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In History,Poet

The first black poet in the United States to be published was Phyllis Wheatley (1753-1784). Born in Senegal, Africa, around 1753, she was transported to Boston in 1761 to be sold on the slave market. John Wheatley, a tailor from Boston, purchased her as a child to serve his wife. Soon Wheatley was accepted as a member of the family and Mary Wheatley, John's daughter, was made her personal tutor. She learned English with remarkable speed and although she never attended a formal school, also learned Greek and Latin. At the age of 13 Wheatley began writing poetry. Her first published poem "On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin" appeared in the Newport Mercury in 1767. In the following years, a number of poems appeared in various publications in and around Boston. The publication of a poem on the death of the evangelical preacher George Whitefield in 1770 made Wheatley a sensation. As a result Countess Selina of Huntingdon, a close friend of Whitefield, invited Wheatley to England and assisted the young woman in the publication of her poems. In 1773, a volume was published in London as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Most of the 39 poems reflect her religious and classical New England upbringing. Written in heroic couplets, many are elegies or stress the theme of Christian salvation. In all Wheatley's work only one line makes any allusion to racial inequality: 'Some view our sable race with scornful eye'. A poem published in 1776, dedicated to George Washington, brought her further acclaim. The deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley left Wheatley struggling to support herself as a poet and seamstress. In 1778 she married John Peters, a free black man who ran a small grocery store in Boston. The business was unsuccessful and Wheatley was forced to find work as a servant to support her children. Wheatley continued to write poetry up to her death but was unable to find a publisher. In 1784, several poems celebrating the end of the American Revolution were published under the name Phillis Peters. She died in poverty in Boston on 5th December 1784. Here is an early poem of hers: On Being Brought from Africa to America: "Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land, Taught my beknighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Savior too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their color is a diabolic dye." Remember Christians; Negroes, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train. The poem that brought her fame, On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield (1770). The Countess referred to in it is the Countess Selina of Huntingdon, mentioned above. Another of her poems begins.... O show the lab'ring bosom's deep intent, And thought in living characters to paint, When first thy pencil did those beauties give, And breathing figures learnt from thee to live, How did those prospects give my soul delight, A new creation rushing on my sight? Still, wond'rous youth! each noble path pursue, On deathless glories fix thine ardent view: Still may the painter's and the poet's fire To aid thy pencil, and my verse conspire! George Moses Horton (1797-1883) He was born in North Carolina as the 'property' of Chatham County yeoman farmer William Horton, and taught himself to read using an old speller and a copy of the Methodist hymnal. He didn’t learn to write until he was grown, but he was fascinated by poetry, and composed what were described as ‘psalm-meter’ verses in his head. He was often sent by his then master, James Horton, to Chapel Hill to sell produce. His unusually sophisticated vocabulary caught the attention of university students, who encouraged his orations and, later, the recitation of his own verse. He began to sell poems that he dictated to students to send to their sweethearts, charging extra for acrostics based on the young ladies' names. For several decades he was able to purchase his own time from his master James for twenty-five cents a day, and later from James’s son Hall Horton for fifty cents. Here is a description of this in his own words: My old master having come to the conclusion to confer part of his servants on his children, lots were cast, and his son James fell heir to me. He was then living on Northampton, in the winter of 1814. In 1815 he moved into Chatham, when my opportunities became a little expanded. Having got in the way of carrying fruit to the college at Chapel Hill on the Sabbath, the collegians who, for their diversion, were fond of pranking with the country servants who resorted there for the same purpose that I did, began also to prank with me. But somehow or other they discovered a spark of genius in me, either by discourse or other means, which excited their curiosity, and they often eagerly insisted on me to spout, as they called it. This inspired in me a kind of enthusiastic pride I was indeed too full of vain egotism, which always discovers the gloom of ignorance, or dims the lustre of popular distinction. I would stand forth and address myself extempore before them, as an orator of inspired promptitude. But I soon found it an object of aversion, and considered myself nothing but a public ignoramus. Hence I abandoned my foolish harangues, and began to speak of poetry, which lifted these still higher on the wing of astonishment; all eyes were on me, and all ears were open. Many were at first incredulous; but the experiment of acrostics established it as an incontestable fact. Hence my fame soon circulated like a stream throughout the college. Many of these acrostics I composed at the handle of the plough, and retained them in my head, (being unable to write,) until an opportunity offered, when I dictated, whilst one of the gentlemen would serve as my emanuensis. He earned the admiration and support of John Owen, then Governor of North Carolina (1828 – 1830) David Lowry Swain (1801 – 1868) who was also Governor (1832 – 1835), and president of the University of North Carolina; and the newspaperman Horace Greeley (1811 – 1872), among others. The novelist Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz (1800 - 1856), who was also a professor’s wife, encouraged him and arranged for the publication, first of a poem entitled Liberty and Slavery which appeared in the Lancaster Gazette on April 8, 1829; and later the same year, of a collection of his poems, The Hope of Liberty. This was the first book published in the South by a black man. The hope had been, apparently, that this might raise enough money to purchase his freedom; but that did not happen. Hentz has been castigated in the critical literature for what was seen as a romanticized apologia for slavery in the south: her book The Planter's Northern Bride, published in 1845, has come in for some particular opprobrium. However, Horton clearly had nothing but gratitude:      To the much distinguished Mrs. Hentz of Boston, I owe much for the correction of many poetical errors. Being a professional poetess herself, and a lover of genius, she discovered my little uncultivated talent, and was moved by pity to uncover to me the beauties of correctness, together with the true importance of the object to which I aspired. She was extremely pleased with the dirge which I wrote on the death of her much lamented primogenial infant, and for which she gave me much credit and a handsome reward. Not being able to write myself, I dictated while she wrote; and while thus engaged she strove in vain to avert the inevitable tear slow trickling down her ringlet-shaded cheek. She was indeed unequivocally anxious to announce the birth of my recent and astonishing fame, and sent its blast on the gale of passage back to the frozen plains of Massachusetts.       This celebrated lady, however, did not continue long at Chapel Hill, and I had to regret the loss of her aid, which I shall never forget in life. As her departure from Chapel Hill, she left behind her the laurel of Thalia blooming on my mind, and went with all the spotless gaiety of Euphrosyne with regard to the signal services she had done me. In gratitude for all these favors, by which she attempted to supply and augment the stock of servile genius, I inscribe to her the following                                    EULOGY. Deep on thy pillar, thou immortal dame, Trace the inscription of eternal fame; For bards unborn must yet thy works adore, And bid thee live when others are no more. When other names are lost among the dead, Some genius yet may live thy fame to spread; Memory's fair bush shall not decline to bloom, But flourish fresh upon thy sacred tomb. When nature's crown refuses to be gay, And ceaseless streams have worn their rocks away; When age's vail shall beauty's visage mask And bid oblivion blot the poet's task, Time's final shock shall elevate thy name, And lift thee smiling to eternal fame. Horton spent his last years in Philadelphia writing Sunday School stories and working for old North Carolina friends who lived in the city. He passed away in 1883, although details of his death are unknown. Both Wheatley and Horton wrote poems based on traditional European forms, and did not write much expressly about the situation of black people. The third major early black poet was quite different: she was Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825 – 1911). Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born on September 24, 1825 to free parents. A few years later, she was orphaned. Harper received her education at a school for free African-Americans run by her uncle, William Watkins. The school was located at the present day site of the Baltimore Convention Center. At the age of 13, Harper's formal education came to an end when she took a job as a nursemaid. Her first publication was a collection of poetry and prose entitled Autumn Leaves, published while she was a teenager. Later, she moved to Philadelphia, and published another volume of poems entitled Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1857), which sold over 10,000 copies within its first five years of publication. Harper married the love of her life, Fenton Harper in 1860. In 1869, she published Moses, A Story of the Nile, and three years later Sketches of Southern Life. Some of her other works include Poems, Atlanta Offering, Effie Alton, Eventide, Idylls of the Bible, and The Sparrow's Fall. Her only novel is Iola Leroy: On Shadows Uplifted, a book about a wealthy slave owner who falls in love with and marries an African-American woman. Harper was, by far, the most popular poet of her time. Her poetry reflected her views on the abolition of slavery, women's rights and other social ills of her time. This is from the Underground Railway site of the University of California (Davis): "In her early adult life, she moved around in the free states of Ohio and Pennsylvania where she worked as a teacher. While teaching at Little York, she was greatly bothered by the inequities and sufferings that her people had to suffer under the slave laws and resolved to take part in the effort to abolish slavery. She became active in the Anti-Slavery movement in the 1850's by using her gift for language