Bontemps' poems [collected in Personals] make use of several recurring themes: the alien-and-exile allusions so often found in New Negro poetry; strong racial suggestiveness and applications; religious themes and imagery subtly used; and the theme of return to a former time, a former love, or a remembered place. On occasion he combines in a way common to lyrical writing the personal with the racial or the general. Many of these poems are protest poems; but the protest is oblique and suggestive rather than frontal. Over all of Bontemps' poetry there is a sad, brooding quality, a sombre "Il Penseroso" meditative cast. In Personals there are no obviously joyous or humorous pieces.

The most popular theme in these verses is that of return. There are seven poems dealing in some way with this subject. The one entitled "Return" has a double thrust, the coming back to an old love which takes on an atavistic coloring: "Darkness brings the jungle to our room: / the throb of rain is the throb of muffled drums. / … This is a night of love / retained from those lost nights our fathers slept in huts." There is definitely here the kind of alien-and-exile comparison found in these New Negro poems; the highest joy the lovers (real or imagined) can have is the remembered ancestral love in an idyllic Africa.

In a different way, "Southern Mansion" is also a return poem because for the speaker "The years go back with an iron clank…." Two waves of remembered sound come to him: music from the house and the clank of chains in the cotton field. Because of the latter, only ghosts and the poplars "standing there still as death" and symbolizing death—only they—remain.

"To a Young Girl Leaving the Hill Country" is a return poem with a Wordsworthian slant. The speaker tells the girl that she has ignored the hills of her native place, and she will therefore come back a bent old lady "to seek the girl she was in those familiar stones." He continues: "then perhaps you'll understand / just how it was you drew from them and they from you." For Bontemps, one seemingly finds his identity in a return to his remembered past. (p. 85)

What is this concern with the past—with old loves, old places, ghosts of yesterday? Is there for Bontemps … greater joy in the backward glance than in the living experience? Is he simply a late romanticist with a yen "For old unhappy far-off things, / And battles long ago"? The answer is not evident in these poems. Perhaps the answer is what each reader finds in them….

[In] "Nocturne at Bethesda," one finds the contemporary loss-of-faith theme joined with the alien-and-exile theme: "The golden days are gone … / And why do our black faces search the empty sky?" There is a suggestion here of a double loss for the black man "wandering in strange lands"—the loss of religion and of a homeland. If there is "a returning after death," the speaker tells us to "search for me / beneath the palms of Africa." In some respects this poem reminds one of Cullen's "Heritage," but as is characteristic of Bontemps, it is a much quieter poem than Cullen's masterpiece.

"Golgotha Is a Mountain," too, employs an atavistic theme. "Some pile of wreckage," we are told, is buried beneath each mountain. "There are mountains in Africa too. / Treasure is buried there," and black men are digging with their fingers for it. "I am one of them," the speaker admits. One day, however, he seems to say, I will crumble and make a mountain. "I think it will be Golgotha." One notes the joining of the personal religious thought with the racial. The return to one's ancestral roots is suggested, but, as in all of these poems, the black man's return is pointed out as being somehow different. In this particular poem there is a hint of future hope for the Negro…. There is also homage to the black man's strongest virtue: endurance.

In "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" one finds the closest approach to direct protest in these poems from Personals: "yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields / my brothers' sons are gathering stalk and root" whereas my children "feed on bitter fruit." This is the kind of muted protest expected of a controlled poet like Bontemps.

The poems of Arna Bontemps lack the clear, unambiguous statement of those of his contemporaries: McKay, Cullen, Hughes. There is modern obscurity in these verses, and the so-called meaning often eludes the reader. Their craftsmanship, however, is impressive. The reader somehow feels a certain rightness in Bontemps' lines, that what he has said could not be expressed otherwise. There is a quiet authority in these poems. (p. 86)

Bontemps' first novel, God Sends Sunday, was published in 1931…. Bontemps managed to get over a little of the spirit and atmosphere necessary to make the novel plausible. But the work is a young man's work. The touch of the beginner is everywhere apparent. For example, the author evidently did not feel up to the task of rendering Little Augie's decline from affluence and power to poverty-stricken old age, and he simply jumps to the last years…. It gives a picture of a segment of Negro life that no other novelist has touched. And though there is not much depth here, it is an entertaining and dramatic work….

Bontemps' second novel, Black Thunder …, is a much better book in every way than his first; in fact, it is perhaps the author's outstanding publication. (p. 87)

Black Thunder tells the story of the 1800 uprising led by Gabriel Prosser and it gives a convincing account of the actions and thinking of this heroic black. Although the account is fictional, it impresses the reader as being psychologically true, and that is the important thing in a work of this sort. Bontemps does not make Gabriel too brave or too clever. He describes him as a powerful black man with a gift for organization and leadership. He has no visions, is not unusually superstitious, and is not particularly religious. His driving force is a deep conviction that "anything what's equal to a grey squirrel wants to be free." Stubbornly loyal to his followers, he refuses to inform on them….

Unfortunately, Gabriel is developed so much better than the other characters in the work that we tend to forget them, especially the whites, both slave masters and sympathetic "Jacobins." But the story of Gabriel and his sexy girlfriend, Juba, of the house servants Ben and Pharoah who "sing" to the white folks, and of the other minor leaders of the insurrection is well told. Bontemps has a gift for storytelling and for making his characters talk convincingly. Moreover, he knew well the Virginia folk speech he utilized, and this gives a certain authority to his narration. Symbolically, the novel speaks for the modern Negro. One wonders why the present-day militants have not made better use of it in this respect. Incidentally, Bontemps' Gabriel impresses the Negro reader as being more authentic than William Styron's Nat Turner.

In his third novel, Drums at Dusk (1939), Bontemps again tries historical fiction, but the work suffers by comparison with the superior Black Thunder. A story of the uprising in Haiti, the one that Toussaint would eventually lead, Drums at Dusk is more a "costume piece" than an historical novel. (p. 88)

Drums at Dusk of a necessity deals with violence, but Bontemps really has no taste for violence, and he gives as little of it as possible in this work…. The action in Black Thunder was much more congenial to Bontemps' temperament because it concerns threatened rather than actual violence. (pp. 88-9)