publish the then eighteen-year-old Phillis’s first collection of twenty-eight poems. Colonial whites rejected the proposal because Phillis was a slave, forcing her to seek a publisher in London.

Although her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” views slavery as a “mercy,” because it led her from “pagan” darkness to Christian light, she was never accepted as a poet on her own merits. However, in England, whose antislavery movement was stronger than that of the colonies, people of wealth and stature, such as the countess of Huntingdon and the earl of Dartmouth, embraced the poet. Lady Huntingdon, to whom Wheatley’s first volume, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), was dedicated, financed the publication and put Phillis’s picture on the frontispiece. Wheatley’s work was advertised as the product of a “sable muse,” and she was presented as a curiosity; the racism of the times made it impossible for her to be accepted as a poet who was as accomplished as her white contemporaries. That sentiment was made clear by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1777): “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic] but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.” Those sentiments are counterbalanced by a contemporary, Jupiter Hammon, also a slave poet, who in “An Address to Miss Phillis Whealy [sic]” praised her talent and influence as part of God’s providence:

While thousands tossed by the sea,  And others settled down,God’s tender mercy set thee free,  From dangers that come down.

Other early writers, such as George Moses Horton and Frances Watkins Harper, shared a common purpose in their antislavery poetry but rarely escaped the confines of religious and political themes acceptable to the abolitionist journals that published their work. The pressures on the African American poet became even more oppressive during the post-Reconstruction era as the South “reconquered” black people, in part by establishing control over the literary image of slavery. “Plantation Tradition” portrayed contented slaves and benevolent masters living in pastoral harmony. Paul Laurence Dunbar attained wide popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but only by acquiescing partially in the white audience’s stereotypical preconceptions concerning the proper style (slave dialect) and tones (humor or pathos) for poetry dealing with black characters.

Spearheading the first open poetic rebellion against imposed stereotypes, James Weldon Johnson, a close friend of Dunbar, mildly rejected Dunbar’s dialect poetry in his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), which issued a call for “a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without.” He explained: The newer Negro poets discard dialect; much of the subject matter which went into the making of traditional dialect poetry, ’possums, watermelons, etc., they have discarded altogether, at least, as poetical material. This tendency will, no doubt, be regretted by the majority of white readers; and indeed, it would be a distinct loss if the American Negro poets threw away this quaint and musical folk-speech as a medium of expression. And yet, after all, these poets are working through a problem not realized by the reader, and perhaps, by many of these poets themselves not realized consciously. They are trying to break away, not from the Negro dialect itself, but the limitations on the Negro dialect imposed by the fixing effects of long convention. The Negro in the United States has achieved or been placed in a certain artistic niche. When he is thought of artistically, it is as a happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo-picking being or as a more or less pathetic figure. The African American poet realizes that there are phases of Negro life in the United States which cannot be treated in the dialect either adequately or artistically. Take, for example, the phases rising out of life in Harlem, that most wonderful Negro city in the world. I do not deny that a Negro in a log cabin is more picturesque than a Negro in a Harlem flat, but the Negro is here, and he is part of a group growing everywhere in the country, a group whose ideals are becoming increasingly more vital than those of the traditionally artistic group, even if its members are less picturesque.

This call was heeded by the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, who took advantage of the development of large black population centers in the North during the Great Northern Migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North during the 1910’s and 1920’s. Where earlier poets lived either among largely illiterate slave populations or in white communities, the New Negroes—as Alain Locke, one of the first major black critics, labeled the writers of the movement—seized the opportunity to establish a sense of identity for a sizable black audience. Locke viewed the work of poets such as Claude McKay, Countée Cullen, and Jean Toomer as a clear indication that blacks were preparing for a full entry into the American cultural mainstream.

The support given Harlem Renaissance writers by such white artists and patrons as Carl Van Vechten and Nancy Cunard, however, considerably complicated the era’s achievement. On one hand, it appeared to herald the merging predicted by Locke. On the other, it pressured individual black writers to validate the exoticism frequently associated with black life by the white onlookers. Cullen’s “Heritage,” with its well-known refrain “What is Africa to me?,” reflects the sometimes arbitrarily enforced consciousness of Africa that pervades the decade. African American artists confronted with white statements such as Eugene O’Neill’s “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” could not help remaining acutely aware that they, like Wheatley 150 years earlier, were cast more as primitive curiosities than as sophisticated artists. However, an expansion in the American literary canon and evolution in African American literature could not be denied. It was celebrated in the March, 1925, issue of Van Vechten’s literary journal, Survey Graphic, guest-edited by Locke, who was then a Howard University philosophy professor.

