Negro Poets and Their Poems

Many are the forms of expression that the life of a developing people or group finds for itself--business and wealth, education and culture, political and social unrest and agit...

As an empire may grow up within an empire without observation so a republic of letters within a republic of letters. That thing is happening today in this land of ours. A litera...

Altogether admirable is the disposition of Negro verse-writers to eulogize the notable personages of their race, the men and women who have blazed the trail of advance. The ment...

It has not frequently happened in these times that a poet has dated a poem from a prison cell, or dedicated a book of poems to the judge of a police court. Mr. Edward Smythe Jon...

The newer methods in poetry--free-verse, rhythmic strophes, polyphonic prose--have been tried with success by only a few Negroes. Of free-verse particularly not many noteworthy...

From newspapers I have clipt several poems by Miss Jessye that exhibit a nature touched to the finer things of the world and of life. She has fancy, and skill in expression. I c...

As elsewhere intimated there is being produced in America a literature of which America, as the term is commonly understood, is not aware. It is a literature of protest--protest...

The reader of these pages may ask: “But where is the Negro’s humorous verse? Here is the pathos, where is the comedy of Negro life?” It may also be asked where the dialect verse...

_Ad astra per aspera_--that is the old Roman adage. Magnificent is it, and magnificently is it being in these days exemplified by the American Negroes, particularly by the incre...