Title: Cries in the Wilderness: African-American Poetry of the 1930s

Abstract: The African-American poetry of the 1930s represents a far different picture than has been chronicled. The tremendous energy that has gone into the construction of what is now institutionalized as the Harlem Renaissance has cast a deep shadow over the decade of the thirties—in effect subsuming the period of the Great Depression into the Harlem Renaissance. At the same time the personality cults that have arisen around the iconic personalizations of Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown have also affected the assessment of the poetry of the thirties. It is difficult to locate the decade of the 1930s in critical studies. The impetus in effect by the commentators on that decade is that of reduction. The idea that the 1930s constitute a period without African-American literary production became a dogma. African-American poets were not relegated to the production of poems cast in the folk forms. The preponderance of the sonnet in the African-American poetry of the 1930s has been unacknowledged. After the 1960s, the valorization of the political over the aesthetic by critics is a determining factor in the assessment of the poetry of the 1930s. There is a large body of work published in magazines and anthologies that has not been taken into consideration.

Keywords: African-American poetry anthology, protest poetry, anti-lynching poetry, Great Depression, agitprop, Thirties

Author: Jon Woodson, Professor, Howard University, Washington D.C., USA.