The first flowering of Harlem as an artistic center came to an end with the Great Depression of the 1930’s, which redirected African American creative energies toward political concerns. The end of prosperity brought a return of hard times to the African American community and put an end to the relatively easy access to print for aspiring black writers.

If the Harlem Renaissance was largely concerned with questions of identity, the writing in Hughes’s A New Song (1938) and Brown’s Southern Road (1932) reflects a new concern with the purpose and direction of both black artists and black masses. Hughes had earlier addressed the caution in an essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” published in the June 23, 1926, issue of The Nation: The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. But in spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and the desires of some white editors we have an honest American Negro literature already with us.I am ashamed for the black poet who says, “I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet,” as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

Whereas many of the Harlem Renaissance writers had accepted Du Bois’s vision of a “talented tenth” who would lead the community out of cultural bondage, the 1930’s writers revitalized the African American tradition that perceived the source of power—poetic and political—in traditions of the “folk” community. Margaret Walker’s “For My People” expresses the ideal community “pulsing in our spirits and our blood.” This emphasis sometimes coincided or overlapped with the proletarian and leftist orientation that dominated African American fiction of the period. Again external events, this time World War II and the “sell-out” of blacks by the American Communist Party, brought an end to an artistic era.

The post-World War II period of African American poetry is more difficult to define in clear-cut terms. Many new poets became active, especially during the 1960’s and 1970’s, while poets such as Hughes and Brown, who had begun their careers earlier, continued as active forces. Nevertheless, it is generally accurate to refer to the period from the late 1940’s through the early 1960’s as one of universalism and integration, and that of the mid-1960’s through the mid-1970’s as one of self-assertion and separatism.

The return of prosperity, landmark court decisions, and the decline of legal segregation in the face of nonviolent protest movements created the feeling during the early postwar period that African American culture might finally be admitted into the American mainstream on an equal footing. Poets such as Brooks, who became the first black person to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry—for Annie Allen (1949)—and Hayden, who later became the first black Library of Congress poet, wrote poetry that was designed to communicate to all readers, regardless of their racial backgrounds and experiences. Neither poet abandoned black materials or traditions, but neither presented a surface texture that would present difficulties for an attentive white reader. Brooks’s poem “Mentors” typifies the dominant style of the “universalist” period. It can be read with equal validity as a meditation on death, a comment on the influence of artistic predecessors, a commitment to remember the suffering of the slave community, and a character study of a soldier returning home from war.

The universalist period also marked the first major assertion of modernism in black poetry. Although both Hughes and Toomer had earlier used modernist devices, neither was perceived as part of the mainstream of experimental writing, another manifestation of the critical ignorance that has haunted black poets since Wheatley. Hayden and Melvin B. Tolson adopted the radical prosody of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, while Baraka, Bob Kaufman, and Ted Joans joined white poets in New York and San Francisco in forging a multiplicity of postmodernist styles, many of them rooted in African American culture, especially jazz.

As in the 1920’s, however, the association of black poets with their white counterparts during the 1950’s and 1960’s generated mixed results. Again, numerous black writers believed that they were accepted primarily as exotics and that the reception of their work was racially biased. With the development of a strong Black Nationalist political movement, exemplified by Malcolm X (who was to become the subject of more poems by African American writers than any other individual), many of the universalist poets turned their attention to a poetry that would directly address the African American community’s concerns in a specifically black voice. LeRoi Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka and placed the term “Black Arts” in the forefront as an indicator of a new cultural aesthetic in the poem “Black Dada Nihilismus.” Brooks announced her conversion to a pan-Africanist philosophy, and community arts movements sprang up in cities throughout the United States.

