“A survey of the work of Negro poets will show that the individual diversifying ego transcends the synthesizing hue.”

Personality, not colour, is what finally sorts one poet from another · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

• Identity
• Individuality
• Poetry

“For we must be one thing or the other, an asset or a liability, the sinew in your wing to help you soar, or the chain to bind you to earth.”

Urges the young to become lift rather than dead weight in the common work · Speech to the League of Youth, printed in The Crisis, August 1923

• Purpose
• Responsibility
• Youth

“The poet writes out of his experience, whether it be personal or vicarious, and as these experiences differ among other poets, so do they differ among Negro poets; for the double obligation of being both Negro and American is not so unified as we are often led to believe.”

Insists that double identity does not flatten every Black poet into one voice · Foreword, Caroling Dusk, 1927

• Experience
• Identity
• Poetry