School-teacher, preacher, poet—this is Charles Bertram Johnson of Missouri. And in Missouri there is no voice more tuneful, no artistry in song any finer, than his. Nor in so bold an assertion am I forgetting the sweet voice and exquisite artistry of Sarah Teasdale. Mr. Johnson’s art is not unlike hers in all that makes hers most charming. Only there is not so much of his that attains to perfection of form. On pages 52 and 63 were given two of his quatrain poems. These were of his people. But a lyric poet should sing himself. That is of the essence of lyric poetry. In so singing, however, the poet reveals not only his individual life, but that of his race to the view of the world. Another quatrain poem, personal in form, may be accepted as of racial interpretation:
Charles Bertram Johnson
SOUL AND STAR
So oft from out the verge afar
The dear dreams throng and throng,
Sometimes I think my soul a star,
And life a pulséd song.
Born at Callao, Missouri, October 5, 1880, of a Kentucky mother and a Virginia father, Charles Bertram Johnson attended a one-room school “across the railroad track,” where—who can explain this?—he was “Introduced to Bacon, Shakespeare, and the art of rhyming.” It reads like an old story. Some freak of a schoolmaster whose head is filled with “useless” lore—poetry, tales, and “such stuff”—nurturing a child of genius into song. But it was Johnson’s mother who was the great influence in his life. She was an “adept at rhyming” and “she initiated me into the world of color and melody”—so writes our poet. It is always the mother. Then, by chance—but how marvelously chance comes to the aid of the predestined!—by chance, he learns of Dunbar and his poetry. The ambition to be a poet of his people like Dunbar possesses him. He knows the path to that goal is education. He therefore makes his way to a little college at Macon, Missouri, from which, after five years, he is graduated—without having received any help in the art of poetry, however. Two terms at a summer school and special instruction by correspondence seem to have aided him here, or to have induced the belief that he had been aided. For twenty-odd years he followed the profession of teaching. For ten years of that period he also preached. The ministry now claims his entire energies, and the muse knocks less and less frequently at his door.
Yet he still sings. In a recent number of The Crisis I find a poem of his that in suggesting a life of toil growing to a peaceful close is filled with soothing melody:
OLD FRIENDS