Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s JON WOODSON THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2011 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Woodson, Jon. Anthems, sonnets, and chants : recovering the African American poetry of the 1930s / Jon Woodson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1146-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1146-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9245-7 (cd) 1. American poetry—African American authors—History and criticism. 2. Depres- sions—1929—United States. 3. Existentialism in literature. 4. Racism in literature. 5. Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1936—Influence. I. Title. PS153.N5W66 2011 811'5209896073—dc22 2010022344 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1146-5) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9245-7) Cover design by Laurence Nozik Text design by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 FOR LYNN CUrrIER SMITH WOODSON Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression: Three Long Poems 15 Chapter 2 Existential Crisis: The Sonnet and Self-Fashioning in the Black Poetry of the 1930s 69 Chapter 3 “Race War”: African American Poetry on the Italo-Ethiopian War 142 A Concluding Note 190 Appendix: Poems 197 Notes 235 Works Cited 253 Index 271 Acknowledgments My thanks to Dorcas Haller—professor, librarian, and chair of the Library Department at the Community College of Rhode Island—for finding the books that I could not find. Carol Doreski sent me many invaluable books. I thank Alicia Catlos for digitally transcribing the unpublished anthology of thirties poems which I assembled as an important part of my research. I am deeply grateful for Amritjit Singh’s longstanding interest in my work. Without the help of Jean Currie Church, chief librarian of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard Uni- versity, this project would not have been possible. Two grants from the Howard University–Sponsored Faculty Research Program in the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education greatly furthered my research and writing. The students of my African American Poetry classes and of my graduate seminars at Howard University were instrumental in helping me develop my understanding of African American poetry and in locating poems that would otherwise never have come to light. Libraries that were generous include the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), the Marcus Christian Collection (at the University of New Orleans), and the John Hay Library (at Brown Uni- versity). My affiliate privileges at the Johns Hopkins University’s Milton S. Eisenhower Library are greatly appreciated. I am deeply obliged to the anonymous reader, whose patient, per- severing, and discerning comments about my earlier drafts helped shape the final form of this book. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewer of the final draft of the manuscript and acknowledge the many ix x | Acknowledgments benefits of that reading. The guidance and support of Sandy Crooms, my editor at The Ohio State University Press, immeasurably sustained me while I wrote this book. List of Abbreviations AHD American Heritage Dictionary AJT “Bibliography T Entries: Toynbee, Arnold J.” The Encyclo- pedia of the Lutheran Church (3 vols.). Ed. J. H. Bodensiek. Philadelphia: 1965. 24 October 2004 http://home.comcast. net/~shuv/t_biblio.html. AYL As You Like It. William Shakespeare BW “Amos ‘n’ Andy in Person—Black and White?” Accessed 29 July 2003 http://216.239.53.104/ search?q+cache:dFhWa1LGydsJ:www.midcoast.com/~lizmcl/ aa11 DP “Documentary Photography as a Medium.” 13 July 2009. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG99/brady/doc.html. DV Redmond, Eugene. Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History. Garden City: Anchor Press, 1976. EA “Blacks in the Great Depression.” Encyclopedia Africana. Accessed 22 July 2007 http://www.africana.com/articles/tt-644. htm. KJV King James Version, the Bible. MAPS Anthology of Modern American Poetry. Ed. Cary Nelson. New York: Oxford, 2000. Online journal. Web. NRSV New Revised Standard Version, the Bible. 1989. PAA Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Abby Arthur Johnson and R. M. Johnson. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. SP Selected Poems of Claude McKay. New York: Harvest, 1953. xi xii | List of Abbreviations VFHR Voices from the Harlem Renaissance. Ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. VS “Victorian Seedlings of the Twentieth Century.” Accessed 22 July 2007 http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/ units/1982/4/82.04.05.x.html. Introduction Literary recovery is a response to some mode of marginalization. In the case of the black American poetry of the thirties, there were three directly marginalizing factors: racism, history, and ideology. As Wah- neema Lubiano has shown, racism presents a particularly difficult obstacle: “Afro-Americanists have often interpreted [African American] texts as if the relationship of a text to its production was an always already known quantity that could be referred to as a casually explicit or implicit reflection of the racism of the dominant culture. Such references suggest that racism operates always under a set of conditions that anyone could recognize. For most of the period between its publication in 1937 and the early 1970s, for example, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was excluded by the movers and shakers of the Harlem Renaissance and then by Richard Wright’s agenda. Now it is taken for granted that Hurston is part of the Afro-American tradition” (434). In addition to racism, there were the exigencies of history. Writing in 1940, Langston Hughes suggested that the economic crash in the fall of 1929 marked the end of the Harlem Renaissance, for from that point on, “We were no longer in vogue, we Negroes” (The Big Sea 334). We now read Hughes’s words from a perspective so totalized and immersed in the elaborate mythology of the Harlem Renaissance that it is barely possible to register the disturbing disposition of Hughes’s discourse. Some sense of the unease is, however, detectable in the semantic shifts 1 2 | Introduction that the phrase has undergone. Alain Locke had already written of a “fad” for “Negro things” in “Art or Propaganda?” (312). In its final form, the title of David Levering Lewis’s book, When Harlem Was in Vogue, periodized the brief moment with a metonymic substitution of place for people. These shifting subject positions point to the question of whether or not, following the crash of 1929, the Negro and black cultural productions were to be allowed to revert to their devastating former position in American culture, or whether the interval of interest in the Negro and in Negro things marked a stage of social progress in an evolutionary process. The theorists of the Harlem Renaissance had hoped to construct a program of artistic produc- tion that would lead to social progress. In 1931, James Weldon Johnson wrote, “A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art. No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as inferior” (281). Then, with the crash of 1929, history intruded and wrecked the Negro’s advance to greatness. It was with a historical metaphor that Alain Locke acknowledged that the Harlem Renaissance period had been traumatically set apart from the Great Depression; in 1938, he wrote, “In self-extenuation, may I say that as early as 1927 I said . ‘Remember, the Renaissance was followed by the Reformation’” (“Jingo, Counter-Jingo and Us” 9). In other words, in the African American culture of the 1930s there existed a discourse that registered a perceptible break between the social triumphs of the 1920s and the setbacks of the 1930s. The reforma- tion that Locke looked to as a succession to the Harlem Renaissance was the new culture ushered into the decade of the 1930s by a series of social catastrophes. The reformation was but a transitional stage in an ongoing evolutionary process, not a period unto itself, and in the end Locke saw that the process would lead to “great universalized art” (PAA 103). My argument is that Harlem and renaissance have subsequently come to signal the discur- sive construct of the Harlem Renaissance as a uniformity of space, time, and form that were never historical and material realities: most of the writers had left Harlem by 1932 (Bremer, “Home” 3). Joyce W. Warren has observed that “African American literary critics . have generally approached peri- odization by separating black literature from conventional divisions of white writers and identifying African American periods (the Harlem Renaissance, for example, instead of modernism)” (x). In contrast to the idealizing semi- otics of a “Harlem Renaissance,” Harlem writing was the work of a handful of moderately productive writers. The literature of the succeeding years lacked Introduction | 3 any such semiotic definitiveness; very few periods in African American lit- erary history have been identified and named.