By Lucy Caplan
Lucy Caplan is a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. In 2016 she received the Rubin Prize for Music Criticism.
The Harlem Renaissance—a term typically used to describe the New York-based flourishing of African American arts and letters in the 1920s and 1930s—is something of a misnomer. While Harlem was an epicenter of Black cultural life during this era, the phenomenon was global in scope, with vibrant artistic communities springing up in cities from Chicago to Paris, Havana to Manila. And while there was no doubt a new (or revitalized) energy bubbling up around Black culture and its relationship to social change, the movement was also but one of innumerable eras in which Black artists and intellectuals have crafted art which speaks to its contemporary conditions and dreams of a better world.
This evening’s program both harkens back to the moment of the Harlem Renaissance and illuminates its connections to more expansive creative and historical lineages. Focused on newly composed settings of texts written a century ago, it knits past and present together. At the heart of the program are poets, whose works and biographies are explored in the notes below. Their vivid words attune us not only to the movement’s major conceptual themes of Black self-determination, resistance, and beauty, but also to the panoply of literary forms and techniques that its writers used, from hyper-traditional sonnets to modern, blues-inflected verses. Through these varied texts—from James Weldon Johnson’s romantic, classically structured “Beauty That Is Never Old” to Arna Bontemps’s haunting, evocative “Southern Mansion”—the richness of the Renaissance can be heard.
Robert Owens (1925–2017)
Desire; Dream; Juliet; Man (1973)
In time of silver rain; Fulfillment; Night Song; Silence; Carolina Cabin; Songs; Sleep (1958)
Born in Texas and raised in California, Robert Owens spent most of his life as an expatriate in Europe, where he lived for more than fifty years. A multitalented pianist, actor, and composer, he was particularly drawn to art song, setting the poetry of figures including Countee Cullen, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. Like so many composers, he embraced the musical vitality of Langston Hughes’s poems. When the two men met in 1958, Hughes encouraged Owens to set poems from his 1947 collection Fields of Wonder. The song cycles Desire and Silver Rain do just that.
The four songs of Desire compress layers of emotional intensity into brief, impressionistic pieces. The title song progresses from a passionate opening cry to a vulnerable, questioning conclusion, while “Dream” evokes the mystery of its text—“Last night I dreamt / This most strange dream”—by way of a vocal line that wanders chromatically within a limited vocal range. “Juliet” is infused with an anguished energy, then “Man” relaxes into ballad-like serenity.
“In time of silver rain” is a reverent exploration of natural beauty, its phrases winding continuously upward. “Fulfillment” has a more theatrical bent, with the vocalist luxuriating in melismatic gestures and leaping up to the highest parts of the register. “Night Song” is peacefully meditative, a fitting predecessor to the gentle warmth of “Silence.” The pace picks up in the jolly “Carolina Cabin,” which is followed by the lushly textured “Songs.” The cycle ends, fittingly, with “Sleep,” bringing us finally from the cycle’s opening images of the vast natural world to an intimate domestic scene.
Jeremiah Evans
April Rain Song; Lost Illusions; Southern Mansion
This set of songs takes up the work of three of the Harlem Renaissance’s most vital poets. The eclectic, genre-spanning Langston Hughes, who wrote poetry, short stories, and opera libretti alongside journalism and essays, was an adventurous writer who sought to translate the rhythms and feelings of jazz and blues into poetic form. “April Rain Song” originally appeared in 1921 in the Brownies’ Book, a children’s magazine published by the NAACP. Delightfully evocative, it uses repeated phrases to mirror the steady fall of raindrops.
Georgia Douglas Johnson was a similarly multifaceted writer, today remembered best for her work as a playwright and her cultivation of a literary salon for Black writers at her home in Washington, D.C. “Lost Illusions” appeared in The Book of American Negro Poetry, an anthology edited by James Weldon Johnson. Lamenting the disappearance of the “veils of my youth,” the speaker subtly links the personal to the political: the phrase recalls W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous image of the “veil” as a means of understanding American racism, a force motivated by exclusion which also affords African Americans a unique vantage point from which to perceive the world.
The haunted racial past of the United States is addressed more explicitly in Arna Bontemps’s “Southern Mansion.” Born in Louisiana, Bontemps later lived in Los Angeles, Harlem, and Washington. D.C, enjoying a varied literary career. Much of his poetry continued to address Southern themes. In this poem, the superficially glamorous space of a mansion is unsettled by “dead men” and the “chains of bondmen,” persistent reminders of the violence of enslavement.
Margaret Bonds (1913–1972)
Poème d’automne (1934); Winter Moon (1936); Young Love in Spring (1955); Summer Storm (1955)
Growing up within a lively artistic community in Chicago—her mother, Estella, was a well-known pianist, and the family hosted musical get-togethers, featuring celebrities like Roland Hayes, in their living room—Margaret Bonds became immersed in African American musical life. She discovered the poetry of Langston Hughes at a moment of great need: facing the everyday indignities of racism while a college student, she came across Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in a library and found it profoundly affirming. The two met in 1936 and developed a close friendship; she later recalled that they “were like brother and sister.”
