[In the following essay, Long surveys Johnson 's poetic works, assessing his evolving notion of "the function of the poet."]

The verse output of James Weldon Johnson falls into four groups: lyrics in standard English, poems in the dialect tradition, folk-inspired free verse, and a long satirical poem. The first two groups are contemporary and were published in the volume Fifty Years and Other Poems (Boston, 1917). The prayer and seven Negro sermons of the third group constitute God's Trombones (New York, 1927). The last group is represented by the poem "St. Peter Relates An Incident of the Resurrection Day," privately printed in 1930, and republished with a selection of earlier poems in 1935.

The early poetry of Johnson belongs to the late nineteenth century tradition of sentimental poetry in so far as its techniques and verse forms are concerned, seldom rising above the mediocrity characteristic of American poetry in the period 1890-1910, during which it was written for the most part. In purpose, however, Johnson's early verse was a species of propaganda, designed sometimes overtly, sometimes obliquely, to advance to a reading public the merits and the grievances of blacks. In this sense the poetry of Johnson is an integral part of a coherent strain in the poetry of Afro-Americans beginning with Phillis Wheatley:

Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refined, and join th' angelic train.

(Phillis Wheatley, "On Being Brought from Africa to America")

More particularly, we may note the relationship of Johnson's early poetry to that of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, his much admired friend and contemporary. Though they were about the same age, Dunbar was by far the more precocious, and his virtuosity had an obvious impact on Johnson, though little of Dunbar's verse bears any obvious burden of racial protest, in spite of the real personal suffering Dunbar underwent because of misunderstanding and neglect that he ascribed to his color.

Another factor of importance in the early verse of Johnson is his composition of verses to be set to music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson; the search for euphony and piquancy and the use of devices such as internal rhyme betrays the hand of the librettist.

The division of Johnson's poetry into standard lyrics and dialect verse, as in the case of Dunbar's poetry, reflects a self-conscious distinction made by the author himself. Johnson's first collection of his poetry, which appeared eleven years after Dunbar's death, presents forty-eight standard poems, followed by a segregated group of sixteen "Jingles and Croons." The dialect poems reflect of course a literary tradition of their own since in point of fact the themes and forms of such dialect poetry as was written by Dunbar and Johnson and many others reflect no tradition of the folk who used "dialect." In point of fact, it is useful to remember that the dialect poets learned mainly from their predecessors and employ for the most part uniform grammatical and orthographic conventions which suggest that they did not consciously seek to represent any individual or regional dialect. Johnson himself gives a brief account of the dialect literary tradition in his introductions to Dunbar and other dialect poets in The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York, 1931).

One of Johnson's dialect poems, because of its popular musical setting, is widely known and thought by many to be a genuine folk-product. The low-key sentimentality of "Sence You Went Away" is nevertheless that of the stage and not of real life. The last stanza will illustrate the point:

The other dialect poems in Johnson's first collection which should be classified among the "croons" are "My Lady's Lips Are Like De Honey," "Nobody's Lookin' But de Owl and de Moon," "You's Sweet to Yo' Mammy Jes de Same," "A Banjo Song." The titles are sufficiently indicative of their range and content. The "jingles" are frequently in the form of dramatic monologue, and while they (partly because of their later publication), have never become platform rivals to Dunbar's monologues, "Tunk (A Lecture on Modern Education)" and "The Rivals" can challenge comparison. The first is an exhortation to a truant schoolboy in which the light duties of white folks in offices are contrasted with the labors of black folks in the fields. The second is an old man's reminiscences of a crucial episode in the courtship of his wife. Both poems are written in long line rhyming couplets, Johnson's preferred verse form for his dialect verse, though a variety of stanza forms and rhyme schemes is employed, some with great versatility as the refrain from "Brer Rabbit, You's de Cutes' of 'Em All" illustrates:

"Brer Wolf am mighty cunnin',
Brer Fox am mighty sly,
Brer Terrapin an" Possum—kinder small;
Brer Lion's mighty vicious,
Brer B'ar he's sorter 'spi'cious,
Brer Rabbit, you's de eûtes' of 'em all.'

Of the standard poems of Johnson collected in Fifty Years, at least ten are more and less overtly on the race problem and among these are several of Johnson's most important poems. In contrast, the more generalized poems have hardly more than a passing interest except for a group of six poems "Down by the Carib Sea" in which Johnson treats images from his Latin-American experience as a U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Unfortunately, even here, conventionality of diction vitiates what might have been a poetic expression of enduring interest and value.