as lecturer. At one time in her career as a lecturer, she made her home in Philadelphia" at the station of the Underground Rail Road, where she frequently saw passengers and their melting tales of suffering and wrong, which intensely increased her sympathy in their behalf". Even during the Civil War, she wrote prolifically, hoping to contribute to the cause of freedom. The writing she produced during the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's assassination further reveals her eloquence in expressing her hopes and disappointments with the progress of the fight for equality. She continued arguing for freedom, equality and reforms in her lectures and writings until her death." Here is the opening of a poem of hers, An Appeal to my Country Women, from the collection Poems, published in 1895. But hark! from our Southland are floating      Sobs of anguish, murmurs of pain, And women heart-stricken are weeping      Over their tortured and their slain. On their brows the sun has left traces;      Shrink not from their sorrow in scorn. When they entered the threshold of being      The children of a King were born. Each comes as a guest to the table      The hand of our God has outspread, To fountains that ever leap upward,      To share in the soil we all tread. When ye plead for the wrecked and fallen,      The exile from far-distant shores, Remember that men are still wasting      Life's crimson around your own doors. Have ye not, oh, my favored sisters,      Just a plea, a prayer or a tear, For mothers who dwell 'neath the shadows      Of agony, hatred and fear? Our next poet is Claude McKay (1889- 1948). The following is drawn from Freda Scott Giles article in America National Biography Online. Claude McKay, poet, novelist, and journalist, was born Festus Claudius McKay in Sunny Ville, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica, the son of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, farmers. The youngest of eleven children, McKay was sent at an early age to live with his oldest brother, a schoolteacher, so that he could be given the best education available. An avid reader, McKay began to write poetry at the age of ten. In 1906 he decided to enter a trade school, but when the school was destroyed by an earthquake he became apprenticed to a carriage and cabinetmaker; a brief period in the constabulary followed. In 1907 McKay came to the attention of Walter Jekyll, an English gentleman residing in Jamaica who became his mentor, encouraging him to write dialect verse. Jekyll later set some of McKay's verse to music. By the time he immigrated to the United States in 1912, McKay had established himself as a poet, publishing two volumes of dialect verse, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912). Having heard favorable reports of the work of Booker T. Washington, McKay enrolled at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama with the intention of studying agronomy; it was here that he first encountered the harsh realities of American racism, which would form the basis for much of his subsequent writing. In 1914 a financial gift from Jekyll enabled him to move to New York, where he invested in a restaurant and married his childhood sweetheart, Eulalie Imelda Lewars. Neither venture lasted a year, and Lewars returned to Jamaica to give birth to their daughter. McKay was forced to take a series of menial jobs. He was finally able to publish two poems, Invocation and The Harlem Dancer, under a pseudonym in 1917. McKay's talent as a lyric poet earned him recognition, particularly from Frank Harris, editor of Pearson's magazine, and Max Eastman, editor of The Liberator, a socialist journal (originally founded by William Lloyd Garrison in 1831 as an abolitionist paper); both became instrumental in McKay's early career. As a socialist, McKay eventually became an editor at The Liberator, in addition to writing various articles for a number of left-wing publications. During the period of racial violence against blacks known as the Red Summer of 1919, McKay wrote one of his best-known poems, the sonnet, If We Must Die, an anthem of resistance later quoted by Winston Churchill during World War II. Baptism, The White House, and The Lynching, all sonnets, also exemplify some of McKay's finest protest poetry. If We Must Die  If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accurséd lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! The generation of poets who formed the core of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Countée Cullen, identified McKay as a leading inspirational force, even though he did not write modern verse. His innovation lay in the directness with which he spoke of racial issues and his choice of the working class, rather than the middle class, as his focus. McKay resided in England from 1919 through 1921, then returned to the United States. While in England, he was employed by the British socialist journal, Workers' Drednought, and published a book of verse, Spring in New Hampshire, which was released in an expanded version in the United States in 1922. The same year, Harlem Shadows, perhaps his most significant poetry collection, appeared. McKay then began a twelve-year sojourn through Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa, a period marked by poverty and illness. He returned to the United States in 1934. . Never able to regain the stature he had achieved during the 1920s, McKay blamed his chronic financial difficulties on his race and his failure to obtain academic credentials and associations. Assessments of McKay's lasting influence