American Negro Poetry

by Bontemps, Arna Wendell

• ISBN13: 9780809015641
• ISBN10: 0809015641
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-12-01
• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub

Summary

With 200,000 copies in print, this anthology has for decades been seen as a fundamental collection of African-American verse. Bontemps (1902-73), an important figure during and after the Harlem Renaissance, author of more than 25 novels, and longtime librarian at Fisk University, last revised this classic anthology just before his death, adding such crucial new voices as Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Bob Kaufman, among others. This edition, issued in 1996, reprints the poems in Bontemps's revised volume along with updated biographical notes. Nearly seventy poets are represented, their works indexed by both author and title. Arna Bontemps(1902-1973), produced more than twenty-five novels, anthologies, children's books, and histories of black life, including the novelGod Sends SundayandThe Story of the Negro. Bontemps's later years were spent at Fisk University as chief librarian and writer-in-residence. Chosen by the American Library Association as a Significant Adult Book for Young People With 200,000 copies in print, this anthology has been seen as a fundamental collection of African American verse for decades. Bontemps (1902-73), an important figure during and after the Harlem Renaissance, author of more than 25 novels, and longtime librarian at Fisk University, last revised this classic anthology just before his death, adding such crucial new voices as Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Bob Kaufman, among others. This edition, issued in 1996, reprints the poems in Bontemps's revised volume along with updated biographical notes. Nearly seventy poets are represented, their works indexed by both author and title. Including some 200 poems covering all the social, cultural, political, historical, and literary movements that defined the 20th century, this collection is essential for every reader interested in African American literature. This classic anthology, a favorite of students, scholars, and general readers for decades, spans three generations to offer some 200 poems composed by African Americans. "[A] vital, revealing collection."San Francisco Chronicle "[A] vital, revealing collection."San Francisco Chronicle "There is about [this] collection the aura of a profound an intelligent dignity."The Baltimore Sun "An interesting, absorbing anthology."Library Journal "[Bontemps's] most distinctive works are ringing affirmations of the human passion for freedom and the desire for social justice inherent in us all. Arnold Rampersad called him the conscience of his era and it could be fairly added that his tendency to fuse history and imagination represents his personal legacy to a collective memory."Charles L. James,The Oxford Companion to African American Literature(on the life and work of Arna Bontemps, editor ofAmerican Negro Poetry)

Author Biography

Arna Bontemps (1902-1973), produced more than twenty-five novels, anthologies, children's books, and histories of black life, including the novel God Sends Sunday and The Story of the Negro. Bontemps's later years were spent at Fisk University as chief librarian and writer-in-residence.

Table of Contents

Introduction

James Weldon Johnson
"O Black and Unknown Bards"
"Go Down Death (A Funeral Sermon)"

Paul Laurence Dunbar
"Dawn"
"Compensation"
"The Debt"
"Life"
"My Sort o' Man"
"The Party"
"A Song"
"Sympathy"
"We Wear the Mask"

William Stanley Braithwaite
"Rhapsody"
"Scintilla"

Angelina W. Grimké
"To Clarissa Scott Delany"
"The Black Finger"

Anne Spencer
"For Jim, Easter Eve"
"Lines to a Nasturtium (A lover muses)"
"Letter to My Sister"

Effie Lee Newsome
"Morning Light the Dew-Drief"

Georgia Douglas Johnson
"Common Dust"
"Trifle"
"The Poet Speaks"
"I Want to Die While You Love Me"
"Your World"
"Lovelight"
"Prejudice"
"Conquest"

Fenton Johnson
"The Daily Grind"
"The World Is a Mighty Ogre"
"A Negro Peddler's Song"
"The Old Repair Man"
"Counting"

Claude McKay
"The Tropics in New York"
"Outcast"
"St. Isaac's Church, Petrograd"
"Flame-Heart"
"If We Must Die"
"The White House"

Jean Toomer
"Georgia Dusk"
"Song of the Son"
"Brown River, Smile"

0Melvin B. Tolson
"Dark Symphony"

Frank Horne
"Kid Stuff"
"Notes Found Near a Suicide"
"To a Persistent Phantom"
"Symphony"

Marcus B. Christian
"McDonogh Day in New Orleans"
"Dialect Quatrain"

Sterling A. Brown
"Sister Lou"
"When de Saints Go Ma'chin' Home"

Clarissa Scott Delany
"Solace"

Langston Hughes
"Brass Spittons"
"Cross"
"Jazzonia"
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
"I, Too"
"Bound No'th Blues"
"Personal"
"Dream Variation"
"Mother to Son"
"Lenox Avenue Mural"
"Pennsylvania Station"
"I Dream a World"
"Without Benefit of Declaration"

Gwendolyn B. Bennett
"Hatred"
"Heritage"
"Sonnet I"
"Sonnet II"