The group of ten race poems includes three of the "appeal" genre in which the black poet addresses his white compatriots and invites an improvement in their attitudes toward the blacks. This genre of Afro-American poetry runs from Phillis Wheatley to Gwendolyn Brooks, and may be said to have been already conventional when Johnson essayed it, though the sincerity with which he takes up the form cannot be doubted. In the short poem "To America" he asks:

How would you have us, as we are?
Or sinking 'neath the load we bear?

…..

Strong willing sinews in your wings?
Or tightening chains about your feet?

"O Southland" makes the poet implore

O Southland, fair Southland!
Then why do you cling
To an idle age and a musty page,
To a dead and useless thing.

And in "Fragment" he declares

See! In your very midst there dwell
Ten thousand blacks, a wedge
Forged in the furnaces of hell.…

The somewhat stern Calvinistic fervor of this poem suggests that the system is foredoomed to divine malediction.

Another genre in the race poems is that of pointing out the virtuous black and inviting sympathy and understanding. "The Black Mammy" and "The Color Sergeant" illustrate this genre. The theme of the Black Mammy who has nursed with tenderness the white child who may some day strike down her own black child has its own kind of immortality, combining as it does the mawkishness of mother love with America's quaint racial customs. "The Color Sergeant" is based on a real incident in the Spanish-American War and may be said to prefigure the Dorie Miller and similar poems of succeeding wars.

A lynching poem is called "Brothers" and is a stilted dramatic exchange between a lynch victim and the mob who burn him alive. The division of objects from the ashes is intended perhaps to recall the casting of lots for Christ's clothes:

"You take that bone, and you this tooth, the chain—
Let us divide its links; this skull, of course
In fair division, to the leader comes."

Still another poem which I classify as a race poem because of its obvious symbolism and because Johnson places it at the end of that group in the arrangement of the poems in Fifty Years could be read simply as a poem of ghostly circumstance. "The White Witch" describes a beauteous apparition who lures young men to their death. The poem's progenitors are the Romantic literary ballads. It is possible that Johnson had heard of the Jamaican ghost legend of the White Witch of Rose Hall, but there is no obvious patterning of his scenario on the legend.

In two of the race poems Johnson addresses black people specifically. One of these is the famous ode to the dead creators of the spirituals, "O Black and Unknown Bards." The harmony and dignity of the poem are fully deserving of the praise it has received. The poet marvels continually:

There is a wide, wide wonder in it all,
That from degraded rest and service toil
The fiery spirit of the seer should call
These simple children of the sun and soil.

But his conclusion seems timid and apologetic,

You sang far better than you knew; the songs
That for your listeners' hungry hearts sufficed
Still live,—but more than this to you belongs:
You sang a race from wood and stone to Christ.

The bulk of the poems written by Johnson which fall into the two categories just discussed were written before 1910. The poem which serves as the title poem to his first collection is itself a commemorative poem written in 1912 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The poem begins with an apostrophe to his fellow blacks:

O brothers mine, today we stand
Where half a century sweeps our ken.…

He then invokes the scene of the first blacks arriving in Jamestown in 1619. And from these few (aided, as the poet does not note, by the energetic exploitation of the slave trade) have come a race "ten million strong / An upward, onward marching host." He goes on to declare

This land is ours by right of birth,
This land is ours by right of toil;
We helped to turn its virgin earth,
Our sweat is in its fruitful soil.

He cites the labors of blacks and their frequent defense of the flag. He observes that despite these things blacks are maltreated and persecuted, but he urges

Courage! Look out, beyond, and see
The far horizon's beckoning span!
Faith in your God-known destiny!
We are a part of some great plan.

And the poem closes with expression of faith in God's intentions for the best. The poem is in twenty-six octosyllabic quatrains, rhyming a ba a b, in Fifty Years and Other Poems. Johnson abridged it to twenty stanzas for its appearance in The Book of American Negro Poetry. In the 1935 collection it appears as a poem of twenty-four stanzas, with a prefatory note.

One poem, related in tone and character to "Fifty Years," written in 1900, was not included in Fifty Years and Other Poems, but was included in the 1935 collection. This is the famous song lyric "Lift Every Voice and Sing," known far and wide as the "Negro National Anthem." Its heroic language, fully sustained by the harmonies of J. Rosamond Johnson, have played a role in the life of black America that no patriotic song could have fulfilled.