vary. To McKay's contemporaries, such as James Weldon Johnson, "Claude McKay's poetry was one of the great forces in bringing about what is often called the 'Negro Literary Renaissance.' " While his novels and autobiographies have found an increasing audience in recent years, modern critics appear to concur with Arthur P. Davis that McKay's greatest literary contributions are found among his early sonnets and lyrics. McKay ended A Long Way from Home with this assessment of himself: "I have nothing to give but my singing. All my life I have been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly on the poetry of existence. And all I offer here is the distilled poetry of my experience." McKay was one of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, as I have said; this is a quotation from the web that describes what this signified: “From 1920 until about 1930 an unprecedented outburst of creative activity among African-Americans occurred in all fields of art. Beginning as a series of literary discussions in the lower Manhattan (Greenwich Village) and upper Manhattan (Harlem) sections of New York City, this African-American cultural movement became known as "The New Negro Movement" and later as the Harlem Renaissance. More than a literary movement and more than a social revolt against racism, the Harlem Renaissance exalted the unique culture of African-Americans and redefined African-American expression. African-Americans were encouraged to celebrate their heritage and to become "The New Negro," a term coined in 1925 by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke (1886 – 1954). One of the factors contributing to the rise of the Harlem Renaissance was the great migration of African-Americans from the southern states to northern cities (such as New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.) between 1919 and 1926. In his influential book “The New Negro†(1925), Locke described the northward migration of blacks as "something like a spiritual emancipation." Black urban migration combined with trends in American society as a whole toward experimentation during the 1920s, and the rise of radical black intellectuals — including Locke, Marcus Garvey (1887 – 1940), founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868 – 1963), editor of The Crisis magazine — all contributed to the particular styles and unprecedented success of black artists during the Harlem Renaissance period.†From a poetry point of view, it is said that the first key event in this was the poem Spring in New Hampshire by Claude McKay published in 1920; and in 1924 Countée Cullen won first prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry Competition. Born in 1903 in New York City, Countée Cullen was raised in a Methodist parsonage. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York and began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. In 1922, Cullen entered New York University. His poems were published in The Crisis, under the leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, a magazine of the National Urban League. He was soon after published in Harper's, the Century Magazine, and Poetry. He won several awards for his poem, Ballad of the Brown Girl, and graduated from New York University in 1923. That same year, Harper published his first volume of verse, Color, and he was admitted to Harvard University where he completed a master's degree. His second volume of poetry, Copper Sun (1927), met with controversy in the black community because he did not give the subject of race the same attention he had given it in Color. He was raised and educated in a primarily white community, and differed from other poets of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, in that he lacked the background to comment from personal experience on the lives of other blacks or use popular black themes in his writing. An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote in the tradition of Keats and Shelley and was resistant to the new poetic techniques of the Modernists. He died in 1946. (These notes are from the Academy of American Poets). Here is a sonnet of his, from The Dark Tower: We shall not always plant while others reap The golden increment of bursting fruit, Not always countenance, abject and mute, That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap; Not everlastingly while others sleep Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute, Not always bend to some more subtle brute; We were not made to eternally weep. The night whose sable breast relieves the stark, White stars is no less lovely being dark, And there are buds that cannot bloom at all In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall; So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds. The other major voice in the Harlem Renaissance was James Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967). His father, James Nathaniel Hughes, was a stenographer with a mining company in Joplin, Missouri, and his mother was Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, who wrote poetry and acted in amateur theatricals. His father departed for Cuba and then Mexico, and his mother took Langston to Lawrence, Kansas, where she had grown up. Once there, they lived in a state of poverty with her mother, Mary Langston. Carrie married Homer Clark, and in 1915 on the death of his grandmother, Langston joined his mother and stepfather in Lincoln, Illinois. In 1916, he graduated from the eighth grade, and was named class poet. He entered Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio, where his parents, now employed in a steel