The Book of American Negro Poetry
The first anthology of its kind, James Weldon Johnson's 1922 collection shattered the assumption that Black poetry had no place in American letters. Gathering thirty-one poets, this landmark volume captured a generation's voice in all its fury, tenderness, and beauty. Here is Paul Laurence Dunbar's aching vernacular, here are newer voices rising, all refusing the racist expectation that Black artists could only imitate white forms. Johnson opens with a fierce defense of Black poetic expression, arguing that these poets possess an innate creativity and a perspective America cannot afford to ignore. The result is a document of extraordinary historical weight: love poems and sorrow poems, poems about identity and resistance and joy, all written in the language of Black American experience. This is not a archive of the past. It is a foundation still being built upon.
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“In spite of the bans which musicians and music teachers have placed on it, the people still demand and enjoy Ragtime.””
— Unknown
“O, de light-bugs glimmer down de lane, Merlindy! Merlindy! O, de whip'-will callin' notes ur pain”
— Unknown
“How yo' gloom tu'ns into gladness, How yo' joy drives out de doubt When de oven do' is opened, An' de smell comes po'in' out;””
— Unknown
“Temperamentally, he belonged to that class of poets who Taine says are vessels too weak to contain the spirit of poetry, the poets whom poetry kills, the Byrons, the Burns's, the De Mussets, the Poes.””
— Unknown
“The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.””
— Unknown
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Unknown. The Book of American Negro Poetry. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-book-of-american-negro-poetry-ba33336c-6ab4-499b-a0f2-3752e0a73f3d.Unknown (n.d.). The Book of American Negro Poetry. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-book-of-american-negro-poetry-ba33336c-6ab4-499b-a0f2-3752e0a73f3dUnknown. The Book of American Negro Poetry. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-book-of-american-negro-poetry-ba33336c-6ab4-499b-a0f2-3752e0a73f3d.
