The African American Sonnet

A Literary History

Timo Müller

• Verlag: University Press of Mississippi
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781496817846
• Thema: Letteratura
• Thema: Critica letteraria nordamericana

Some of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's "If We Must Die, " Countee Cullen's "Yet Do I Marvel, " Gwendolyn Brooks's "First fight. Then fiddle." Yet few readers realize that these poems are part of a rich tradition that formed after the Civil War and comprises more than a thousand sonnets by African American poets. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Rita Dove all wrote sonnets.Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Müller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history. He examines the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the postwar period, the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement, and disruptive strategies of recent experimental poetry.In this book, Müller examines the inventive strategies African American poets devised to occupy and reshape a form overwhelmingly associated with Europe. In the tightly circumscribed space of sonnets, these poets mounted evocative challenges to the discursive and material boundaries they confronted.

Chapter 1

THE GENTEEL TRADITION AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN SONNET

In 1889 the A.M.E. Church Review, a widely read organ of the emerging black middle class, carried an essay on “The Province of Poetry” by society leader and occasional poet Josephine Turpin Washington. The main purpose of poetry, Washington wrote, was to improve the reader through refined ideas and sentiments. While “the cultivation of an inner, a soul life, does not directly contribute to the breadwinning process,” she argued, “it sweetens and strengthens man’s whole nature, and so fits him for the better performance of any duty … Poetry is allied to our best affections. Home, wife, mother, country, are themes ever dear to the poet” (quoted in Bruce, Black American 21). For Washington as for many of her contemporaries, the province of poetry had clear boundaries. It was circumscribed by the nation and the domestic sphere, bounded off from the base self-interest of “the breadwinning process,” from politics and business. Yet, in spite or because of these boundaries, poetry enabled flights of fancy, emotional refinement, and intellectual insight. It was both fundamental and superior to the life outside.

Her idealism, domesticity, and penchant for self-improvement situate Washington in the social and aesthetic sphere that historians have come to call the genteel tradition. Coined by George Santayana in 1911, the term refers to a set of norms and values that shaped American middle-class culture from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth. The genteel tradition as characterized by Santayana and later historians was conservative, elitist, and idealistic in outlook. Its aesthetic values were modeled on an idealized European tradition and favored romanticized settings, moral edification, and allegorical interpretation. Most genteel readers and critics believed that these values found their purest manifestation in poetry, and that poetry was therefore the highest of literary genres. As Franklin Frazier, Dickson Bruce, and others have shown, the black middle class largely embraced these genteel preferences in its quest for social recognition in a racially segregated society. For educated African Americans, refined taste and behavior became a means of deflecting racist insults, asserting intellectual capability, and contesting legalized discrimination.¹

In the twentieth century the genteel conception of literature fell out of favor with African American critics. Against the background of the New Negro and Black Arts movements, critics tended to prefer writing that had an openly political purpose and was inspired by such sources of cultural authenticity as folk expression, popular music, and African traditions. Even Saunders Redding, in many ways a genteel figure, dismissed most poetry of the postbellum period as “dilettantism,” “conventional,” and “without substance” (85–92). Under the influence of the Black Arts movement, some critics went further and accused poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and William Stanley Braithwaite, along with the black genteel tradition as a whole, of subordination to white racism.²

As a result of this shift in critical opinion, studies of postbellum African American poetry tend to neglect the generative, politically empowering dimension of genteel conventions. Some scholars have identified cases of subversive or empowering appropriation in the work of individual poets, especially Dunbar and Albery Allson Whitman, and discussions of the genteel interest in classical subjects occasionally hint at this dimension. The only detailed study of the subject is Keith Leonard’s Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights (2006), which explores the “middle ground” Dunbar and other black genteel poets inhabited between the boundaries conventionally ascribed to the black and the white literary traditions. Rather than imitating or rejecting genteel aesthetics, Leonard points out, these poets brought it into a mutually transformative interplay with African American concerns and traditions.³

The sonnet is not only an outstanding example of this mutual transformation, this chapter argues, but it offers unique insights into the productive appropriation of the genteel tradition by African American poets between Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance. The sonnet was a favorite genre in the genteel tradition, so much so that Edwin Arlington Robinson derided his fellow poets as “little sonnet-men” by the end of the nineteenth century (93). African American poets drew on its authority to negotiate and revise the themes Josephine Turpin Washington calls “ever dear to the poet”: love, interiority, patriotism. For technically accomplished poets the sonnet provided various opportunities to signify on racial prejudice in a covert manner. Mastery of one of the oldest and most demanding forms in the Western canon alone made a compelling case against allegations of black intellectual inferiority. In exploring the technical intricacies of the sonnet form, the most innovative poets of the time became remarkably adept at turning genteel conventions against the racial prejudice these conventions implied.

After exemplifying these signifying strategies in sonnets by Braithwaite and James Weldon Johnson, the chapter focuses on two conventions of the genteel sonnet that poets appropriated for purposes of self-assertion. One is the Romantic notion of the sonnet as a key to the poet’s heart, which African American poets adapted to express what they were not supposed to acknowledge or even possess: emotions, desires, and generally a complex inner life. The other is the fashion for tribute sonnets, which African American poets appropriated to defend the legacy of Reconstruction by celebrating abolitionists and anti-slavery fighters. The concluding section of the chapter demonstrates how, in commenting on and engaging with respected public figures, these poets troubled traditional hierarchies of expression and contributed to the new poetic subjectivity by shifting the focus from the (often white) addressee to the black speaker.

WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE, JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, AND GENTEEL SIGNIFYING

The outstanding representative of genteel values in African American poetry, many contemporary and later observers agreed, was William Stanley Braithwaite. A self-made man whose light skin opened the doors of New England’s intellectual elite to him, Braithwaite gained a position of influence and authority in the literary field unimaginable for previous writers of African descent. His anthologies of English poetry and his regular column in the Boston Evening Transcript (from 1905) made Braithwaite the country’s most influential poetry critic by the beginning of the twentieth century. Some later commentators accused him of disavowing his race in the process, and indeed Braithwaite avoided categorization as a black writer, which would have reduced him to dialect work in public perception.⁴ Yet he did use his influence to promote individual African American writers, and his own poetry, which has been neglected in critical debate, casts further doubt on the notion that he was an apolitical figure.

Inspired by the English Romantics and fin-de-siècle aestheticism, Braithwaite’s poetry epitomizes genteel tastes and values. It includes a considerable proportion of sonnets, most of which are Keatsian in attitude and center on the feelings of the lyrical I. In his second collection, The House of Falling Leaves (1908), however, Braithwaite begins to use genteel conventions to signify on racial stereotypes, for example in the sonnet “This is My Life”:

To feed my soul with beauty till I die;

To give my hands a pleasant task to do;

To keep my heart forever filled anew

With dreams and wonders which the days supply;

To love all conscious living, and thereby

Respect the brute who renders up its due,

And know the world as planned is good and true—

And thus—because there chanced to be an I!

This is my life since things are as they are:

One half akin to flowers and the grass:

The rest a law unto the changeless star.

And I believe when I shall come to pass

Within the Door His hand shall hold ajar

I’ll leave no echoing whisper of Alas! (101)

The poem is an amalgam of stock devices from the genteel archive. A softened Romanticism, devout Christian morality, fin-de-siècle languishing, and aestheticist egocentrism all flow into this vague, complacent self-conception. What saves the poem from redundancy is its strict focus on the lyrical I. The ostentatious title imbues the abstract statements of the poem with autobiographical significance and the unusual syntax reinforces this referentiality. The entire octave consists of a subordinate clause that leads up to the italicized “I” and the repetition of the title at the beginning of the sestet. The suspension of this eponymous reference creates a vanishing line that puts the I of the nodal passage firmly at the center of perception and leads up to its first apotheosis. The second apotheosis comes in the sestet: the reader’s gaze is directed from the earth to the sky and the I enters heaven, where he holds divine judgment over himself after God has awaited him at the door like an obliging Negro Servant. Under the disguise of conventional diction and perfectly mastered form, Braithwaite sketches a spiritual autobiography in the grandest terms available to white Christian gentility. His work in the sonnet here parallels his biographical trajectory in that it revises the covert racial hierarchies of the genteel tradition simply by inserting a black subject in an otherwise conventional framework.

The next step for genteel signifying was to extend this revisionary dynamic to the formal framework itself. Braithwaite did not take that step, but the other outstanding figure of black genteel poetry did. James Weldon Johnson published the sonnet “Mother Night” in the February 1910 issue of Century magazine, a respectable middle-class outlet. Arguably the most accomplished sonnet by an African American before the Harlem Renaissance, “Mother Night” signifies on the formal conventions of genteel poetry to articulate a message of black racial empowerment in the innocuous guise of an allegorical lament.⁵

Eternities before the first-born day,

Or ere the first sun fledged his wings of flame,

Calm Night, the everlasting and the same,

A brooding mother over chaos lay.

And whirling suns shall blaze and then decay,

Shall run their fiery courses and then claim

The haven of the darkness whence they came;

Back to Nirvanic peace shall grope their way.

So when my feeble sun of life burns out,

And sounded is the hour for my long sleep,

I shall, full weary of the feverish light,

Welcome the darkness without fear or doubt,

And heavy-lidded, I shall softly creep

Into the quiet bosom of the Night.

