“My point is not that all young poets should perforce write racially if they are black. It is simply that in America it is almost impossible for Negro poets not to do so.”

Distinguishing artistic freedom from the unavoidable pressure of lived social realities · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“The color problem is a drag on the whole world, not just on Negro poetry.”

Insisting that racial injustice is a human problem rather than merely a literary subject · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Poetry
• Truth

“Our time today is the time of color from Selma to Saigon, and of the heartaches and heartbreaks of racial conflict from Cape Town to Chicago.”

Placing American racial conflict within a wider international struggle · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Despair
• Truth

“It would seem to me then only fitting and proper—if art is to be an intensification or enlargement of life, or to give adequate comment on what living is like in the poet's own time—that Negro art be largely protest art.”

Defining art as an intensified response to the realities of its own age · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“Only a very few Negro writers have been able to escape the impact on their lives of this white shadow across America.”

Describing racism as an unavoidable influence on generations of writers · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Art
• Despair
• Truth

“The desire to be an integral part of the life of the country whose soil the Negro people have inhabited for three hundred years is a majority desire.”

Emphasising belonging and participation rather than separation · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Hope
• Truth

“Most Negro poets a hundred years ago, and most Negro poets today are protest poets.”

Identifying protest as a persistent tradition shaped by historical circumstances · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Poetry
• Truth

“In my poems in the manner of the blues and spirituals, I have attempted to inject a sense of racial color and rhythms into the broader framework of the American language.”

Explaining how Hughes brought Black musical traditions into his poetic language · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“The charm and humor of this now almost unreadable slave English gave unique color to his work.”

Reflecting on the artistic power and historical distance of Paul Laurence Dunbar's dialect · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Art
• Poetry

“Hers was distinctly a poetry of protest, as has been most Negro poetry for two hundred years—which has limited its appreciation in America to a comparatively small circle of readers.”

Observing how protest can give poetry urgency while narrowing its acceptance · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Poetry
• Truth

“Once liberated, he continued to protest in writing concerning the sad fate of the black man on American shores, in slavery or out.”

Presenting writing as a continuing instrument of witness after personal freedom was gained · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Freedom
• Poetry
• Truth

“Horton had to wait until the end of the Civil War to become a free man.”

A stark reminder of the limits that even literary achievement could not overcome under slavery · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Freedom
• Poetry
• War

“She wrote herself to freedom, modeling her verses after those of Milton, Dryden, and Alexander Pope, as was the fashion of her times.”

Describing how Phillis Wheatley's literary achievement became inseparable from her journey out of enslavement · Essay, 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

• Freedom
• Poetry

“And they accept what beauty is their own without question.”

Praising an unselfconscious acceptance of one's own culture and beauty · Essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

• Beauty
• Truth

“Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear.”

Contrasting social pressure with the creative freedom offered by ordinary audiences · Essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

• Art

“They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardizations.”

Valuing individuality as a defence against cultural uniformity · Essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

• Art
• Truth

“These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child.”

Locating musical creativity in a community willing to embrace its own traditions · Essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

• Art
• Music

“Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout.”

Evoking the intensity with which ordinary life can become joy and spiritual expression · Essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

• Faith
• Joy

“They do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else.”

Admiring people whose sense of self is not governed by imitation or social approval · Essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

• Truth

“But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority—may the Lord be praised.”

Celebrating ordinary people as a vital source of cultural life and artistic material · Essay, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

• Art
• Joy

“Well, everyone knows, except us, that all Negroes have rhythm, so they elected me as class poet.”

Turning an imposed stereotype into a wry account of his beginnings as a poet · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Childhood
• Poetry

“I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry.”

Recalling with irony how a racial stereotype helped lead him towards poetry · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Childhood
• Poetry
• Truth

“Something about my grandmother’s stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything.”

Describing an early lesson in resilience absorbed indirectly through storytelling · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Childhood
• Hope
• Memory

“Nobody ever cried in my grandmother’s stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying.”

Remembering family stories that presented hardship through endurance and action · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Childhood
• Memory