A major movement of young black poets, variously referred to as the New Black Renaissance or the Black Arts movement, rejected involvement with Euro-American culture and sought to create a new black aesthetic that would provide a specifically black identity, purpose, and direction. Poets such as Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight perceived their work primarily in relation to a black audience, publishing with black houses such as Broadside Press of Detroit and Third World Press of Chicago. Most poets of the Black Arts movement remained active after the relative decline of the Black Nationalist impulse in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, but, with such notable exceptions as Madhubuti, their tone generally became more subdued. They have been joined in prominence by a group of poets, many of whom also began writing in the 1960’s, who have strong affinities with the modernist wing of the universalist period. If Madhubuti, Knight, and Giovanni are largely populist and political in sensibility, poets such as Michael S. Harper, Ai, and Jay Wright are more academic and aesthetic in orientation. Although their sensibilities differ markedly, all the poets asserted the strength of both the African American tradition and the individual voice.

A new pluralism began to emerge, testifying to the persistence of several basic values in the African American sensibility: survival, literacy, and freedom. The publication of the anthology Black Fire (1968), coedited by Baraka and Larry Neal, signaled the emergence of the new age. The shift in goals, simply put, was from the uplift of the black community to the transformation of American society. The collection made it clear that African American artists had moved beyond cultural navel gazing. The poets now defined themselves as a Third World people engaged in a global struggle. Neal’s essay “The Black Arts Movement” became the period’s manifesto: National and international affairs demand that we appraise the world in terms of our own interests. It is clear that the question of human survival is at the core of contemporary experience. The black artist must address himself to this reality in the strongest terms possible. Consequently, the Black Arts Movement is an ethical movement. Ethical, that is, from the viewpoint of the oppressed. And much of the oppression confronting the Third World and black America is directly traceable to the Euro-American cultural sensibility. This sensibility, antihuman in nature, has, until recently, dominated the psyches of most black artists and intellectuals. It must be destroyed before the black creative artist can have a meaningful role in the transformation of society.

Even highly idiosyncratic poets, such as Toomer in “Blue Meridian” and Ishmael Reed in his “neo-hoo-doo” poems, endorsed those basic values, all of which originated in the experience of slavery. In his book From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979), Robert B. Stepto identifies the central heroic figure of the African American tradition as the “articulate survivor,” who completes a symbolic ascent from slavery to a limited freedom, and the “articulate kinsman,” who completes a symbolic immersion into his cultural roots. The articulate survivor must attain “literacy” as defined by the dominant white society; the articulate kinsman must attain “tribal literacy” as defined by the black community.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the American Civil Rights and subsequent Black Power movements breathed life into human rights struggles throughout the world. Poets in other parts of the African world began to be heard in the United States during the 1970’s, which gave evidence that black bids for survival, literacy, and freedom were indeed universal. Derek Walcott of St. Lucia, South African Dennis Brutus, and Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka were among the most important voices.

Walcott, like McKay a Jamaican, showed a reverence for the native Caribbean cultures. Another theme in his early work was outrage at the injustices of colonial rule. Beginning with The Gulf, and Other Poems (1969), the poet begins to grapple with ideological and political questions. The strength of the reflection grows in Sea Grapes (1976) and comes to full potency in The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979).

Brutus’s first volume of poems, Sirens, Knuckles, Boots (1963), was published while he was doing an eighteen-month stretch on Robben Island, apartheid South Africa’s most infamous jail. The equivalent of Alcatraz, it was considered escape-proof because of the water that separated its inmates from the mainland. After release in 1965, Brutus was exiled to London. The poet joined the Northwestern University English faculty in 1970. Three years later, A Simple Lust detailed for American audiences the horror of South African prisons and apartheid’s injustices. The collection was also influenced by medieval European sensibilities and images. In the first poem of the collection, Brutus speaks in the voice of a troubadour who fights for his beloved against social injustice and betrayal. Even though outwardly European, the poem reverberates the sense of the heroic found in many American-born black writers’ works.