Beneath its placid tone and apparently genteel imagery, the poem inverts and revalorizes a number of oppositions inscribed into the Western poetic canon: day and night, aspiration and resignation, light and dark, creation and chaos, linearity and cyclicality, male and female. Against the traditional emphasis on day as the period of life, clarity, and lucidity, Johnson makes night the all-encompassing ground of his poem. Night frames not only the poem itself, appearing in the title and as its last word; it also frames day and human life in general. On an individual level, the speaker experiences it as a refuge from the physical and emotional strains caused by daily life, as a sphere of peace and quietude associated with the nurturing principle of motherhood. Johnson’s modification of the sonnet structure emphasizes this stance. Instead of developing a countermovement, the sestet endorses the initial argument and draws the speaker into the scene he has described in the octave. Even as night becomes death the speaker continues to welcome the quietness and peace it offers: creeping into its bosom is his only active movement in the entire poem.

Whereas the traditional love sonnet put a strong emphasis on the speaker’s aspiration toward his beloved and the ideals associated with her, the speaker of “Mother Night” has no aspirations at all, except a vague yearning for death. Along with its preference for night and sleep over day and life, the poem valorizes resignation as the more appealing form of aspiration. It adopts the aestheticist posture of languishing world-weariness, yet complements it with a revised version of the “uplift” idea of individual aspiration prominent in contemporary race discourse (Gaines 1–17; 67–99). Avoiding mere escapism, this move invests the conventional aestheticist posture with new meaning and new assurance as it comes to express the poem’s dark ontology. Johnson lends new depth to the sentimental yearning for otherworldly peace and moves beyond other genteel poets, white and black, in his subtle use of allegory and his revision of conventional symbolism.

“Mother Night” makes a sustained argument for the superiority of darkness and radicalizes this argument through various social and political allusions. The poem describes darkness as the complete absence of light, and thus as blackness. In the context of contemporary debates over the origins of human culture, the “dark place” from which all life originates might be Africa, and contemporary black readers would likely associate the “blaze” and “flame” that characterize day(light) in the poem with the lynchings and Klan bonfires that had been regular newspaper features for decades and that appear in several of Johnson’s poems from the period. A more sustained and explicit layer of allusions is established by the religious references. Trigger words like “eternity” and “chaos” link the poem to the Christian narrative of creation and resurrection that dominated both genteel and African American spirituality at the time. In the octave, the focus is on creation and on life in general (“darkness was upon the face of the deep,” Gen 1:2); in the sestet, on death and on individual lives (death as a “long sleep,” Eccles 46:19). In both cases the Christian version is subordinated to the poem’s revisionist ontology. The Biblical genesis is reduced to an insignificant flicker in the eternities of night, and the afterlife becomes a cyclical return to night rather than an ascent to the light of heaven. The linear, teleological worldview of Western culture is superseded by the cyclical worldview and mythical time of the African tradition. The Christian Father is replaced by the dark, archaic Mother Night.

The shift from the male to the female principle supports not just the religious argument, but also Johnson’s negotiation of the genteel tradition. The intellectual avant-garde of the 1910s regarded the genteel tradition as the outcome of a fundamental division of American society into a practical, progressive, male sphere and an abstract, nostalgic, female one. In the lecture that gave the genteel tradition its name, Santayana described “the sphere … of the American woman” as that “half of the American mind … not occupied intensely in practical affairs” (128–29). Around the turn of the century the influential critic and novelist William Dean Howells had written repeatedly and ambivalently about the “tradition of decency” in American literature, which he had endorsed on the grounds that “the vast majority” of the American reading public “are ladies, and that very many, if not most, of these ladies are young girls” (149–50). In the first half of the twentieth century many modernist writers and critics, including some members of the Harlem Renaissance, took up the gender argument to emphasize their masculine, progressive stance. One of the most notorious examples is Saunders Redding’s description of Countee Cullen as “a gentle poet” whose “vision of life is interestingly distorted … as if he saw life through the eyes of a woman who is at once shrinking and bold, sweet and bitter” (110).

The conspicuously gendered “Mother Night” engages and complicates this debate in several ways. In some respects it reiterates genteel notions of gender: the female principle (night) is associated with passivity, fecundity, and motherhood, while the male principle (sun) is described as active and powerful. In the sestet the male role is smoothly conferred from the sun to the speaker (“when my feeble sun of life burns out”) but the return-to-the-womb scene that follows affirms the gender opposition. At the same time, however, the poem inverts the hierarchy implicit in the genteel active/passive dichotomy as it assumes that night will outlast not just one but many suns, and that night is the primary ground from whi...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Troubling Spaces
• Chapter 1: The Genteel Tradition and the Emergence of the African American Sonnet
• Chapter 2: New Negro and Genteel Protest: The Sonnet during the Harlem Renaissance
• Chapter 3: The Sonnet and Black Transnationalism in the 1930s
• Chapter 4: The Vernacular Sonnet and the Afro-Modernist Project
• Chapter 5: Poetics of the Enclave: The Sonnet in the Age of Black Nationalism
• Chapter 6: The Spaces of Black Experimental Poetry
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index