Bonds set many of Hughes’s poems to music over the years, including the four that comprise the cycle Songs of the Seasons. “Poème d’automne,” composed when Bonds was just 21 years old, sets the scene with burnished, minor-key sonorities; the vocalist lingers on the flatted blue notes that recur throughout its angular phrases. “Winter Moon” is a sliver of a song, barely a minute long. The piano’s low ostinato and the singer’s repeated pitches create an eerie atmosphere. “Young Love in Spring,” composed nearly two decades after the cycle’s first two songs, is playfully romantic, with expansive phrases that remain in the upper reaches of the voice’s register. In the densely chromatic, rollicking “Summer Storm,” syncopated rhythms and jazzy harmonies express both the pattering of the rain and “the wonder of being in love.”
Jasmine Barnes
Peace; Invocation
“Peace” first appeared in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Bronze: A Book of Verse (1922), the author’s second collection of poetry. In an introduction to the collection, Johnson describes her work as “the child of a bitter earth-wound,” in which she is able to “sing out, and of, my sorrow.” “Peace” offers a faith that the world’s many sorrows, from injustice to war, will someday fall away, the “night of strife” giving way to “sweet charity” and “brotherhood.”
Claude McKay’s “Invocation” wrestles with the relationship between past and present, pondering the role of an “Ancestral Spirit”—here associated with an African creative past—in the context of “modern Time.” This theme motivated much of McKay’s writing. An adventurous writer who once described himself as a “vagabond with a purpose,” McKay traveled across the globe in search of both artistic inspiration and like-minded political radicals. A key Harlem Renaissance figure, he spent little actual time in Harlem, preferring instead to travel the world. Born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica in 1889, McKay first visited the United States in 1912, and he also lived in Holland, Belgium, France, the Soviet Union, and Morocco.
Brandon Spencer
I Know My Soul; Dance of Love
In “I Know My Soul,” Claude McKay turns inward, seeking and finding self-affirmation. While this project is incomplete—“the sign may not be fully read,” he muses—it serves a crucial purpose, allowing the speaker to find beauty and meaning within the “narcotic thought” of self-knowledge, even in a world that might otherwise deny him those qualities. Many scholars have interpreted the poem as referencing McKay’s status as a Black queer man in a world hostile to multiple aspects of his identity.
Countee Cullen’s ecstatic “The Dance of Love” was inspired by the novel Batouala, by the French writer René Maran. A celebrated poet of the era, Cullen was key to the social and intellectual worlds of the Harlem Renaissance. As a poet, he was interested in universal themes and skeptical of aesthetic frameworks that pigeonholed Black poets by pandering to the expectations of white audiences. As he wrote in the introduction to an anthology he edited, Caroling Dusk, “The attempt to corral the outbursts of the ebony muse into some definite mold to which all poetry by Negroes will conform seems altogether futile and aside from the facts.”
Damien Sneed
Beauty That Is Never Old; The Gift to Sing; To America
These three poems were written by the profoundly multifaceted James Weldon Johnson. a diplomat, author, lawyer, writer, musician, political activist, and more, who was central to both the artistic and political dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance. With his brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson, he wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing”; the two also wrote an array of songs and operettas. He published numerous collections of poetry, and his modernist novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, is a classic of early-twentieth-century American literature. As president of the NAACP beginning in 1920, he led campaigns for civil rights and racial justice.
These three texts first appeared in Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917), Johnson’s first full-length poetry collection. Written to commemorate the passage of half a century since Emancipation, the collection explores a range of styles and forms, from dialect poetry rooted in vernacular speech to canonical forms like the sonnet. The first two, which take up the ostensibly universal topics of beauty and song, demonstrate Johnson’s embrace of conventional poetic forms. “To America” has a more politicized cast; it addresses the reader directly to determine what the next fifty years will bring for African Americans. Will they be seen by their fellow citizens as “men or things”? Will oppression persist, or might justice yet prevail?
Shawn E. Okpebholo
Romance
Claude McKay’s poetry collection Harlem Shadows (1922) made a splash on the literary scene, garnering praise from both general readers and fellow poets: Georgia Douglas Johnson called it “vital and living,” while James Weldon Johnson noted that with its publication, McKay “has risen like a new and flaming star on the horizon.” One of the collection’s hallmarks is its breadth, ranging from politically charged rhetoric to vivid urban scenes. “Romance” takes up another of the collection’s major themes: love and intimacy.
Joel Thompson
Supplication; Compensation; My People
Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. died of tuberculosis in 1919, prior to what most scholars consider the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. Just 24 years old, he had already written a number of plays and poems. “Supplication” appeared posthumously, in James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry. Powerful in its brevity, it makes a plea for peace, its speaker seeking nothing more than “rest and quiet.”
Paul Laurence Dunbar, too, predated and anticipated the Harlem Renaissance. The best-known African American poet of the late nineteenth century, he became famous for his use of dialect – even though this technique featured in only some of his work. “Compensation” uses a formal vocabulary befitting the seriousness of its subjects: failure, beauty, and death.
The somber mood of Cotter’s and Dunbar’s poetry explodes into joy and laughter in Langston Hughes’s “My People.” A loving paean to the “dream-singers” and “story-tellers,” “cooks” and “waiters,” who are part of Hughes’s community, the poem spills buoyantly from line to line, as if no traditional form can contain its exuberance.
