A realist not only by artistic and significant persuasion, but by temperament, Sterling A. Brown has shown concern throughout his career with poetry as an art of communication. Brown's essential writings deal primarily with the literary portrayal of Afro-Americans. Brown renders in a trend that emerged from many types of folks discourse, a black dialect matrix that features the blues and ballads, the spirituals and work songs. Brown’s final referents are African-American music and mythology. Brown was born in May 1901 and graduated with honors from Dunbar High in 1918. when after he went to Williams college on a scholarship and was the only student awarded Final Honors. From 1922 to 1923 Brown took a masters degree in English at Harvard University.
Brown conducted a form of unorthodox anthropology fieldwork among southern ebony individuals within the 1920s and afterward engendered a series of dominant essays on ebony Folkways. Brown drew on his observations to engender a composed dialect literature that honored ebony individuals of the agricultural South rather than championing the early order of ebony life being engendered in cities and also the North. Brown's wanderings within the South portrayed not simply an exploration for literary material, however but an odyssey in search of roots more consequential than what appeared to be provided by college within the North and ebony materialistic culture in Washington. Both Brown’s poetry and criticism pursue the liberty referred to as Hughes. As a result of Browns in depth work in African American folk culture, he was well prepared to present his vision to a wider audience once the chance arose.
“Professor Brown devoted his life to the event of an authentic black folks literature. He ...
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...of such a process. At the same time, this process is not simply a sentimental return to the folk, or a new primitivism on the part of the intellectual, but also involves the intellectual-poet's giving a new consciousness to the folk that allows it to see its power and destiny more clearly while recognizing its weaknesses” (Southern Road). Southern Road is about a black man working on a chain gang. The man is a prisoner. His daughter is a hooker on the streets, his son already dead, and his wife pregnant.
Works Cited
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"On "Old Lem"" Modern American Poetry. n.d. Web. 28 Mar. 2014.
"Southern Road and the "New Negro Renaissance"" Modern American Poetry. n.d. Web.
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The author was born in Washington D.C. on May 1, 1901. Later, he received a bachelor’s degree from Williams College where he studied traditional literature and explored music like Jazz and the Blues; then had gotten his masters at Harvard. The author is a professor of African American English at Harvard University. The author’s writing
Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. 163-67. Print.
The South is a region of the United States known for lively bluegrass and jazz music, African American literature, fine cuisine, family unity, a strong prevalence of religion and racial stereotypes. These customs, important to this area, have spurred artists to write about their experiences in the South. Black American poet and educator, Terrance Hayes, has been greatly influenced by the culture of the Southern United States. Terrance Hayes’ works reflect Southern influences and how being a member of the black community in the South has shaped his identity and his perception of the world.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. Print.
Lynch is a writer and teacher in Northern New Mexico. In the following essay, she examines ways that the text of The Souls of Black Folk embodies Du Bois' experience of duality as well as his "people's."
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Young Goodman Brown." Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers. 5th ed. Ed. John Schlib and John Clifford. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2012. 1131-1141. Print.
The first passage is an excerpt from W.E.B Du Bois ' biography of John Brown written in 1909. Du Bois who was an activist and founder of the NAACP presents Brown as the hero who initiated the end of the horrors of slavery. Du Bois ' descriptions paint Brown as the positive light that helped get rid of the darkness that African Americans faced. He describes Brown as "exasperatingly simple; unlettered, plain, and homely," and calls him an "eternal truth" (232). Du Bois believes that there are truths we can learn from Brown 's life and actions. He explains that Brown 's intense hate of slavery was a result of his love and sympathy for the "poor, unfortunate, or oppressed" (233). Brown believed and acted on the fundamental truth that "all men are free and equal" according to Dubois (233). He also argues that Brown 's violent actions and the consequences of those actions are the price that needs to be paid for freedom. He concludes in the biographical passage that "John Brown was right," and that violence or war was necessary to destroy slavery. On the other hand, the second passage from Robert Warren 's 1929 biography of John Brown casts Brown in a negative and unsympathetic light. Warren, an American writer who was associated with the Southern Agrarians focuses on the cruel nature and consequences of Brown 's actions. He describes the "bloody heap" of innocent lives that resulted from the Pottawatomie murders committed by Brown and his men. Warren labels Brown as a thief, a cruel murderer, and insane religious extremist. There 's nothing normal or right about Brown 's motives and actions for Warren, since they classify under insane
Like most, the stories we hear as children leave lasting impacts in our heads and stay with us for lifetimes. Hughes was greatly influenced by the stories told by his grandmother as they instilled a sense of racial pride that would become a recurring theme in his works as well as become a staple in the Harlem Renaissance movement. During Hughes’ prominence in the 20’s, America was as prejudiced as ever and the African-American sense of pride and identity throughout the U.S. was at an all time low. Hughes took note of this and made it a common theme to put “the everyday black man” in most of his stories as well as using traditional “negro dialect” to better represent his African-American brethren. Also, at this time Hughes had major disagreements with members of the black middle class, such as W.E.B. DuBois for trying to assimilate and promote more european values and culture, whereas Hughes believed in holding fast to the traditions of the African-American people and avoid having their heritage be whitewashed by black intellectuals.
3. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 51: Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Gale Group, 1987. pp. 133-145.
Smith, David Lionel. “The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics.” American Literary History. 3.1 (Spring 1991): 94-109.
During this era African Americans were facing the challenges of accepting their heritage or ignoring outright to claim a different lifestyle for their day to day lives. Hughes and Cullen wrote poems that seemed to describe themselves, or African Americans, who had accepted their African Heritage and who also wanted to be a part of American heritage as well. These are some of the things they have in common, as well as what is different about them based on appearance, now I shall focus on each author individually and talk about how they are different afterwards.
Hawthorn, Nathaniel. "Young Goodman Brown" The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. I. Shorter Seventh Edition. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2008. 620-629. Print.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.
Analyzing the poem’s title sets a somber, yet prideful tone for this poem. The fact that the title does not say “I Speak of Rivers,” but instead, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1) shows that he is not only a Negro, but that he is not one specific Negro, but in his first person commentary, he is speaking for all Negroes. However, he is not just speaking for any Negroes. Considering the allusions to “Mississippi” (9) and “Abe Lincoln” (9) are not only to Negroes but also to America, confirms that Hughes is talking for all African Americans. This poem is a proclamation on the whole of African American history as it has grown and flourished along the rivers which gave life to these people.
Margolies, Edward. “History as Blues: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968. 127-148. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Vol. 54. Detroit: Gale, 1989. 115-119. Print.