Negro Poets and Their Poems - Robert Thomas Kerlin

BY
ROBERT T. KERLIN
AUTHOR OF “THE VOICE OF THE NEGRO”

Still comes the Perfect Thing to man
As came the olden gods, in dreams.
J. Mord Allen.

ILLUSTRATED
ASSOCIATED PUBLISHERS, Inc.,
WASHINGTON, D. C.

Copyright, 1923,
By
THE ASSOCIATED PUBLISHERS, Inc.

To the Black and Unknown Bards who gave to the world the priceless treasure of those “canticles of love and woe,” the camp-meeting Spirituals; more particularly, to those untaught singers of the old plantations of the South, whose melodious lullabies to the babes of both races entered with genius-quickening power into the souls of Poe and Lanier, Dunbar and Cotter: to them, for whom any monument in stone or bronze were but mockery, I dedicate this monument of verse, budded by the children of their vision.

[CHAPTER I]
			PAGE
Preface			[xiii]
The Present-Day Negro Heritage of Song			[1]
I.	Untaught Melodies: Folk Song		[4]
	1.	The Spirituals	[6]
	2.	The Seculars	[12]
II.	The Earlier Poetry of Art		[20]
	1.	Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley	[20]
	2.	Charles L. Reason	[24]
	3.	George Moses Horton	[25]
	4.	Mrs. Frances E. W. Harper	[26]
	5.	James Madison Bell and Albery A. Whitman	[32]
	6.	Paul Laurence Dunbar	[37]
	7.	J. Mord Allen	[48]
[CHAPTER II]
The Present Renaissance of the Negro			[51]
I.	A Glance at the Field		[51]
II.	Some Representatives of the Present Era		[70]
	1.	The Cotters, Father and Son	[70]
	2.	James David Corrothers	[85]
	3.	A Group of Singing Johnsons:
		James Weldon Johnson	[90]
		Charles Bertram Johnson	[95]
		Fenton Johnson	[99]
		Adolphus Johnson	[104]
	4.	William Stanley Braithwaite	[105]
	5.	George Reginald Margetson	[109]
	6.	William Moore	[111]
	7.	Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.	[113]
	8.	Walter Everette Hawkins	[119]
	9.	Claude McKay	[126]
	10.	Leslie Pinckney Hill	[131]
[CHAPTER III]
The Heart of Negro Womanhood			[139]
	1.	Miss Eva A. Jessye	[139]
	2.	Mrs. J. W. Hammond	[142]
	3.	Mrs. Alice Dunbar-Nelson	[144]
	4.	Mrs. Georgia Douglas Johnson	[148]
	5.	Miss Angelina W. Grimké	[152]
	6.	Mrs. Anne Spencer	[156]
	7.	Miss Jessie Fauset	[160]
[CHAPTER IV]
Ad Astra per Aspera			[163]
I.	Per Aspera		[163]
	1.	Edward Smythe Jones	[163]
	2.	Raymond Garfield Dandridge	[169]
	3.	George Marion McClellan	[173]
	4.	Charles P. Wilson	[179]
	5.	Leon R. Harris	[180]
	6.	Irvin W. Underhill	[185]
II.	Ad Astra		[187]
	1.	James C. Hughes	[187]
	2.	Leland Milton Fisher	[189]
	3.	W. Clarence Jordan	[190]
	4.	Roscoe C. Jamison	[191]
[CHAPTER V]
The New Forms of Poetry			[197]
I.	Free Verse		[197]
	1.	Will Sexton	[197]
	2.	Andrea Razafkeriefo	[197]
	3.	Langston Hughes	[200]
II.	Prose Poems		[201]
	1.	W. E. Burghardt DuBois	[201]
	2.	Kelly Miller	[206]
	3.	Charles H. Conner	[209]
	4.	William Edgar Bailey	[213]
	5.	R. Nathaniel Dett	[214]
[CHAPTER VI]
Dialect Verse			[218]
	1.	Waverly Turner Carmichael	[219]
	2.	Joseph S. Cotter, Sr.	[220]
	3.	Raymond Garfield Dandridge	[221]
	4.	Sterling M. Means	[222]
	5.	J. Mord Allen	[223]
	6.	James Weldon Johnson	[226]
	7.	Theodore Henry Shackleford	[228]
[CHAPTER VII]
The Poetry of Protest			[229]
		Lucian B. Watkins	[237]
[CHAPTER VIII]
Miscellaneous			[243]
I.	Eulogistic Poems		[243]
II.	Commemorative and Occasional Poems		[254]

[Index of Authors, with Biographical and Bibliographical Notes]			[269]

[Index of Titles]:[A],[B],[C],[D],[E],[F],[G],[H],[I],[J],[L],[M],[N],[O],[P],[R],[S],[T],[V],[W],[Y],[Z]			[281]

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS