“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

“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

“Social forces pull backwards or forwards, right or left, and social poems get caught in the pulling and hauling.”

Recognising that socially engaged poetry inevitably enters public conflict · Essay, My Adventures as a Social Poet

• Art
• Poetry