Crossing a sea of black poetry

Yet in this period following the Civil War, black poets (and writers of prose) interested in creating believable, true images of their people and the diverse experiences of those people, were up against a hard wall of public resistance. Remember, this time gave rise to a popular generation of white American writers and poets-many politically to the right, proslavery, even reactionary - who worked in what we now call the Plantation Tradition. These writer - Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, William John Grayson, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Irwin Russell, Sidney Lanier and others - developed formulaic images of the ex-slave as buffoon, lazy roustabout, figure of ridicule, mammy, half-wit, criminal, thief and rapist.

As the end of the 19th century approached, American writing generally - and African - American writing in particular - showed signs of breaking away from its absolute dependency on European influences. Walt Whitman was also at work, boldly creating and insisting on a native art form. The idea of a formal native poetry - though still a strange notion - was at least now in the vocabulary, even if Whitman and those few who believed as he did didn't have a large tribe of followers.

During this period, Dunbar's achievement in deceptively simple pastoral poetry matches Charles Waddell Chesnutt's in serious literary fiction and W.E.B. Du Bois' in lyrical analytical nonfiction. Dunbar's dialect verse became better known than some of his more complex and sophisticated poems - of which there were many more. (Dunbar, among other early black poets, is a clear forerunner of the jazz poetry of the '60s, '70s and '80s, as well as today's rap and hip-hop poetry.) In a way, it was William Dean Howells' introduction to Dunbar's first commercially published volume, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), that helped bring a certain respectability to dialect poetry by black poets.

During the first two decades of the 20th century, the so-called New Negro came into vogue, and for the first time the general public started reading the poetry and prose of African Americans. The Dunbar-Chesnutt-Du Bois-James Weldon Johnson generation became the Old Guard as a group of younger writers - Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps and others - merged as the leading poets of what later was called the Harlem Renaissance.

But who were these young upstart? In terms of poetic form, they were individualistic, but in terms of thematic concerns, they - specially Toomer, McKay and Hughes - shared a great deal. The new poetry was vigorous and often universal in its subject matter and themes, yet it retained much of the sensitivity to racial issues and injustice expressed by the earlier generation. Modernism was in the air.

It is often said that McKay's Harlem Shadows (1922) signaled the African-American shift - at least in poetry - to the self-consciously modern mode and, at the same time, the beginning of the "New Negro" movement, better known as the Harlem Renaissance. But a McKay volume published two years earlier, Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems, reflects as much consciousness of the new aesthetic, which insisted that a poem was a lyrical thing, and not merely a vehicle for ideas.