Like these Caribbean and South African counterparts, American poets of African descent made reference to, but transformed, European influences. Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” and Mari Evans’s “Vive Noir!” convey the drama of knighthood’s quests against an unjust society through plain language and images drawn from black environments. The works also toss aside traditional notions of grammar, spelling, and punctuation as a means to emphasize the rejection of conventional European sensibilities. Evans, for example, sick of the language of oppressors as much as the slums of inner cities, asserts she is

weary        of exhausted lands        sagging privies        saying yessuh yessah        yesSIR        in an assortment        of geographical dialects

The Black Arts movement faded in the mid-1970’s, without changing the world or stabilizing the growth it gave to African American consciousness. New Orleans poet Kalamu ya Salaam, in an essay in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), traced the beginning of the swan song to 1974: As the movement reeled from the combination of external and internal disruption, commercialization and capitalist co-option delivered the coup de grace. President Richard Nixon’s strategy of pushing Black capitalism as a response to Black Power epitomized mainstream co-option. As major film, record, book and magazine publishers identified the most salable artists, the Black Arts movement’s already fragile independent economic base was totally undermined.

As in the 1930’s, after the Harlem Renaissance subsided most of the independent publications, public forums, and other outlets for African American cultural expression had evaporated. Lotus Press and Broadside Press in Detroit and Third World Press in Chicago would continue to create outlets for excellent literature. White-owned book companies and magazines shifted focus to the movements for women’s equality and against the Vietnam War. That set the stage for the emergence of Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and Yusef Komunyakaa.

Lorde’s The Black Unicorn (1978) used African symbols and myths to explore the dimensions within her existence. Adrienne Rich acknowledged the volume as a kind of declaration of independence: “Refusing to be circumscribed by any single identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary.” In an interview with editor Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work (1983), Lorde averred the Black Arts movement’s stress on representation of the global experience of blacks and the oppressed. Tossing aside previous notions that true African American art is political at its core, she sketched a vision of poetry as a reflection of the personal: Black men have come to believe to their detriment that you have no validity unless you’re “global,” as opposed to personal. Yet our real power comes from the personal; our real insights about living come from the deep knowledge within us that arises from our feelings. Our thoughts are shaped by our tutoring. We were tutored to function in a structure that already existed but that does not function for our good. Our feelings are our most genuine path to knowledge. Men have been taught to deal only with what they understand. This is what they respect. They know that somewhere feeling and knowledge are important, so they keep women around to do their feeling for them, like ants do aphids.

The African American poets who rose in prominence during the 1980’s employed stylistic traditions that stretched back to Hughes and other Harlem Renaissance writers. The themes of survival and freedom remained pronounced in their works. The major difference was that, instead of grappling with outside forces, they confronted their nightmares.

Komunyakaa took on Vietnam. The Bogalusa, Louisiana, native won a Bronze Star for his service during the war as a writer and editor of the military newspaper The Southern Cross. His poem “Facing It,” which reflects on a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., exposes the war as a personal bad dream: “My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of the night slanted against the morning.” The poet becomes the black granite slab and the archetype of the tens of thousands of visitors. As the poem unfolds, it becomes clear that the conflict is a ghost that will haunt every American for generations.

In September, 1994, the largest gathering of black poets since the end of the Black Arts period was held in Harrisonburg, Virginia, at James Madison University. Thirty of the top black poets since the 1960’s—old voices such as Baraka, Madhubuti, Sanchez, Giovanni, and Evans, and new voices such as E. Ethelbert Miller and Toi Derricotte—came together with more than 250 scholars, reporters, and critics. According to a report in The Washington Post (October 1), the one subject none of the writers wanted to discuss was what qualities set African American poetry apart from the mainstream. The reporter said that the poets “hate the question, because it reminds them of days when black poetry was relegated to the ’Negro’ section of anthologies.” However, each of these poets was living with the deep awareness that African American poets were still not equal members of an elitist literary establishment.

Literacy, frequently illegal under the slave codes, both increases the chance of survival and makes freedom meaningful. Tribal literacy protects the individual’s racial identity against submersion in a society perceived as inhumane and corrupt. “The literature of an oppressed people is the conscience of man,” wrote Lance Jeffers in an essay printed in the January, 1971, issue of the journal Black Scholar: Nowhere is this seen with more intense clarity than the literature of Afroamerica. An essential element of Afroamerican literature is that the literature as a whole—not the work of occasional authors—is a movement against concrete wickedness. The cry for freedom and the protest against injustice are a cry for the birth of the New Man, a testament to the Unknown World (glory) to be discovered, to be created by man.

