[In the following review of St. Peter Relates an Incident, Rosenberg observes that Johnson's conservative poetic temperament undercuts the harsh political realities of his subject matter.]

The title poem [of Saint Peter Relates an Incident, Selected Poems] is the author's expression in satirical terms, of the indignation he felt on reading in the newspaper of a morning in 1930 that the U. S. government was sending a group of gold-star mothers to France to visit the graves of their sons slain in the World War, and that the Negro gold-star mothers would not be allowed to travel with the white, but would be sent over later on a second-class ship. The incident, related in Eternity by Saint Peter, deals with the discovery on Resurrection Day that the Unknown Soldier, buried in Washington, happens to be a Negro.

It is grievous to report that the outrageous act of public discrimination against his race which inspired Mr. Johnson to write his poem strikes very little fire in the poem itself. Naturally, the blurb on the book tries to capitalize on the genius of the Negro people by claiming for the poem "something of the simple charm of Negro lore." As a matter of fact, however, the Saint Peter poem, as well as the rest of the volume, is less typical of the poetry produced out of the labor, anguish, courage, and awakening consciousness of the Negro race in America, than of the literary products of the conservative upper-class nationalist of any race or nation. Mr. Johnson is a Negro poet only in the sense that he applies his academic art to the situation of the American Negro. So far as literary qualities are concerned, a conservative Chinese nationalist, a conservative Zionist, a conservative Hindu nationalist, a conservative celebrator of American accomplishment, all resemble Mr. Johnson in their comfortable idealization of nature-sentiments, their reliant appeals to abstract Justice, their self-solacing trust in an after-death rectification of what their people have suffered. Amid the most brutal assaults upon the lives and liberties of their beloved people, these patriots manage to remain aloft and dignified, the official mourners, the official voices of hope in the future. With respect to nationality, they exist as Chinese, Jews, Hindus, Americans; with respect to poetry, they are all one thing—academicians: an internationalism of mediocrity forever seeking to disguise itself under racial and geographic borderlines.

Whatever part it may play in the social and political progress of the people it aims to represent, the official gesture is irreconcilable with good poetry. The chemistry of interaction between experience, imagination, and language is completely unknown to the stencil-designer of monumental shadows of good will. When Mr. Johnson, in the poem called "Brothers—American Drama," gives an account of the burning alive of a member of his race, he does not say that the victim was lynched because he was a Negro—that would be too horrible; he is lynched because he is not a Negro at all but

The monstrous offspring of the monster, Sin,

a criminal, whom Mr. Johnson is careful to dissociate from

That docile, child-like, tender-hearted race
Which we have known three centuries.

And the only admonition he can give to the righteous mob which has "avenged" some "fiendish crime" are the dying man's last words,

Brothers in spirit, brothers in deed are we—

in short, an absurd application (Why "brothers in deed"?—did the victim lynch himself?—or did he lynch the mob?) of the apostolic slogan to be found in all idealistic versions of crime and punishment. Is this the speech of a Negro poet? Of any Negro in concrete imaginative contact with the ultimate dread and horror of the black man's history? Such a falsely conceived, slave-mongering piece of high-society propaganda, overlooking its lynch-condoning implications in order to raise the "problem" of mass-servitude to a metaphysical height, could only be constructed in the most wooden language imaginable. With its calculated juggling of old figures, it has the poetic and intellectual value of a false financial report.

Such being the condition of Mr. Johnson's talents, it is possible to respond favorably to his verses on two occasions only: when the great folk-song tradition of his people flows over his poetry, as in some of the dialect poems; and when it happens to fall within his philosophy to make a clear statement of fact: