In African American poetry, John Henry represents heroic labour, exploitation, masculinity, industrial struggle, resistance, and the costs of proving human worth within dehumanising systems. The myth blends folklore and historical imagination, making it a powerful symbolic resource. Poets invoke John Henry to explore strength, exhaustion, technological displacement, racial labour history, and the tension between pride and sacrifice.

The John Henry myth as a poetic subject engages questions of Black labour, bodily strength, technological displacement, and the dignity of work under dehumanising conditions. The legend's historical basis — likely a Black worker in the post-Civil War railroad construction era — makes it a figure for the transition from enslavement to nominally free but exploited labour. Students should consider the gender politics of John Henry as an icon of Black masculinity: the poem most often cited, the traditional ballad itself, celebrates physical prowess while also mourning it as ultimately futile against industrialisation. Related terms include work song, Black masculinity, collective struggle, field holler, and mythmaking.