To a large extent, black poets writing in traditional forms established their literacy as part of a survival strategy in the white literary world. Those concerned with developing black forms demonstrate their respect for, and kinship with, the culturally literate African American community.

Against this complex of values and pressures, folk traditions have assumed a central importance in the development of the African American sensibility. Embodying the “tribal” wisdom concerning survival tactics and the meaning of freedom, they provide both formal and thematic inspiration for many black poets. African American poets have become extremely adept at manipulating various masks. Originating with the trickster figures of African folklore and African American heroes such as Brer Rabbit, these masks provide survival strategies based on intellectual, rather than physical, strength.

Existing in a situation during slavery in which open rebellion could easily result in death, the slave community capitalized on the intimate knowledge of white psychology encouraged by the need to anticipate the master’s wishes. The white community, conditioned not to see or take into account black needs and desires, possessed no equivalent knowledge of black psychology. Lacking knowledge, whites typically turned to comfortable stereotypes—the loyal mammy, the singing darkie, the tragic mulatto, the black beast—for their interpretation of black behavior. The observant slave found it both easy and rewarding to manipulate white perceptions of reality by appearing to correspond to a stereotypical role while quietly maneuvering for either personal or community gain. The nature of the mask, which exploits a phenomenon of double consciousness by controlling the discrepancy between black and white perspectives, is such that the true goal must always remain hidden from the white viewer, who must always feel that he is making the “real” decisions. Brer Rabbit asks not to be thrown in the briar patch; he will be allowed to escape, however, only if Brer Bear, the symbolic white man, believes that Brer Rabbit’s mask is his true face.

This folk tradition of masking adds a specifically African American dimension to the standard poetic manipulation of persona. African American poets frequently adopt personas that, when viewed by white audiences, seem transparent incarnations of familiar stereotypes. Dunbar’s dialect poetry and Hughes’s Harlem street poems, for example, have been both accepted and dismissed by white readers as straightforward, realistic portraits of black life. An awareness of the complex ironies inherent in the African American folk traditions on which each drew, however, uncovers increasingly complex levels of awareness in their work. Dunbar’s melodious dialect songs of plantation life contrast sharply with his complaint against a world that forced him to sing “a jingle in a broken tongue.” Similarly, his classic poem “We Wear the Mask” expresses the anguish of a people forced to adopt evasive presentations of self in a nation theoretically committed to pluralism and self-fulfillment. Less agonized than Dunbar, Hughes manipulates the surfaces of his poems, offering and refusing stereotypical images with dazzling speed. “Dream Boogie” first connects the image of the “dream deferred” with the marching feet of an army of the dispossessed, only to resume the mask of the smiling darkie in the sardonic concluding lines:

What did I say?Sure,I’m happy!Take it away!Hey, pop!Re-bop!! Mop!Y-e-a-h!

The critical record gives strong evidence that Hughes is frequently taken at “face” value. His mask serves to affirm the existence of a black self in control of the rhythm of experience, as well as to satirize the limitations of the white perception.

Throughout the history of African American poetry, poets choosing to address the black political experience without intricate masks have been plagued by the assumption that their relevance was limited by their concentration on racial subject matter. Particularly in the twentieth century, a new stereotype—that of the “angry black” writer—has developed. The conditions of black life frequently do, in fact, generate anger and protest. African American poets, from Wheatley through Alberry Whitman in the late nineteenth century to Cullen and Giovanni, frequently protest against the oppression of blacks. McKay’s sonnet “If We Must Die” embodies the basic impulse of this tradition, concluding with the exhortation, “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/ Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Far from being limited by its origins in the African American experience, such poetry embraces a universal human drive for freedom. Winston Churchill quoted lines from the poem (ironically written partially in response to British exploitation of McKay’s native Jamaica) during the early days of World War II. The stereotype of the angry black, while based on a limited reality, becomes oppressive at precisely the point that it is confused with or substituted for the full human complexity of the individual poet. Giovanni, at times one of the angriest poets of the Black Arts movement, pinpoints the problem in her poem “Nikki-Rosa”: I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy.

