Home / Essay / The Harlem Renaissance Poets, Essay Example

The Harlem Renaissance Poets, Essay Example

Pages: 4

Words: 1200

Female Poets of the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance gave a voice to the voiceless, allowing newly-freed blacks to explore their sense of self and the image they presented to the larger world through song, theater, books, and poetry. With this freedom came the responsibility to provide a positive view of black society that would work to improve race relations while demonstrating that black culture did not threaten that of white society (A&E, 2011). This meant that, despite their artistic freedoms, those at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance were faced with the challenge of “double-consciousness” (Sayre, 2007), a term coined by W.E.B. Dubois to illustrate the struggle blacks faced in defining their sense of self by a set of white values and expectations. This difficulty was amplified even further for female poets of this era, who had to contend with their gender as well as their race (Walton, 2011). However, despite many obstacles, the poets Gwendolyn Bennett and Georgia Douglas Johnson were able to create a body of work that illustrates the unique experiences and dreams of the black woman. Their poems, “To a Dark Girl” and “Black Woman” respectively, utilize themes of loss, love, and heartache to tell the narrative of not just an individual girl or woman, but of the black race as a whole, illustrating their racial pride and longing for the African land that was lost to them.

Gwendolyn Bennett played a pivotal role in the Harlem Renaissance, not just as a poet but as a grounding force for many young writers within the movement. After graduating from the Sorbonne in Paris, she moved to Harlem where she worked as an editor for the African American magazine Opportunity and a columnist for the New Negro journal Fire, writing articles to inform and inspire those involved in the incipient movement. Her workshops encouraged lesser-known writers to connect with one another and aspire to reach the heights of authors such as Langston Hughes (Walton, 2011). Although her own body of work is small, as she gave up creative writing for marriage, Bennett continued to influence other writers and artists as a teacher. Bennett often crossed paths with poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, the only female writer of the Harlem Renaissance to publish collections of verse (Walton, 2011). Johnson held a regular Saturday night artists’ salon in her Washington, D.C. home that was attended by many Harlem Renaissance luminaries, many of whom cited the gathering as influential to their personal progress as writers. Although she was a prolific writer and poet, Johnson was challenged by the need to hold multiple jobs to support her children after the death of her husband, leaving her with much less time than she would have liked to pursue her artistic goals (Walton, 2011).

Bennett’s poem “To a Dark Girl” is a pain-wracked paean to a younger generation of black women, one which begs them to “keep all you have of queenliness” (Bennett 10). Bennett uses the imagery of “old forgotten queens” (5) and the “shackled slave” (7) to demonstrate that time does not erase the racial memory of a people. Indeed, this one young girl acts as a metaphor for a new generation of blacks in America, and while Bennett urges her “little brown girl” (9) to forget “that you were once a slave” (11), the poet’s tone and word choice implies that this task in near impossible. While the tone of the poem begins in a positive manner, stating all the elements of blackness which the poet finds appealing, each stanza contains powerful and emotional words which demonstrate the legacy of slavery on the black people. She writes of “breaking sadness” (3), “sobs in the rhythm of your talk” (8), and a child born to be “sorrow’s mate” (9), emphasizing that the fate of prior generations resonates over time until African queens, captured slaves, and young freed black girls are almost indistinguishable from one another. In the context of the Harlem Renaissance, “To a Black Girl” works to reinforce themes of black pride and an awareness of history in order to remind black audiences of their roots while informing white audiences that the black people possessed a rich and vibrant culture long before they were enslaved.

In “Black Woman,” Georgia Douglas Johnson also addresses her poem to a child, thereby evoking the innocence of a new generation of black children who are unaware of the generational horrors their people have experienced. Using the sustained metaphor of a child knocking at a door, asking to be let in, the poet writes of her narrator’s inability to bring a child into a world of pain and misery. “You do not know the monster men/Inhabiting the earth” (Johnson 13), she writes, paralleling the innocence of her “little child” (1) with her own awareness that “the world is cruel, cruel, child” (7). Johnson employs repetition to great effect throughout “Black Woman,” such as the manner in which she uses “little child” (1), “child” (7), and “precious child” (15) to express both the narrator’s love for her unborn child and her terrible awareness that she cannot bring it into the world. Johnson’s poem speaks to the burden carried by black women in a world that does not accept them, and brings an overtly feminist and very modern approach to female power to the body of work produced during the Harlem Renaissance.

Gwendolyn Bennett and Georgia Douglas Johnson act as a voice for multiple generations of black women. While the Harlem Renaissance offered creative opportunities for many writers and artists, the work of these female poets is especially notable given that they worked during a period when black women held little power to exact control over their own lives and the world around them. Through their poetry and community activism, Bennett and Johnson illustrated the historical weight of their people’s conflicted past, the burdens of the present, and the hopes of the future, thus paving the way for future generations of both poets and black women.

The Eye

There is no eye that cannot see,

except for that I

which belongs to me.

The children say we want…

The husbands say we need…

The bosses say we demand…

But where amongst this clamouring cacophony of voices

is there room to hear the single small sound

of my own voice speaking?

I search the cold flat sky

for a sign that things might change