African Americans -- Poetry; American poetry -- African American authors
Fenton Johnson is a young poet of the ultra-modern school who gives
promise of greater work than he has yet done. Jessie Fauset shows that she
possesses the lyric gift, and she works with care and finish. Miss Fauset
is especially adept in her translations from the French. Georgia Douglas
Johnson is a poet neither afraid nor ashamed of her emotions. She limits
herself to the purely conventional forms, rhythms and rhymes, but through
them she achieves striking effects. The principal theme of Mrs. Johnson's
poems is the secret dread down in every woman's heart, the dread of the
passing of youth and beauty, and with them love. An old theme, one which
poets themselves have often wearied of, but which, like death, remains one
of the imperishable themes on which is made the poetry that has moved
men's hearts through all ages. In her ingenuously wrought verses, through
sheer simplicity and spontaneousness, Mrs. Johnson often sounds a note of
pathos or passion that will not fail to waken a response, except in those
too sophisticated or cynical to respond to natural impulses. Of the half
dozen or so of colored women writing creditable verse, Anne Spencer is the
most modern and least obvious in her methods. Her lines are at times
involved and turgid and almost cryptic, but she shows an originality which
does not depend upon eccentricities. In her "Before the Feast of Shushan"
she displays an opulence, the love of which has long been charged against
the Negro as one of his naïve and childish traits, but which in art may
infuse a much needed color, warmth and spirit of abandon into American
poetry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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