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Crossing a sea of black poetry
American Visions, August-Sept, 1996 by Clarence Major, Robert Hayden, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer
African-American literature, formally speaking, is perhaps best known for its vast body of diverse and often brilliant poetry. This has a lot to do with poetry's relationship to music - another cultural form in which black Americans, from the beginning of their presence in this country, have worked joyously.
There were black poets who were born slave - Lucy Terry, Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley - and who were writing and publishing their poetry on these shores or in England in the 18th century, a time when slave ships were still unloading their captured or purchased cargo to be sold as property. It's ironic, because the European explanation for slavery was rooted in the belief that Africans were subhuman, incapable of learning anything requiring abstract thinking. The legacies of this be. lief and that institution linger stormily in the hearts of Americans even now.
Today, in the sophisticated and complex poetry of, say, Rita Dove, Michael S. Harper, Derek Walcott, Ai, Jay Wright or Audre Lorde, thematically speaking, tribal or folk elements and the universals are obvious. In fact,. such elements are more in evidence in the 20th century, and especially since the mid-1940s, than they are, say, in the efforts of Terry, Hammon or Wheatley.
Terry was the first known African slave on these shores to write a poem in English, "Bars Fight," (1746), about an Indian "ambush" in Deerfield. Mass., that same year. The poem describes, among other things, Samuel Allen's heroic resistance and his death. The Bars were a prominent area along the Deerfield River.) But Hammon, of Queens Village, Long Island, N,Y., was probably the first person of African descent to publish a poem ("An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, With Penitential Cries ... etc.") in English (1760), and Wheatley was the first to publish a collection of verse, Poems on Various Subjects (1773).
Both Wheatley and Hammon - slaves with "advantages and privileges," as Hammon said of himself - were strongly influenced by the Wesley-Whitefield evangelist movement. They wrote the type of sentimental and pious Christian poetry typical of and favored by the Puritans in New England at that time - a point that Thomas Jefferson might have added to his comment about Wheatley's work being "below the dignity of criticism." Better educated than Terry or Hammon, Wheatley showed - relatively speaking - a level of technical skill absent in their work.
The period from the 1920s to the end of the Civil War gave rise to black poets who spoke out - though perhaps not always strongly - against slavery. Many of them also looked piously to middle-class gentility, British verse and European Christianity for models and only marginally to their own culture and tradition.
But then that tradition - the folk - had yet to gain in respectability. The richness and power of it were perhaps too close to be seen clearly. Clergymen and professors, these poets wrote in formal religious terms and too often (like their white counterparts) were formally derivative. They were concerned with injustice and war, yes, and spoke out against American hypocrisy, but most of them were also much concerned with making a good impression - with, in effect, proving that "colored" folks were intelligent enough to write verse in the manner of the Poets of England.
Then, in 1829, George Moses Horton, sometimes called the Colored Bard of North Carolina, published his first collection, The Hope of Liberty (reprinted in 1837 as Poems by a Slave). In that volume we can see the beginnings of a black poet's efforts to break away from the earlier themes. Like the authors of the slave narratives, he spoke out against slavery - and he is considered the first Southern slave to do so in print.
But Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first major African-American poet, turned for sustenance and for models, more dramatically than any previous poet of African descent, to the folk tradition. His poetry reflects a wide range of ideas, forms and habits in African-American folk culture. He made use of the spirituals, the storytelling tradition.. work songs, sermons, tall tales, the secular and religious blues songs. Yet Dunbar, too, was cautious about what his work implied and what he said in print. Diplomatic and optimistic at the same time, his was a careful militancy.
While Dunbar's 19th-century African-American contemporaries writing poetry - James Weldon Johnson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Aaron Belford Thompson, Josephine D. Head, Daniel Webster Davis and Alice Dunbar Nelson, to name only a few - reflected some of the same measured social militancy, none of them, with the possible exception of Johnson, equaled him in literary range and power.
Although this was a period of accommodationist thinking, it was also the beginning of serious political and social protest. With this newfound confidence, African-American poets - in terms of either dialect or the king's English - began to explore their own folk culture. And this conscious choice placed American black poetry firmly in the broadest and oldest context of world poetry - oral and musical - where it remains. Poetry is, after all, a form of music made out of words. So a written tradition, based on an oral one, evolved side by side with that continuing oral tradition.
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