mill, lived. He began to publish poems in the Central High Monthly Magazine. His work shows the influence of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. In 1921, he published The Negro Speaks of Rivers in The Crisis. Supported unwillingly by his father, by this time a successful businessman and landowner in Mexico, he entered Columbia University, where he met Countée Cullen. In 1922, he completed his courses and left Columbia. In 1923, after visiting a Harlem cabaret, he wrote "The Weary Blues" and then sailed out on a steamship trading on the west coast of Africa. On a second voyage in 1924, he jumped ship and settled in Paris, where he began to write poems influenced by jazz rhythms. He returned to America, and lived with his mother, now in Washington, D.C. In April of that year The Weary Blues won first prize in Opportunity magazine’s literary contest; and in January 1926 it was published to good reviews. Over the next several years, Hughes spent much of his time traveling, writing books and plays; and only in 1942, with the publication of Shakespeare in Harlem did he return to the themes and forms of the 1920’s, including the blues. This information is extracted from a much more detailed chronology in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (1995). Most commentators these days, while expressing the importance of Langston Hughes as a figure in the Harlem Renaissance and the evolution of recognition of the importance of black poets in the U.S., do not have a high regard for his poetry itself: it has been said that as a poet he does not compare well with the major figures of 20th century poetry, such as Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot; or with his Harlem Renaissance rival, Countée Cullen. However, in part because of his importance in the growth of black poetry, and because of the way it illustrates the nature of his argument with Cullen about the difference between a poet who happens to be black as opposed to a black poet. Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 – 2000) was born in Topeka, Kansas, and raised in Chicago. I have quoted one of her poems in an earlier piece: We Real Cool. She wrote more than twenty books of poetry, the first of which was A Street in Bronzeville (1945). She received the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen (1949). In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, after the death of Carl Sandburg, and from 1985 – 1986 she was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. These are just a few of the many awards she received. In 1967, she attended Fisk University's Second Black Writers' Conference and began to rediscover her blackness. After the conference, Brooks decided to become more involved in the Black Arts movement, and her poems become angrier in tone. She began to market her work through black publishers. In the terms of the Hughes/Cullen debate, Gwendolyn Brooks became a black poet (instead of a poet who just happens to be black). In her autobiography Report from Part One (1972) Gwendolyn wrote: “The Black woman must remember, through all the prattle about walking or not walking three or twelve steps behind or ahead of ‘her’ male, that, sweet as sex may be, she cannot endlessly brood on Black Man’s blondes, blues, blunders. She is a person in the world—with wrongs to right, stupidities to outwit, with her man when possible, on her own when not. And she is also here to enjoy. She will be here, like any other, once only. Therefore she must, in the midst of tragedy and hatred and neglect, mightily enjoy the readily enjoyable: sunshine and pets and children and conversation and games and travel (tiny or large) and books and walks and chocolate cake.†I include her here not only because of her quality as a poet, but because she lived all her life in Chicago, and presents a distinctly different urban black voice to the New York based Harlem Renaissance poets. Here is her The Sonnet/Ballad: Oh mother, mother, where is happiness? They took my lover's tallness off to war, Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess What I can use an empty heart-cup for. He won't be coming back here any more. Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew When he went walking grandly out that door That my sweet love would have to be untrue. Would have to be untrue. Would have to court Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort) Can make a hard man hesitate--and change. And he will be the one to stammer, "Yes." Oh mother, mother, where is happiness? I wish I were able to give examples of more black poets, particularly newer voices, such as Etheridge Knight (1931 – 1991), a member of the Black Arts Movement, and Rita Dove (1952 - ), the first African American writer to become poet laureate (1993 – 1995); but space does not permit. I would like to close with a work from a black musician, and it has to be Huddie Ledbetter (1885 – 1949): “Ledbelly – King of the 12-String Guitarâ€. He is worth an article to himself, and eventually I may get round to it, but for the moment here is Black Girl: Black Girl, Black Girl, Don’t lie to me, Tell me where did you sleep last night? In the pines, in the pines, Where the sun never shines, And I shivered the whole night through. My husband was A railroad man Killed a mile and a half from here. His head was found In the driver’s wheel And his body haven’t never been found. Black Girl, Black Girl Where will you go? I’m going where the cold wind blows You caused me to weep And you caused me to moan You caused me to leave my home.
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