Lee, Naomi Madgett, Sterling Plumpp, and Lance Jeffers are only a few of the widely read contemporary black poets whose origins are southern. The focus shifted from the rural South to the urban North with southern settings, themes, and female personae being replaced by northern settings, themes, and male personae. During the 1960s and after, the poetry of southern blacks lost many of its more obvious regional qualities and merged with the larger body of black American poetry. Tolson became one of the best American poets of his time.Īs the movement toward a black aesthetic gained impetus in the 1960s, southern black writers, many of them poets, were again among the leaders. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Walker and Tolson exhibited in their poetry an intricate blending of the Euro-American and Afro-American heritages. A native of the District of Columbia, Sterling Brown in his Southern Road (1932) captured the spirit of the southern black folk character in the language, form, and personae of his poetry. Tolson were among black America's leading poets between the end of the Harlem Renaissance and the 1960s. Southerners Sterling Brown, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, and Melvin B. In the decades following the Harlem Renaissance, southern blacks continued to be major influences on black American poetry. The lyricism of Jean Toomer's poetry and the intricate patterns of imagery drawn from nature by Anne Spencer revealed that a poetic voice originating from the black South could adopt the Euro-American literary heritage and yet remain relatively free of its constraints. Many southern black poets of the Harlem Renaissance also built their poetic canons with forms and themes not exclusively or predominantly black or southern. Black dialect gave way to black idiom, and poets made even more extensive uses of features from the southern black oral tradition. In the 1920s black poets' use of dialects became more refined as poetic form merged with content. Poets, novelists, and playwrights after the 1920s (blacks and whites) followed the example of Hughes, Johnson, and others of the Harlem Renaissance by deriving artistic inspiration from the social and cultural life of the black South. Choosing the black folk sermon as the embodiment of a southern black worldview and as an indigenous art form, Johnson elevated folk art to the level of high art. Johnson tapped the sacred side of the southern black experience. Grounding his poetic technique in musical forms whose origins were southern and black and which, to a large extent, had evolved from the religious orientation of southern blacks, Hughes used blues and jazz to shape the form and meaning of his poetry. Hughes tapped an essentially secular component of southern black life-its music. Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926) and James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) drew heavily from southern black folk culture and the experiences of the black masses within and outside the South. One wing of the Harlem Renaissance arts movement looked to the black South for aesthetic inspiration and artistic direction. Southern blacks emerged, though, as the dominant voices in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and thereafter they remained in the vanguard of black poets in America. Cotter, Sr., at times wrote skillfully about racial and nonracial topics in conventional poetic forms.īefore the 1920s the South produced few black poets who had mastered the art form on a level equal to that of blacks elsewhere in the country. Still others, like Harper, used these standard forms primarily to concentrate on issues germane to southern black life. Some poets, such as Horton, adopted standard Euro-American poetic techniques and seldom wrote about racial issues. Slave poet George Moses Horton and abolitionist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper were the most prominent southern black voices in antebellum poetry. Southern black poetry was basically undistinguished before the 1920s. Over the past century southern black literature has evolved from a relatively sparse body of writings, mainly imitative of Euro-American literary forms and thematically focused on the plight of blacks in the South, to a sophisticated literary canon whose forms and meanings coalesce to give it a distinct identity. From: Wilson, Charles Reagan, and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
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