African American Sonnets: Voicing Justice and Personal Dignity

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4 Scopus citations

Abstract

There is no monolithic blackness nor a single tradition of sonnet writing among black writers. Elizabeth Alexander sums up this idea in the second stanza of her 24-line poem "Today's News": "I didn't want to write a poem that said 'blackness / is,' because we know better than anyone / that we are not one or ten or ten thousand things" (I. 14 - 16). To keep Alexander's point in mind, in what follows I focus primarily on political protest and personal dignity in sonnets by twentieth-century African American poets. While my approach turns from the tradition of the love sonnet to the subsidiary tradition of the political sonnet, one could just as easily address the way black poets since the Harlem Renaissance have adapted the sonnet to write about love. My choice is simply a pragmatic one, based on the central fact of racism and the historic response of black writers to it.

Original languageAmerican English
Title of host publicationA Companion to Poetic Genre
Pages234-249
Number of pages16
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012

Keywords

  • "subtle poise," that countee cullen admires in "atlantic city waiter"
  • African american sonnets, voicing justice
  • Cullen, figuring blackness as warmly protective
  • Dignity of individual, analogy between black oratory and poetry
  • Dunbar's "we wear the mask"
  • Dunbar's douglass, voice heard above the storm of social conflict
  • Kahlo's vitality through a rebirth motif, power of her art
  • McKay's treatment of the walls, products of unfree black labor
  • McKay, echoing idea of black samson's blindness
  • No monolithic blackness or tradition of sonnet writing, black writers

EGS Disciplines

  • English Language and Literature

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