African-American Poets: 1700s-1940s (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

264 Pages·2009·1.13 MB·english

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
African-American Gabriel García Mary Wollstonecraft
Poets: Volume I Márquez Shelley
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
AFRICAN-AMERICAN
POETS
Volume 1: 1700s–1940s
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: African-American Poets, Volume 1—New Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
African-American poets : volume 1: 1700s–1940s / edited and with an
introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-400-1
1. American poetry—African American authors—History and criticism.
2. African Americans—Intellectual life. 3. African Americans in literature.
I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series.
PS310.N4A355 2009
811.009’896073—dc22 2008054305
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Robert Hayden: The Apprenticeship:
Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940) 7
Pontheolla T. Williams
Gwendolyn Brooks: The 1940s:
A Milieu for Integrationist Poetics 23
B.J. Bolden
Black Modernism? The Early Poetry of
Jean Toomer and Claude McKay 35
Wolfgang Karrer
The Adventures of a Social Poet: Langston Hughes
from the Popular Front to Black Power 49
James Smethurst
Inventing a “Negro Literature”: Race, Dialect, and
Gender in the Early Work of Paul Laurence Dunbar,
James Weldon Johnson, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson 71
Caroline Gebhard
vi Contents
Creative Collaboration:
As African American as Sweet Potato Pie 87
Frances Smith Foster
“Bid the Gifted Negro Soar”: The Origins of the
African American Bardic Tradition 103
Keith D. Leonard
Rewriting Dunbar:
Realism, Black Women Poets, and the Genteel 133
Paula Bernat Bennett
The Harlem Renaissance: Depicting the “New Negro” 147
Lena Ahlin
A Familiar Strangeness: The Spectre of
Whiteness in the Harlem Renaissance
and the Black Arts Movement 165
Emily Bernard
Lyric Stars: Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes 185
James Smethurst
What a Difference a “Way” Makes:
Wheatley’s Ways of Knowing 199
April C.E. Langley
Contributors 239
Bibliography 241
Acknowledgements 247
Index 249
Editor’s Note
My introduction appreciates the eloquence of our earlier major African-
American poets: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer,
Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen.
The apprentice phase of Robert Hayden is studied by Pontheolla T. Wil-
liams, while B. J. Bolden considers the onset of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Toomer and McKay, both outsiders to the Harlem Renaissance, are seen
in the context of literary modernism by Wolfgang Karrer, after which James
Smethurst chronicles the political development of Langston Hughes.
Dunbar’s and James Weldon Johnson’s experiments in dialect are sur-
veyed by Caroline Gebhard, while Frances Smith Foster reviews the history
of collaborative efforts by African-American poets.
Bardic tradition, from Phillis Wheatley to Frances Harper, is outlined
by Keith D. Leonard, after which Paula Bernat Bennett details the revision of
Dunbar by Lizelia Moorer, Maggie Johnson, and the Thompson sisters.
Lena Ahlin’s subject is the poets of the Harlem Renaissance and their
relationship to a beautiful icon, Josephine Baker, while Emily Bernard nar-
rates the Black Arts Movement’s rebellion against “whiteness” in the Harlem
Renaissance.
James Smethurst juxtaposes Cullen and Hughes, after which this vol-
ume ends with an appreciation of Wheatley by April C.E. Langley.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
1
Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first major African-American poet and, in my
judgment, remains one of the truly authentic poets of his American generation,
which included Edwin Arlington Robinson, Trumbull Stickney, Edgar Lee
Masters, James Weldon Johnson, and the earlier work of Robert Frost. Dead at
thirty-five (tuberculosis augmented by alcoholism), Dunbar essentially wrote
in the skeptical strain of Shelley, except in dialect poems. He inherited from
Shelley an agonistic spirit, expressed strongly in “The Mystery,” one of his
undervalued poems, where he deliberately echoes “To a Skylark”: “I fain would
look before / and after, but can neither do.” Caught in an unhappy present for a
black poet, Dunbar concludes “The Mystery” with memorable eloquence:
I question of th’eternal bending skies
That seem to neighbor with the novice earth;
But they roll on and daily shut their eyes
On me, as I one day shall do on them,
And tell me not the secret that I ask.
The secret is the mystery of being an eternal novice, a kind of Promethean
complaint, which leads to what may be Dunbar’s best poem, “Ere Sleep Comes
Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes.” The fifth of the six stanzas is an epitome of
how intensely Dunbar can transcend his situation and its limitations:
Ere sleep comes down to soothe the weary eyes,
How questioneth the soul that other soul,—
1