The work of James Weldon Johnson (1871 - 1938) inspired and encouraged the artists of the Harlem Renaissance,a movement in which he himself was an important figure. Johnson was active in almost every aspect of American civil life and became one of the first African-American professors at New York University. He is best remembered for his writing, which questions, celebrates and commemorates his experience as an African-American.
The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) is an anthology by James Weldon Johnson. Alongside some of his own poems, Johnson includes the work of such legendary artists as Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Carefully selected and supported with a masterful preface by Johnson, the poems herein reflect a range of voices, styles, and subjects drawn from tradition and experience alike. In his preface, Johnson justifies his anthology by identifying its vital purpose: “The public, generally speaking, does not know that there are American Negro poets—to supply this lack of information is, alone, a work worthy of somebody's effort.” And the effort was his. In his poem “O Black and Unknown Bards,” he asks “O black and unknown bards of long ago, / How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?” Recognizing the need for a reconciliation between the long tradition of black culture and the overwhelming erasure of his own contemporary artists, Johnson highlights the efforts of those poets who “Within [their] dark-kept soul[s], burst into song.” Like Johnson himself, many of the poets included in The Book of American Negro Poetry work in a variety of voices, moving expertly from dialect to the traditional lyric in poems that harness the spirit of song and sermon alike. To borrow the words of Joseph S. Cotter Jr., a poet included in this anthology, these poems are elemental in their power to rejuvenate an exclusive national culture, and they “Rise and fall triumphant / Over every thing.” With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.
The Book of American Negro Poetry : Chosen and Edited, With an Essay on the Negro'S Creative Genius by James Weldon Johnson, first published in 1922, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.
A National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award Winner! From the breakout author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé comes a profound and deceptively funny exploration of Black American womanhood. "Morgan Parker's latest collection is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read—both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest." —TIME Magazine A Best Book of 2019 at TIME, Elle, BuzzFeed, the Star Tribune, AVClub, and more. A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Vogue, O: the Oprah Magazine, NYLON, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, and more. Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics—of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience. In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present—timeless black melancholies and triumphs.
"For this anthology, Cullen selected the work of thirty-eight poets to, as he put it, "bring together a miscellany of deeply appreciated but scattered verse." The collection includes Paul Laurence Dunbar, often credited as the first Black poet to make a deep and lasting impression on the literary world; James Weldon Johnson, the author of what is referred to now as the Black National Anthem; W. E. B. Du Bois; Jessie Faucet; Sterling A. Brown; Arna Bontemps; Langston Hughes and Cullen's own work. The poets were all known within the literary world and widely published. Each poem is accompanied by autobiographical notes, with the exception of three. The decorations in this book are by African American painter and graphic artist, Aaron Douglas"--J. Willard Marriott Library blog, viewed June 3, 2022.
There is, perhaps, a better excuse for giving an Anthology of American Negro Poetry to the public than can be offered for many of the anthologies that have recently been issued. The public, generally speaking, does not know that there are American Negro poets-to supply this lack of information is, alone, a work worthy of somebody's effort.
