The Aesthetic Evolution of Melvin B. Tolson : a Thematic Study of His Poetry

RICE UNIVERSITY THE AESTHETIC EVOLUTION OF MELVIN B. TOLSON: A THEMATIC STUDY OF HIS POETRY by HERMINE D. PINSON A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE /?. U-G Terrence A. Doody, Professor of English, Chakman * mL ysL. Wesley Mojpris, Professor of English Bernard Aresu, Associate Professor of French Lorenzo Thomas, Writer-In-Residence, Uniyersity of Houston / /O 12. on, Associate Professor of Eng' outhern University THE AESTHETIC EVOLUTION OF MELVIN B. TOLSON: A THEMATIC STUDY OF HIS WORKS by Hermine D. Pinson ABSTRACT Within the context of Euro-American and Afro-American modernism Toison is an enigmatic figure. Only in recent years have critics and students begun to reappraise the works of a poet whose body of work reveals the varied influences of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, the Symbolists, and the Euro-American modernists. Toison shares with Afro-American modernists, from Langston Hughes to Ralph Ellison, an indebtedness to Afro-American music and culture, from the blues to black vernacular speech to the tradition of "signifying," whether in the service of citing or "righting history." On the other hand, he shares with Euro-American modernists, from Ezra Pound to T. S. Eliot to W. B. Yeats, a predilection for symbolism, imagism, obscure allusions, and a preoccupation with confronting the chimeras of history and consciousness. To understand how Toison manages to incorporate elements of aesthetic approaches that are often politically and stylistically antithetical, this study traces the poet’s developing aesthetic, from his first manuscript, Portraits in a Harlem Gallery, to his last work, Harlem Gallery. The poet’s subtle shift in emphasis on his staple themes - race, class, the role of the artist, and the nature of art — from one work to the next evidence the poet’s struggle to clarify and sharpen a developing aesthetic that culminates in his final and best work, Harlem Gallery. Tolson’s final solution to the psycho-historical phenomenon of double consciousness is a delicate synthesis of the most salient elements of both aesthetic approaches -- Afro-American and Euro-American modernism. The result is neither derivative of Langston Hughes or T. S. Eliot, but a strong, individualistic Melvin B. Toison. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe thanks to many people: Robert Jones, Wesley Morris, Bernard Aresu, Betty Taylor-Thompson, Lorenzo Thomas, and especially Terrence Doody, whose patience and careful reading of my innumerable drafts compelled me to do the best work I was capable of doing. A National Endowment for the Humanities Dissertation grant and the initial seed money from my father, Robert B. Harris, Sr., enabled me to take one year off to do research on the dissertation. I am also indebted to Edward F. J. Tucker, who first introduced me to Tolson’s work; Jon Stanton Woodson, whose astute reading of Toison enriched my understanding of the writer; Enid Davis Harris, who taught me to take the high road; my daughter, Leah Pinson, and especially Donald Pinson, my husband and best friend, who travelled that road with me. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: Melvin Tolson’s Harlem 14 CHAPTER TWO: A Poet of Two Minds 54 CHAPTER THREE: Toison, The Initiate: Period of Transition, 1944-53 90 CHAPTER FOUR: Poetic Prophecy 152 CHAPTER FIVE: "... for, against, about/ This and That" 203 AFTERWORD 248 WORKS CITED 260 INTRODUCTION When critics consider the mature verse of Melvin B. Toison, they inevitably express their difficulty in making Tolson’s poetry square with the whole of the Euro-American modern literary tradition. However, by the same token, neither can they securely place him with the Afro-American modernists who were, by all accounts, his contemporaries. Toison seems to have been one of the most celebrated "invisible men" of his generation, and only in recent years has Toison begun to receive the kind of critical attention he deserves. Perhaps his recognition has been so long in coming precisely because he is so hard to place. The recent plethora of scholarship leads one to ask why Tolson’s recognition has been so long in coming. As late as 1965, approximately one year before the poet’s death, Karl Shapiro declared in his "Introduction" to Tolson’s final book, Harlem Gallery: Book I. The Curator. "A great poet has been living in our midst and is almost totally unknown, even by literati, even by poets."1 As Jon Stanton Woodson suggests: The small amount of critical attention accorded the poetry of Melvin B. Toison has contributed little to the understanding of his works.... No investigation of Tolson’s poetry has attempted to deal with the content of his much-touted dazzling display of allusion and technique. The vast range of mythic, philosophic, cultural, historic, and aesthetic ideation that