"Negro Poets and their Poems." An Anthology Edited by Robert Kerlin (1923)
AND THEIR POEMS
BY
ROBERT T. KERLIN
AUTHOR OF “THE VOICE OF THE NEGRO”
Still comes the Perfect Thing to man
As came the olden gods, in dreams.
J. MORD ALLEN.
ASSOCIATED PUBLISHERS, INC.,
WASHINGTON, D. C.
Copyright, 1923,
By
THE ASSOCIATED PUBLISHERS, INC.
To the Black and Unknown Bards who gave to the world the priceless
treasure of those “canticles of love and woe,” the camp-meeting
Spirituals; more particularly, to those untaught singers of the old
plantations of the South, whose melodious lullabies to the babes of both
races entered with genius-quickening power into the souls of Poe and
Lanier, Dunbar and Cotter: to them, for whom any monument in stone or
bronze were but mockery, I dedicate this monument of verse, budded by
the children of their vision.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
CHAPTER I
THE PRESENT-DAY NEGRO HERITAGE OF SONG 1
I. Untaught Melodies: Folk Song 4
1. The Spirituals 6
2. The Seculars 12
II. The Earlier Poetry of Art 20
1. Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley 20
2. Charles L. Reason 24
3. George Moses Horton 25
4. Mrs. Frances E. W. Harper 26
5. James Madison Bell and Albery A. Whitman 32
6. Paul Laurence Dunbar 37
7. J. Mord Allen 48
CHAPTER II
THE PRESENT RENAISSANCE OF THE NEGRO 51
I. A Glance at the Field 51
II. Some Representatives of the Present Era 70
1. The Cotters, Father and Son 70
2. James David Corrothers 85
3. A Group of Singing Johnsons:
James Weldon Johnson 90
Charles Bertram Johnson 95
Fenton Johnson 99
Adolphus Johnson 104
4. William Stanley Braithwaite 105
5. George Reginald Margetson 109
6. William Moore 111
7. Joshua Henry Jones, Jr. 113
8. Walter Everette Hawkins 119
9. Claude McKay 126
10. Leslie Pinckney Hill 131
CHAPTER III
THE HEART OF NEGRO WOMANHOOD 139
1. Miss Eva A. Jessye 139
2. Mrs. J. W. Hammond 142
3. Mrs. Alice Dunbar-Nelson 144
4. Mrs. Georgia Douglas Johnson 148
5. Miss Angelina W. Grimké 152
6. Mrs. Anne Spencer 156
7. Miss Jessie Fauset 160
CHAPTER IV
AD ASTRA PER ASPERA 163
I. Per Aspera 163
1. Edward Smythe Jones 163
2. Raymond Garfield Dandridge 169
3. George Marion McClellan 173
4. Charles P. Wilson 179
5. Leon R. Harris 180
6. Irvin W. Underhill 185
II. Ad Astra 187
1. James C. Hughes 187
2. Leland Milton Fisher 189
3. W. Clarence Jordan 190
4. Roscoe C. Jamison 191
CHAPTER V
THE NEW FORMS OF POETRY 197
I. Free Verse 197
1. Will Sexton 197
2. Andrea Razafkeriefo 197
3. Langston Hughes 200
II. Prose Poems 201
1. W. E. Burghardt DuBois 201
2. Kelly Miller 206
3. Charles H. Conner 209
4. William Edgar Bailey 213
5. R. Nathaniel Dett 214
CHAPTER VI
DIALECT VERSE 218
1. Waverly Turner Carmichael 219
2. Joseph S. Cotter, Sr. 220
3. Raymond Garfield Dandridge 221
4. Sterling M. Means 222
5. J. Mord Allen 223
6. James Weldon Johnson 226
7. Theodore Henry Shackleford 228
CHAPTER VII
THE POETRY OF PROTEST 229
Lucian B. Watkins 237
CHAPTER VIII
MISCELLANEOUS 243
I. Eulogistic Poems 243
II. Commemorative and Occasional Poems 254
INDEX OF AUTHORS, WITH BIOGRAPHICAL AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 269
INDEX OF TITLES 281