Black Poets in America
Poetry by Black American writers, from Phillis Wheatley's 1773 collection to Langston Hughes.
- These are careful, formal couplets in the style of Pope, elegies and hymns mostly, so come patient. But when Wheatley, enslaved and barely twenty, tells the Earl of Dartmouth exactly why she loves freedom, the restraint cracks open and you feel history looking straight at you.
- Hughes gets blues and jazz onto the page: The Weary Blues, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, lines that look simple and land hard. If poetry usually feels like homework, his voice reads like someone talking straight to you.
- Johnson moves between Lift Every Voice and Sing and the sermon-poems of God's Trombones, where The Creation turns a Black preacher's cadence into verse. Formal skill and pulpit fire at once; the spoken power survives on the page.
- Harper read these aloud on abolitionist lecture circuits, and it shows: The Slave Auction and Bury Me in a Free Land are built to be heard and to hurt. The later Aunt Chloe poems add a freedwoman's wit to the fire.
- Short lyrics, most under a page, about what a woman is allowed to want and what she does with the wanting; The Heart of a Woman sets the note. Quiet craft from a Harlem Renaissance salon-keeper, easy to enter, hard to shake.
Published in The Liberator in the 1830s, often under pen names.
Mary Weston Fordham's collection of 1897.