Critique and Joy
by ELISA NEW for HARVARD MAGAZINE
Photomontage illustration by Niko Yaitanes
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, edited by Kevin Young ’92 (Library of America, $45)
IT WAS NOT UNTIL 1855—the same year an unknown poet named Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass—that a once-famous Black poet, Phillis Wheatley, finally appeared in print in the United States. An international sensation when her 1773 collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was first published in Britain, Wheatley had been kidnapped earlier in life from Senegal, and enslaved in Boston, where her fame as a literary prodigy flared briefly and then faded rapidly: she died in penury.
If Wheatley’s importance as a perspicacious foremother of Black American poetry took another 200 years to begin to be acknowledged, the full and foundational role of Black poetry as it undergirds all American poetry is also still in the process of being recognized—as is, it must also be said, the cultural importance of poetry itself. The unforgettable performance by Amanda Gorman ’20 at the Presidential Inauguration was a break-out moment not only for Black poetry or American poetry but for all poets and poetry, and perhaps the best illustration in our time of the test Whitman set for poets: “the proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”
Kevin Young
Photograph by Leah L. Jones/National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian Institution
The fascinating fact that Wheatley and Whitman first saw print in the same year in this country is one among many I learned from Kevin Young’s introduction to his Library of America anthology, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. His implicit juxtaposition of the two as co-founders of American poetry got me thinking about how poets demonstrate and secure value within their cultures; and, too, how cultures circulate, and secure for posterity, their poets’ wisdom.
Left to right: Phillis Wheatley, Melvin B. Tolson, Dudley Randall, Gwendolyn Brooks, Yusef Komunyakaa, Paul Laurence Dunbar. In the background: On Virtue, written in 1766 by Phillis Wheatley
I waited weeks for a copy of Young’s anthology, the initial print run having—tellingly—sold out. When I finally received the compendious volume, I could see why, and for months I’ve been dipping in frequently for refreshment, edification, and surprise. Although anthologies sometimes get a bad rap among academics, as creator and host of PBS’s anthology-style Poetry in America television series (from the archives of which come the videos embedded in this article online), I cherish the anthology format for the diversity of materials it gathers, and for how it nurtures a sophisticated kind of understanding that passes through pleasure into respect. The most popular anthologies are substantial harvests, promising inexhaustibility. In anthologies, as Young ’92 writes, we find the poems that we “pass around, carry in our memory, and literally inscribe in stone.”
POETRY’S CUMULATIVE, as well as collective, uses, and, indeed, the importance of the cumulative to the collective, are both vital to Young, and so he naturally invokes his predecessor, James Weldon Johnson, who, in 1922 compiled The Book of American Negro Poetry, the first important anthology of Black poetry. In the preface, Johnson asserted that “the final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.” Of course, Johnson’s community then was deprived of nearly all tools for civic participation, and the work of forging and preserving peoplehood had to be carried forward by cultural forms—especially those, like the spiritual, emerging straight from the experience of slavery. Johnson’s own predecessors saw the importance of these forms. Writing in 1845 about those still enslaved, Frederick Douglass identified these songs as more powerfully expressive than “whole volumes of philosophy,” and in 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois, A.B. 1890, Ph.D. ’95, went further, identifying the spiritual as “the sole American music…the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.” He staked not only Black futures, but the entirety of America’s future, on the resources of that song, a “gift” that people give their nation, a touchstone of moral and aesthetic value. https://player.vimeo.com/video/569572835?autopause=1&autoplay=0&badge=1&byline=1&loop=0&portrait=1&autopause=1&fullscreen=1
Opera singer Davóne Tines ’09 performs the spiritual, “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel”
Courtesy of Poetry in America/poetryinamerica.org
Young’s book naturally opens, then, with a section called “Bury Me in A Free Land,” featuring Phillis Wheatley’s poems composed for public occasions. Wheatley’s mastery of Homer, Virgil, British neoclassical verse, and the doctrines of Congregational Christianity led to invitations to address students at Harvard and to read and publish her poems in Britain. In “To the University of Cambridge, in New-England,” Wheatley had adjured students to “Improve your privileges while they stay,” but she risked the greatest of these—to remain in Britain as a free person—to return to America, lending her voice—including her incisive, if necessarily veiled, critique—to the emerging language of independence. In “To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” Wheatley minced no words in explaining her political ardor to British America’s colonial Secretary of State: “Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, / Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,” the answer is obvious: who knows better than one by “cruel fate…snatch’d” from home and family how to value “Freedom” and deplore “Tyranny”? Going perhaps even further in her poem of 1775 addressed to General George Washington, Wheatley subtly exposed glib revolutionary rhetoric to irony, even sarcasm. Surely it is not only the English King who will “Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.”
Du Bois would later name this critical perspective—afforded to Wheatley by her position outside—“double consciousness,” and this double consciousness is a through line in the Black American poetic tradition. As Du Bois argued, the very experience of exclusion and invisibility that weighs on psyches and on communities may also sharpen the tools of “second sight,” tools of irony, double entendre, and humorous release. From Wheatley to today’s Evie Shockley—who pulls back the veil on lynching by embedding the first line of the protest song “Strange Fruit,” acrostic style, in her poem “you can say that again, billie”—and on through the dozens of well-aimed poetic takedowns of racism, racists, and what they say, Young’s anthology abounds in poems whose devastating gravity is carved only more deeply by coruscating wit. https://player.vimeo.com/video/565750782?autopause=1&autoplay=0&badge=1&byline=1&loop=0&portrait=1&autopause=1&fullscreen=1
Evie Shockley reads her poem, “you can say that again, billie”
Courtesy of Poetry in America/poetryinamerica.org
American Poetry Today 