constitutes the very raison d’etre of Tolson’s epical poems yet remains a terrae incognitae wherein many discoveries await the explorer. The very lushness and density of the verbal foliage attract and repel the would-be reader.2 1 2 Of Tolson’s problematical position in the history of arts and letters, Ronald Lee Cansler has observed that a "major part of the problem in getting Toison read and accepted as a great twentieth-centuiy poet is that he is both a modem and a black poet"3; or as Toison himself puts it, the black artist has been "shoved" into but not necessarily subsumed by the "white and not-white dichotomy,/ the Afroamerican dilemma in the arts -- / The dialectic of/ to be or not to be/ a Negro."4 To assess fully the ramifications of this "dialectical dilemma" and to understand Tolson’s own solution, one must first understand Tolson’s aesthetic in so far as it informs the body of his works. This task, though intriguing, is nevertheless tricky, because major aspects of Tolson’s aesthetic undergo significant changes from his first collection, A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, to his last collection, Harlem Gallery. What does remain fairly constant are Tolson’s thematic concerns: black conscious¬ ness, the class struggle, the problem of history, and the role of the black artist. Through an analysis of these thematic concerns as they change in response to the evolution and maturation of Tolson’s aesthetic, one can discover how Toison grappled with and eventually transcended the problem of "double consciousness" as a writer. Other published studies have not directly addressed these issues, though Jon Stanton Woodson, Wilburn Williams, and Robert Farnsworth have all touched upon them. Unlike the foregoing studies, the present discussion links Tolson’s growth as a poet to his changing views of language, theme, and style; and offers an explanation of how Toison ultimately settles his own aesthetic dilemma, his own private valley of "dry bones" and lives to tell the tale. 3 It is my intention to identify the most significant elements in Tolson’s aesthetic and to trace the development and continuous modification of that aesthetic as it is reflected in the poet’s presentation of his dominant themes during his major stages of literary development. As this study will show, Tolson’s presentation of his themes becomes increasingly dependent on his interpretation of and response to Euro- and Afro-American modernism. Tolson’s solution to the apparently antipodal camps formed by black and white modernists is to blend the best aspects of both worlds to create his own hybrid modernist poetry. Tolson’s career can be generally divided into two major stages of literary development: the period of social realism (1936-45) and the longest and most characteristic American modernist period (1945-66). During the first stage of Tolson’s literary development, he wrote two collections of poetry: Portraits in a Harlem Gallery (unpublished during his lifetime) and Rendezvous with America. The first collection reveals the mixed influence of such Harlem Renaissance writers and thinkers as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and W.E.B. Dubois on the one hand and Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters on the other. Generally speaking, the Harlem Renaissance writers taught Toison how to invigorate his poetry with a kind of blues-inspired realism which is evident, for instance, in "Pearl Triplett," a typical poem in the collection, where Toison alternates blues stanzas with free-verse stanzas to depict the underbelly of Harlem night life. Pearl "picks up cargo in the nocturnal shadows along One Hundred and Fifteenth Street." The poem opens with the blues stanza, 4 Come on, Daddy, come on, What makes you so slow? Come on, Daddy, come on, What makes you so slow? If you’s a homeless daddy, Yo’ babe knows whar to go.5 Juxtaposed to this slangy, street-wise verse is the free-verse account of one such siren, Pearl Triplett. The absence of black dialect and rhyme in the second stanza clarifies the poem, while deepening its pathos, principally because Toison uses the free-verse stanzas to explain and, by implication, to justify Pearl’s existence. Tolson’s quasi-sociological approach to the poem calls to mind Carl Sandburg’s "Chicago. And yet Tolson’s alternation of the discursive stanza structure with the blues stanza does something a Sandburg poem does not do. It places this experience within the context of black life. As the last stanza reveals, Pearl’s virtue was soiled when she was left "under the too-loving care/ of Old Uncle Billy" while the mother worked "twelve hours a day/ In the white folk’s kitchen." The incisive folk wisdom of the penultimate stanza which precedes the explanation of Pearl’s womanish ways is both comment and complaint as it transcends the chronological boundaries of the poem to relate a universal truth.

Load more