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

The second decade of the twentieth century was a period of innovation and change in American poetry. The establishment of Poetry Magazine, the Imagist manifesto, the appearance of Frost, Masters, Sandburg, Lindsay and Pound all bespeak the new spirit. The annual anthologies of Magazine verse edited by William Stanley Braithwaite beginning in 1913 which were one of the chief forums of the new spirit despite Braithwaite's own conservatism were surely well-perused by his friend James Weldon Johnson. Accordingly, it is not surprising to find a sudden modification in Johnson's poetic practice develop during this decade, for his poem "The Creation" precedes by almost a decade its publication with companion pieces in God's Trombones in 1927. He recounts his immediate inspiration for "The Creation" in the Preface to God's Trombones:

… He [a rural black preacher] strode the pulpit up and down in what was actually a very rhythmic dance, and he brought into play the full gamut of his wonderful voice.… He intoned, he moaned, he pleaded—he blared, he crashed, he thundered. I sat fascinated; and more, I was, perhaps against my will, deeply moved; the emotional effect upon me was irresistible. Before he had finished I took a slip of paper and somewhat surreptitiously jotted down some ideas for the first poem, "The Creation."

"The Creation" was conceived, as it were, in the heat of the moment. Only gradually did Johnson develop the series of poems which constitute the seven sermons and the opening prayer of God's Trombones. The principles he employed in writing these poems, based closely on the practice of the folk preacher, are explained in the Preface. He explains why he did not write them in dialect (in the sense of an attempted indication of folk speech):

First, although the dialect is the exact instrument for voicing certain traditional phases of Negro life, it is, and perhaps by that very exactness, a quite limited instrument. Indeed, it is an instrument with but two complete stops, pathos and humor. This limitation is not due to any defect of the dialect as dialect, but to the mould of convention in which Negro dialect in the United States has been set, to the fixing effects of its long association with the Negro only as a happy-go-lucky or a forlorn figure.…

The second part of my reason for not writing these poems in dialect is the weightier. The old-time Negro preachers, though they actually used dialect in their ordinary intercourse, stepped out from its narrow confines when they preached. They were all saturated with the sublime phraseology of the Hebrew prophets and steeped in the idioms of King James English, so when they preached and warmed to their work they spoke another language, a language far removed from traditional Negro dialect. It was really a fusion of Negro idioms with Bible English; and in this there may have been, after all, some kinship with the innate grandiloquence of their old African tongues. To place in the mouths of the talented old-time Negro preachers a language that is a literary imitation of Mississippi cotton-field dialect is sheer burlesque.

Johnson says in the Preface that "the old-time Negro preacher is rapidly passing." Nothing could have been further from the truth. "Old-time" Negro preaching is not only fully present in 1971 in large churches as well as in store-front meeting rooms, but its eloquence has dominated political forums and civil rights meetings, sometimes to the exclusion of action. This eloquence underlies much of the prose of Ellison and Baldwin as well as that of many writers of the sixties.

The medium Johnson chose for the sermon poems is a cadenced free verse which very effectively reflects the rhythmical speech of the folk preacher. Johnson uses the dash to indicate "a certain sort of pause that is marked by a quick intaking and an audible expulsion of the breath.…" The arrangement of prayer and sermons in God's Trombones is

Listen, Lord—A Prayer
The Creation

The Prodigal Son
Go Down Death—A Funeral Sermon
Noah Built the Ark
The Crucifixion
Let My People Go
The Judgment Day.

"Listen, Lord," "The Creation," "Go Down Death," and "The Crucifixion" are generally of a more exalted interest than the other pieces, but all of them capture effectively the imagery, the intensity, the sly humor, and the hypnotic grandeur of the black sermon tradition. In "Listen, Lord" the blessing of God is invoked on the preacher in these terms

Put his eye to the telescope of eternity,
And let him look upon the paper walls of time.
Lord, turpentine his imagination,
Put perpetual motion in his arms,
Fill him full of the dynamite of thy power,
Anoint him all over with the oil of thy salvation,
And set his tongue on fire.

The actual events of awful moments are iterated in "The Crucifixion":

Jesus, my lamb-like Jesus,
Shivering as the nails go through his feet.
Jesus, my darling Jesus,
Groaning as the Roman spear plunged in his side;
Jesus, my darling Jesus,
Groaning as the blood came spurting from his wound.
Oh, look how they done my Jesus.

