Jupiter Hammon, the first African American to publish poetry in the United States, was born on this day in Long Island, New York, in 1711. In honor of Hammon’s birth, today is Black Poetry Day.
All week I will be featuring the work and biographies of a female poets from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Today, I am printing excerpts (and featuring a poem) from an essay on Poets.org.
Double-Bind: Three Women of the Harlem Renaissance
by Anthony Walton
The women poets of the Harlem Renaissance faced one of the classic American double-binds: they were black, and they were female, during an epoch when the building of an artistic career for anyone of either of those identities was a considerable challenge. To the general reader, the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance is more than likely embodied in the work of two or three writers: Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and of course, Langston Hughes; Jean Toomer‘s beautiful poems from Cane might also be added to that list. But behind these names, and such signal poems as “Incident,” “If We Must Die,” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” lies another body of work that is also worth of study, acclaim, and respect.
This work includes poems of homespun wit and sophisticated irony; of family, politics, and existential unease; of love, betrayal, and heartache; of racial pride and world-weariness. These poets were, given their true prospects, painfully ambitious. In addition, they carried the burdens of “the race”: self-consciously creating a literature for a people only recently out of slavery; not writing anything that could be construed as revealing, embarrassing or humiliating, not only to African Americans as a group and themselves as individuals, nor anything that deviated from the constrained Victorian social patterns in which all women in our culture found themselves living at that time; and, perhaps most crushing of all, being obligated to write in ways that “proved” blacks and black women were as literate and articulate, as capable of education and cultivation, as whites.
These burdens grew out of the expectations of the Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, as it is also known. As Alain Locke, one of the pioneering theorists of the movement, wrote in his seminal essay “The New Negro,” the writers of the Renaissance would join musicians (Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson,) actors and dancers (Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker), and visual artists (Aaron Douglas and May Howard Jackson) in educating the world in true African American capability: “The especially cultural recognition that they win should in turn prove the key to that reevaluation of the Negro which must precede or accompany any considerable further benefit of race relationships.”
Things did not quite work out that way: the Renaissance, splintering from its own success and losing momentum as white patrons and curiosity seekers moved on to newer fashions, collapsed completely in the face of the Depression. The lives and careers of poets such as Jessie Redmon Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Georgia Douglas Johnson have, in the history that has been written since, been relegated to the precincts of specialists in African American literature. Yet, in the face of what must have been corrosive psychic costs, in terms of the circumscription of their true ambitions and selves, the achievements of Fauset, Bennett, Johnson, the other women poets of the Harlem Renaissance stand among the most heroic in the twentieth century American poetry. (read more at Poets.org)
The Heart of a Woman by Georgia Douglas Johnson