The drive for freedom transcends any single tone or mode. While frequently connected with the protest against specific conditions limiting social, psychological, or artistic freedom, the impulse modifies a wide range of poetic voices. At one extreme, explicitly political poems such as Baraka’s “Black Art” call for “Poems that shoot/ guns.” Even Baraka’s less assertive poems, such as “For Hettie” or the more recent “Three Modes of History and Culture,” seek to envision a world free from oppression. At another extreme, the drive for freedom lends emotional power to “apolitical” poems such as Dunbar’s “Sympathy,” with its refrain, “I know why the caged bird sings.” Although the poem does not explicitly address racial issues, the intense feeling of entrapment certainly reflects Dunbar’s position as a black poet subject to the stereotypes of white society. Similar in theme, but more direct in confronting racial pressures, Cullen’s sonnet “Yet Do I Marvel,” a masterpiece of irony, accepts the apparent injustices of creation, concluding: “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing/ To make a poet black, and bid him sing.” Hughes’s “Mother to Son” and “I, Too,” with their determination to keep moving, reflect a more optimistic vision. Despite the hardships of life in a country that forces even the “beautiful” black man to “eat in the kitchen,” Hughes’s characters struggle successfully against despair. Significantly, many of Hughes’s poems are very popular in the Third World. “I, Too,” for example, has become a kind of anthem in Latin America, which honors Hughes as a major poet in the Walt Whitman tradition.

Whereas Hughes and Walker frequently treat freedom optimistically, Brown’s “Memphis Blues” provides a stark warning of the ultimate destruction awaiting a society that fails to live up to its ideals. McKay’s sonnet “America,” with its echoes of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” strikes a similar note, envisioning the nation’s “priceless treasures sinking in the sand.” Perhaps Hayden best embodies the basic impulse in his brilliant "Runagate Runagate," which employs a complex modernist voice to celebrate the mutually nourishing relationship between the anonymous fugitive slaves and the heroic figure of Harriet Tubman, who articulates and perpetuates their drive for freedom. Blending the voices of slavemasters, runaway slaves, the spirituals, and American mythology, Hayden weaves a tapestry that culminates in the insistent refrain, “Mean mean mean to be free.”

Hayden’s use of the anonymous voice of the runaway slave with the voice of the spirituals underscores both the drive for freedom and the nature of the individual hero who embodies the aspirations of the entire community. It exemplifies the importance of folk traditions as formal points of reference for the African American poetic sensibility.

Poets seeking to assert a specifically black voice within the context of the Euro-American mainstream repeatedly turn to the rhythms and imagery of folk forms such as spirituals and sermons. During the twentieth century, the blues and jazz assumed equal importance. As Stephen Henderson observes in Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973), these folk traditions provide both thematic and formal inspiration. Hayden’s “Homage to the Empress of the Blues,” Brown’s “Ma Rainey,” Brooks’s “Queen of the Blues,” and poems addressed to John Coltrane by Harper (“Dear John, Dear Coltrane,” “A Love Supreme”), Madhubuti (“Don’t Cry, Scream”), and Sanchez (“A Coltrane Poem”) are only a few of countless African American poems invoking black musicians as cultural heroes. Bluesmen such as Robert Johnson (who wrote such haunting lyrics as “Crossroads,” “Stones in My Passageway,” and “If I Had Possession over Judgement Day”) and singers such as Bessie Smith frequently assume the stature of folk heroes themselves. At their best they can legitimately be seen as true poets working with the vast reservoir of imagery inherent in African American folk life. Du Bois endorsed the idea by montaging passages of African American music with selections of Euro-American poetry at the start of each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Similarly, Johnson’s poem “O Black and Unknown Bards” credits the anonymous composers of the spirituals with a cultural achievement equivalent to that of Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner.

These folk and musical traditions have suggested a great range of poetic forms to African American poets. Johnson echoed the rhythms of black preaching in his powerful volume God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), which includes such classic “sermons” as “The Creation” and “Go Down Death—A Funeral Sermon.” Hughes and Brown used their intricate knowledge of black musical forms in structuring their poetry. Early in his career, Hughes was content simply to imitate the structure of the blues stanza in poems such as “Suicide.” As he matured, however, he developed more subtle strategies for capturing the blues impact in “The Weary Blues,” which establishes a dramatic frame for several blues stanzas, and “Song for Billie.” The latter mimics the subtle shifts in emphasis of the blues line by altering the order of prepositions in the stanza:

What can purge my heart    of the song    and the sadness?What can purge my heart    But the song    of the sadness?What can purge my heart    of the sadness    of the song?

