not afraid to dare.”
Despite her limited publication history and untimely death at age 26, Clarissa Scott Delany leaves us with a legacy that was celebrated by notable figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alice Dunbar Nelson, and Countee Cullen, who included her poems in his anthology Caroling Dusk. Upon her death, Delany’s Dunbar colleague Angelina Weld Grimke wrote a moving tribute to her—“To Clarissa Scott Delany.” Her family also honored her memory by establishing the YWCA Camp Clarissa Scott on Chesapeake Bay, ensuring that her spirit of service and dedication to Black communities would continue to inspire future generations.
Works Cited
Harlem Renaissance Lives from the African American National Biography. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Maureen Honey, Ed. Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. United Kingdom, Rutgers University Press, 2006.
Wintz, Cary D., and Finkelman, Paul. Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. United Kingdom, Routledge, 2004.