Frances E.W. Harper and James Whitfield are two of the most influential anti-slavery poets of all time. Both individuals use poetry as a form of resistance and as a way to express themselves during a time of great racial tension. Their poems reach out to many different audiences, shedding light on racial injustices that were present in America. Harper’s and Whitfield’s poetry, like many other works that were written during this time, help us to better comprehend the effects of slavery on African Americans.
Although Frances E.W. Harper (1825-1911) lived in the enslaved state of Maryland, she was a free individual as a result of her parents’ social status. Harpers’ freedom allowed her to embark upon many opportunities that other blacks were not afforded. During her youth Harper’s parents passed away and she began to live with her aunt and uncle. While living with her aunt and uncle, Harper was acquainted with a new way of life that taught her about abolitionism and how to be a well rounded individual. After learning more about social injustices and seeing the ways in which they affected black people, Harper began to use writing as a positive outlet. She eventually became a teacher of poetry and taught vocational skills that were important during this time. However, teaching was not Harper’s passion and she felt that she needed to do something to improve the lives of the people of her race. Harper gave lectures about moving forward and demolishing social injustices. She gradually became one of the greatest black reformers, feminists, and civil rights activists in the nation. In the midst of fighting for civil rights Harper still continued to write poetry. She published one of her most famous works “The Slave Mother” during this t...
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...e enslaved and oppressed.
Works Cited
Gates, Henry L., Jr., and Nellie Y. Mckay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature. Second ed. New York: Norton, 2004. Print.
Gray, Janet Sinclair. Race and Time: American Women's Poetics from Antislavery to
Racial Modernity. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2004. Print.
Stancliff, Michael. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.
Whitfield, James Monroe, Robert S. Levine, and Ivy G. Wilson. The Works of James M.
Whitfield: America and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-century African American
Poet. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011. Print.
Whitley, Edward Keyes. American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010. Print.
African-Americans’/ Affrilachians’ Suffering Mirrored: How do Nikky Finney’s “Red Velvet” and “Left” Capture events from the Past in order to Reshape the Present? Abstract Nikky Finney (1957- ) has always been involved in the struggle of southern black people interweaving the personal and the public in her depiction of social issues such as family, birth, death, sex, violence and relationships. Her poems cover a wide range of examples: a terrified woman on a roof, Rosa Parks, a Civil Rights symbol, and Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State, to name just a few. The dialogue is basic to this volume, where historical allusions to prominent figures touch upon important sociopolitical issues. I argue that “Red Velvet” and “Left”, from Head off & Split, crystallize African-Americans’ /African-Americans’ suffering and struggle against slavery, by capturing events and recalling historical figures from the past.
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The civil rights movement may have technically ended in the nineteen sixties, but America is still feeling the adverse effects of this dark time in history today. African Americans were the group of people most affected by the Civil Rights Act and continue to be today. Great pain and suffering, though, usually amounts to great literature. This period in American history was no exception. Langston Hughes was a prolific writer before, during, and after the Civil Rights Act and produced many classic poems for African American literature. Hughes uses theme, point of view, and historical context in his poems “I, Too” and “Theme for English B” to expand the views on African American culture to his audience members.
In 1942, Margaret Walker won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her poem For My People. This accomplishment heralded the beginning of Margaret Walker’s literary career which spanned from the brink of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s to the cusp of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s (Gates and McKay 1619). Through her fiction and poetry, Walker became a prominent voice in the African-American community. Her writing, especially her signature novel, Jubilee, exposes her readers to the plight of her race by accounting the struggles of African Americans from the pre-Civil War period to the present and ultimately keeps this awareness relevant to contemporary American society.
The author was born in Washington D.C. on May 1, 1901. Later, he received a bachelor’s degree from Williams College where he studied traditional literature and explored music like Jazz and the Blues; then had gotten his masters at Harvard. The author is a professor of African American English at Harvard University. The author’s writing
The poems “I, Too” by Langston Hughes and “From the Dark Tower” by Countee Cullen are both written by black men during the period of the Harlem Renaissance (1276, 1279). Both of these poems address the oppression and discrimination of black people and the hope for equality that the authors have. Through an analysis of the differences in the tone, style of writing and the implied audiences of the two poems, we can better understand how each author viewed the subject of their discrimination and oppression.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the most popular poets of his day. He was highly regarded for his black dialect poetry, which earned him the title, “poet laureate of his race.” Dunbar’s second book of poetry, Majors and Minors, was even reviewed positively by the famous critic William Dean Howells. However, despite Dunbar’s popularity, he has also been widely criticized for his black dialect poetry. Many scholars and African-Americans have argued that it is an unsympathetic portrait of blackness meant to appease his paying white readership. This thesis discusses the conditions and circumstances that influenced Dunbar to write black dialect poetry. It places the poet’s life and career in the social, economic, and critical context of the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
As a Black female writer in the 21st century, having the opportunity to read works by poet/novelist Margaret Walker and now afforded a space to discuss her literary influence passed on to me in my own quest for truth in telling Black stories- our language, our creativity, our avant-garde is one in the same. Our wordplay and visual descriptions of Black life in America is a shared partnership, by conceptualizing the truth about what it means to be aware of one’s history through poetry, fiction, and essays. Reading and studying the literary stylistics of Margaret Walker, true writers go against the status quo of traditionalism as it pertains to language and the written word. It is okay to be experimental and radical, never apologizing for how a sentence is formed. Through poetry and fiction, Margaret Walker was a consummate linguist, mastering the literary art-form of writing dialect as she heard it in African American culture. Margaret Walker’s poetry, fiction, and essays will be examined by using literary explication as a tool, bringing clarity and understanding to her work about African American life in the south, and puts the
At the tender age of seven, Phillis Wheatley was brought from Africa to Boston as a slave. Slaves were not typically thought of as bright, creative or intelligent, but her owner saw a light in Phillis and at the age of thirteen, she tried her hand at poetry. Her experience was a unique one, given the opportunity to expand her mind by her owner, but unable to lift the veil of actually being a slave. Her poem expresses her great arrival from Africa, a joyous adventure, being rescued. If only all slaves were given this great arrival experience, more joyous poetry from slaves may have been written. I enjoy this simplicity of this poem from the eyes of a thirteen year old slave child who wa...
Upon reading the text The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, it easily came to me that the prevailing issues on oppression, or on racial discrimination in particular, played a heavily important role in making this masterpiece. It is a universal issue that has been moving history and is affecting our political system since time immemorial. It has defined several stereotypes in our society and has been the inspiration in the making of popular literary works like that of Browning’s. Moreover, literary masterpieces of written by female authors has always been given a
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.