In "Noah Built the Ark" Satan is depicted with familiarity:

Then pretty soon along came Satan.
Old Satan came like a snake in the grass
To try out his tricks on the woman.
I imagine I can see Old Satan now
A-sidling up to the woman.
I imagine the first word Satan said was:
Eve, you're surely good looking.

After the story of the exodus is told in "Let My People Go" the preacher concludes with a magnificent coda:

Listen!—Listen!
All you sons of Pharaoh.
Who do you think can hold God's people
When the Lord God himself has said,
Let my people go?

The general technique developed by Johnson for God's Trombones constitutes a giant leap from his archaizing early poetry. Unfortunately the many pressures of his life as a public man and as a cultural mentor prevented him from utilizing his new freedom in a substantial body of work, though the continuing popularity of God's Trombones since its initial publication and its appeal to a broad stratum of readers have given this slim volume an importance in American poetry enjoyed by few other works of comparable scope.

A special irony of Johnson's creations is that they have often themselves reentered the folk stream they were intended to fix and commemorate, and have in turn sustained through countless recitations the continuation of a living tradition.

While Johnson expressed no overt ideological objectives concerning his verse sermons, it is significant that they were not offered either in the spirit of his early standard verse or of his "jingles and croons." The sermons are an assertion of black pride and black dignity with no reference to perspectives and standards of others.

A further direction in his poetic practice was revealed by Johnson in the long satirical poem "St. Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day." Johnson describes the genesis of the poem in the third person in his 1935 foreword:

… The title poem of this volume was originally printed in 1930, in an edition of 200 copies for private distribution. In the summer of that year the author was busy on the manuscript of a book. He read one morning in the newspaper that the United States government was sending a contingent of gold-star mothers to France to visit the graves of their soldier sons buried there; and that the Negro gold-star mothers would not be allowed to sail on the same ship with the white goldstar mothers, but would be sent over on a second and second-class vessel. He threw aside the manuscript on which he was working and did not take it up again until he had finished the poem, "Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day."

The poem, arranged in six sections of varying length, presents St. Peter, long after Resurrection Day, recounting to some of the heavently host the unburying of the Unknown Soldier. The discovery that the man who had been honored by generations of Americans in his magnificent tomb was black is the O'Henryesque reversal in the poem. The limpidity of Johnson's handling of the theme in quatrains of rhyming couplets, a favorite meter for narration and monologue with him in his earlier verse, is illustrated by his description of the reaction to the Klan's suggestion that the soldier be reburied:

The scheme involved within the Klan's suggestion Gave rise to a rather nice metaphysical question: Could he be forced again through death's dark portal, Since now his body and soul were both immortal?

The publication of "St. Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day" in 1935 provided the occasion for Johnson to issue a new selection of his poems. Thirtyseven poems, including eight in dialect, from Fifty Years and Other Poems were reprinted, as well as "Lift Every Voice and Sing." Four additional poems were a sonnet "My City," a celebration of Manhattan, and "If I were Paris," a lyric of twelve lines, both in his earlier manner; a free-verse poem "A Poet to His Baby Son" written in a later colloquial manner; and a translation from the Cuban poet Placido, "Mother, Farewell!" a sonnet which Johnson had published in the 1922 edition of The Book of American Negro Poetry and again in the 1931 revised edition. Fifty Years and Other Poems had included the translation of another poem of Placido.

An untitled envoy, the last poem in Fifty Years and Other Poems, contains the following lines, central to its thought:

… if injustice, brutishness and wrong
Should make a blasting trumpet of my song;
O God, give beauty and strength—truth to my words.…

Eighteen years later a revised and now titled "Envoy" closes the second and final selection of Johnson poems:

… if injustice, brutishness, and wrong
Stir me to make a weapon of my song;
O God, give beauty, truth, strength to my words.

In this revision two important points are presented in capsule. Johnson continued to revise and modify his poems, a fact which should be taken account of in any future study devoted primarily to the texts. The second point is that Johnson's conception of the function of the poet, the black poet particularly, had evolved from the apologetic tradition, in which racial justice is implored and in which an attempt to show the worthiness of blacks is made by showing their conformism, to a militant posture, in which the poet uses his talent as a weapon with concern only for beauty, truth and strength. In both phases, Johnson was a poet who recognized the propriety of propaganda. His earlier concern was with influencing opinion ("a blasting trumpet"); his later concern was asserting the verities, with a willingness "to make a weapon of my song."