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African-American Poets Past and Present: a Historical View

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African-American Poets Past and Present: a Historical View Curriculum Units by Fellows of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute 1991 Volume IV: Recent American Poetry: Expanding the Canon African-American Poets Past and Present: A Historical View Curriculum Unit 91.04.04 by Joyce Patton African American Poets Past and Present: A historical View will address in this unit African-American poets and the poetry they wrote throughout the course of history. They will be listed in chronological order as they appear in history. The Eighteenth Century Beginnings (1700-1800) brought us Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon. The Struggle Against Slavery and Racism (1800-1860) brought us George Moses Horton and Frances W. Harper. The Black Man in the Civil War (1861-1865). There were not any poets that came to us in this time frame. Reconstruction and Reaction (1865-1915) brought us Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. Du Bois, William S. Braithwaite, and Fenton Johnson. Renaissance and Radicalism (1915-1945) brought us James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Contee Cullen, Angelina Grimke, Arna Bontemps, and Sterling Brown. The Present Generation brought us Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Imamu Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Owen Dodson, Samuel Allen, Mari E. Evans, Etheridge Knight, Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni. These poets have written poems that express the feelings of African-Americans from slavery to the present. Poems were not only things written during these times. There was folk literature, prison songs, spirituals, the blues, work songs, pop chart music, and rap music the craze of today, plus sermons delivered by ministers. The objectives of this unit are to teach children about the poets, the poems written expressing their feelings, and how to write poetry. The final goal of this unit is to help students develop an appreciation for poetry, to read and analyze poetry. This unit is being written for students in grades second through fifth. This unit can be used throughout the school year. However, this unit will be used mainly during Black History Month. This unit will give brief biographies of each poet so students will learn something about the backgrounds of poets. Next poems written by these poets will be listed for the teacher to read to the students. Students will also be required to read poems and discuss the poets’ feelings. Last, students will be taught how to write poetry with the lessons provided in this unit. They will be required to write poetry from their own experiences. Lesson plans will be the final part of this unit. Lucy Terry a slave girl from Deerfield, Massachusetts is recognized as the first African-American poet. In 1746 she wrote Bars Fight a verse account of an Indian raid. Jupiter Hammon, a Long Island slave was the first poet to be published, in 1760 (an eighty-eight line religious poem printed as a broadside). In 1773 Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave was the first African-American to publish a volume of verse (124 pages, printed in London). (Chapman 21). Phillis Wheatley is the first poet to be addressed in our study of African-American Poets. Phillis Wheatley was Curriculum Unit 91.04.04 1 of 15 born free in Senegal on the African coast in the early 1750’s. When she was five years or possibly six years old, she was kidnapped by slavers, eventually transported in a slave ship to Boston, and sold in 1761 to John Wheatley, a well-to-do-merchant tailor. Her precocity encouraged the Wheatleys to educate her, and, within sixteen months after her arrival in the Wheatley household, the young slave girl had learned to speak and to write English. She then received, through informal tutorial sessions, a New England education, with considerable stress on the Bible and on the classics. Her education also prepared her to write the kind of neoclassical poetry very much in vogue at that time. It should be also noted that her upbringing and training did not give her a deep sense of identification with her people. She wrote no poems of social or moral protest against slavery and apparently had little communication with the free Blacks of Boston until her unfortunate marriage in 1778. (Barksdale and Kinnamon 38). Jupiter Hammon’s life and career are obscure. Only a few facts are known with any certainty. First, he was born a slave sometime around 1720 and remained a slave all of his life. Second, he belonged to the influential Lloyd family of Lloyd’s Neck near Queen’s Village on Long Island and found in this family the kind of benevolent understanding that encouraged him to write and publish poetry. There is very little known of his marriage and family, his reconciliation of fervent Christianity with chattel slavery, or his attitudes and beliefs. His poetry reflects a strong influence of Methodism and the Wesleyan Revival that swept America in the middle of the eighteenth century. This is particularly evident in the hymnal qualities of his verse. In fact, because all of his poetizing is on religious themes, some critics have speculated that Hammon may have been a preacher first and a poet only secondarily. In the final analysis, Hammon’s religion was an opiate that dulled him to the world’s evil ways. Instead of giving him a revolutionary social vision, it filled him with penitential cries. And his poetry is esthetically anemic and almost stifling in its repetitive religiosity. (Barksdale and Kinnamon 46). George Moses Horton was born a slave in Northampton County, North Carolina, and remained at least nominally a slave until freed by the union soldiers in 1865. Horton found the means and the time to become the first professional poet. He taught himself to read and write by studying the alphabet from scraps of paper and by reading Methodist hymnbooks. By the 1820’s while enjoying a new kind of freedom of movement rarely accorded a slave, Horton had journeyed Northampton County to Raleigh, North Carolina, and on to the state university at Chapel Hill, where worked as a janitor and wrote poetry for lovelorn students at the price of twenty-five or fifty cents a poem. (Barksdale 219). This tone of Horton’s poetry is different from that of the other two slave poets, Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon. Except for the poems in which he bitterly pleads for his freedom from slavery, Horton’s poems are generally bright with good humor, and they occasionally sparkle with fanciful bits of imagery. His poetry has little of the religiosity of Jupiter Hammon or the pious sentimentality of Phillis Wheatley. He writes of love, nature, and life’s small ironies with simplicity and homely wit. Because of his early self-instruction in hymn book literature, however, the form and meter of his poems reflect a strong hymnal influence. (Barksdale 219). Frances Watkins Harper was born free in Baltimore and became one of the best known anti-slavery poets. She received her education in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and after a brief spell of teaching in Pennsylvania, she volunteered her services to the Anti-Slavery Society in Maine as a lecturer and poetic orator. Her marriage to Fenton Harper in Cincinnati in 1860 brought a brief interlude in lecturing activities, but after her husband’s early death in 1864, Mrs. Harper went back to work for the Society, traveling from Maine to Louisiana for the cause of abolition and freedom. Her poetry was for the cause of abolition and freedom. Her poetry was dedicated to slavery and its abominable practices and abuse. Many of her poems she recited at lectures. Curriculum Unit 91.04.04 2 of 15 Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1872. From youth he was a black prodigy in a white world. He was the only black student in his high school class. After high school, Dunbar had to work at one of the few jobs open to black youngsters, an elevator operator. Dunbar, the son of an ex-slave, rose from an elevator boy composing verses to an internationally known poet. Like other black writers in the turbulent days following the Civil War, Dunbar was artistically inhibited by the distorted image of black people which was comfortable for the white book-buying public. Dunbar as lyricist of considerable ability, who proved to the literary public that a black man could be an artist. In spite of Dunbar’s success, he was haunted by a feeling of failure because the dialect poems, not his standard poems, were considered the more important. He was haunted by the fear of an early death and died at the age of thirty-three, from tuberculosis in 1906. He broke the ground for poets to become in the current upsurge of poetry which reflects black life, black rhythms, black language, we can perhaps detect the spectre of Dunbar. (Barksdale 349). W. E. B. Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a small New England town where few black families lived. Years of study at Fisk University and Harvard University and the University of Berlin brought him in contact with some of the most brilliant teachers of two continents. In 1895 he received his doctorate from Harvard. Du Bois was not only the most brilliant and prolific black scholar of the early twentieth century, but also the most influential. He lived to be well over ninety. He spent seventy years writing, speaking, and organizing for human peace, dignity, and justice. His commitment to Black Americans broadened to encompass all people descended from Africa. (Barksdale 363). Du Bois wrote free verses to the confinement of conventional forms. His poetry was passionate and replete with vivid images.
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