Arna Bontemps
"A Black Man Talks of Reaping"
"Close Your Eyes!"
"The Day-Breakers"
"Golgotha Is a Mountain"
"Idolatry"
"Reconnaissance"
"Southern Mansion"
"Nocturne at Bethesda"

Countee Cullen
"Heritage (For Harold Jackman)"
"That Bright Chimeric Beast"
"Yet Do I Marvel"
"Four Epitaphs"
"Simon the Cyrenian Speaks"

Donald Jeffrey Hayes
"Appoggiatura"
"Benediction"
"Haven"
"Poet"
"Threnody"
"Alien"
"Pastourelle"

Jonathan Brooks
"The Resurrection"

Frank Marshall Davis
"Flowers of Darkness"
"Four Glimpses of Night"

Waring Cuney
"No Images"
"Threnody"
p0"Finis"

Helene Johnson
"Poem"
"The Road"
"Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem"
"Invocation"

Richard Wright
"Between the World and Me"
"Hokku Poems"

Charles Enoch Wheeler
"Adjuration"

Pauli Murray
"Without Name"
"Dark Testament"

Robert Hayden
"A Ballad of Remembrance"
"Witch Doctor"
"Middle Passage"
"Fredrick Douglas"
"Veracruz"

Dudley Randall
"Perspectives"
"I Loved You Once (From the Russian of Alexander Pushkin)"

Owen Dodson
"Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One"
"Drunken Lover"
"Sickle Pears (For Glidden Parker)"
"Hymn Written After Jeremiah Preached to Me in a Dream"
"Yardbird's Skull (For Charlie Parker)"
"Sailors on Leave"

Leslie M. Collins
"Stevedore"

Margaret Walker
"For My People"
"Molly Means"
"October Journey"

Frank Yerby
"The Fishes and the Poet's Hands"
"Weltschmerz"
"Wisdom"
"You Are a Part of Me"
"Calm After Storm"

Samuel Allen
"A Moment Please"
"To Satch"

Catherine Cater
"Here and Now"

Gwendolyn Brooks
"Flags"
"The Old-Marrieds"
"Piano After War"
"The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock, Fall, 1957"

Bruce McM. Wright
"The African Affair"

Alfred A. Duckett
"Sonnet"

Myron O'Higgins
"Sunset Horn"

M. Carl Holman
"And on This Shore"
"Letter Across Doubt and Distance"
"Notes for a Movie Script"
"Song"

Yvonne Gregory
"Christmas Lullaby for a New-Born"

Margaret Danner
"Far From Africa: Four Poems"
"The Slave and the Iron Lace"

G. C. Oden
"A Private Letter to Brazil"
"The Carousel"
"' . . . As When Emotion Too Far Exceeds Its Cause'"
"The Map"

Mari E. Evans
"The Rebel"
"When in Rome"
"The Emancipation of George-Hector (a colored turtle)"

Oliver Pitcher
"Raison d'Etre"

James P. Vaughn
"Four Questions Addressed to His Excellency, the Prime Minister"
"So?"

Russell Atkins
"At War"
"Irritable Song"
"It's Here In The"

Ted Jones
"Lester Young"
"Voice in the Crowd"

William Browne
"Harelm Sounds: Hallelujah Corner"

James A. Emanuel
"The Voyage of Jimmy Poo"
"The Treehouse"
"Get Up, Blues"

Conrad Kent Rivers
"Four Sheets to the Wind and a One-Way Ticket to France, 1933"
"To Richard Wright"

LeRoi Jones
"Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note"
"The Invention of Comics"
"As a Possible Lover"
"The End of Man Is His Beauty"

Clarence Major
"Celebrated Return"

Julia Fields
"No Time for Poetry"

Horace Julian Bond
"The Bishop of Atlanta: Ray Charles"

Carl Wendell Hines, Jr.
"Two Jazz Poems"

Bob Kaufman
"Cocoa Morning"
"I Have Folded My Sorrows"
"African Dream"
"Battle Report"
"Forget to Not"

ql
Richard A. Long
"Hearing James Brown at the Café des Nattes"
"Juan de Pareja"

Audre Lorde
"If You Come Softly"

Calvin C. Hernton
"Young Negro Poet"

Helen Armstead Johnson
"Affirmation"
"Philodendron"

Naomi Long Madgett
"Woman with Flower"

Lucille Clifton
"Good Times"

Larry Neal
"Malcolm X—An Autobiography"

Don L. Lee
"But He Was Cool"
"Assassination"
"Education"
"Stereo"

Nikki Giovanni
"My Poem"
"Nikki-Rosa"
"Knoxville, Tennessee"
"The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr."
"Kidnap Poem"
"A Robin's Poem"

Frank Lamont Phillips
"No Smiles"
"Genealogy"
"Maryuma"

Marvin Wyche, Jr.
"And She Was Bad"
"We Rainclouds"
"Leslie"
"Five Sense"

Biographical Notes

Index of Titles

Acknowledgments