The persona moves from a stance of distance to one of identification and acceptance of the blues feeling. In merging emotionally with the singer, he provides a paradigm for the ideal relationship between artist and audience in the African American tradition.

Brown’s blues poem “Ma Rainey” incorporates this call-and-response aspect of the blues experience into its frame story. Ma Rainey attains heroic stature because her voice and vision echo those of the audience that gathers from throughout the Mississippi Delta to hear its experience authenticated. Brown’s attempt to forge a voice that combines call and response points to what may be the central formal quest of African American poetry. Such an ideal voice seeks to inspire the community by providing a strong sense of identity, purpose, and direction. Simultaneously, it validates the individual experience of the poet by providing a sense of social connection in the face of what Ralph Ellison refers to as the “brutal experience” underlying the blues impulse. Both Ellison and Hughes, two of the most profound critics of the blues as a literary form, emphasize the mixture of tragic and comic worldviews in the blues. Hughes’s definition of the blues attitude as “laughing to keep from crying” accurately reflects the emotional complexity of much blues poetry.

Like the blues, jazz plays a significant formal role in African American poetry. Poets frequently attempt to capture jazz rhythms in their prosody. Ambiguous stress patterns and intricate internal rhyme schemes make Brooks’s “We Real Cool” and “The Blackstone Rangers” two of the most successful poems in this mode. Brown’s “Cabaret” and Hughes’s “Jazzonia” employ jazz rhythms to describe jazz performances. On occasion, poets such as Joans (“Jazz Must Be a Woman”) and Baraka (“Africa Africa Africa”) create “poems” that, like jazz charts, sketch a basic rhythmic or imagistic structure that provides a basis for improvisation during oral performance. Jazz may be most important to African American poetry, however, because of its implicit cultural pluralism. In his critical volume Shadow and Act (1964), Ellison suggests a profound affinity between the aesthetics of African American music and European American modernism: “At least as early as T. S. Eliot’s creation of a new aesthetic for poetry through the artful juxtapositioning of earlier styles, Louis Armstrong, way down the river in New Orleans, was working out a similar technique for jazz.” As Ellison suggests, jazz provides an indigenous source for an African American modernism incorporating voices from diverse cultural and intellectual sources. In effect, this enables the African American poet to transform the burden of double consciousness, as manifested in the traditions of masking and ironic voicing, into sources of aesthetic power.

Many of the masterworks of African American poetry, such as Hughes’s “Montage for a Dream Deferred,” Brooks’s “In the Mecca,” Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” and Jay Wright’s “Dimensions of History,” accomplish precisely this transformation. Choosing from the techniques and perceptions of both European American and African American traditions, these works incorporate the dreams and realities of the American tradition in all its diversity. Aware of the anguish resulting from external denial of self and heritage, the African American tradition recognizes the potential inherent in all fully lived experience. Hughes’s vision of individuals living out a multiplicity of dreams within the American Dream testifies to his profound respect and love for the dispossessed.

The blend of the spoken word, politics, and music in the 1970’s laid the foundations for rap music to become a major art form for social criticism. From Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” to Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” the rhymed critiques of life in America move beyond racial icons to indict anyone who turns away from the plight of the oppressed as the enemy. There is debate outside the community as to whether rappers are poets or song stylists. Even some successful African American writers look on the rap and hip-hop as clever wordplay, but lacking the discipline of traditional poetry. Nevertheless, anthologies edited by up-and-coming African American poets such as Kevin Powell and Clarence Gilyard suggest that the works of some of these artists deserve to be added to the American canon.

In 2008, when voters of all races chose an African American to be president of the United States, it could no longer be claimed that racism continued to block the achievement of the American democratic ideal. Though the people of the United States still had their flaws, and though economic and social injustices still existed, it was now evident that the dreams expressed more than sixty years before by one of America’s greatest poets, the late Margaret Walker, could at last come true: A new world was being born, a world for the lovers of freedom, a world that would be large enough for everyone.