FOREWORD
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r is now five years since James Weldon Johnsonedited with a brilliant essay on “The Negro’s CreativeGenius” The Book of American Negro Poetry, fouryears since the publication of Robert T. Kerlin’s NegroPoets and Their Poems, and three years since from theTrinity College Press in Durham, North Carolina, cameAn Anthology of Verse by American Negroes, edited byNewman Ivey White and Walter Clinton Jackson. Thestudent of verse by American Negro poets will find inthese three anthologies comprehensive treatment of thework of Negro poets from Phyllis Wheatley, the firstAmerican Negro known to have composed verses, towriters of the present day. With Mr. Johnson’s schol-arly and painstaking survey, from both a historicaland a critical standpoint, of the entire range of verseby American Negroes, and with Professor Kerlin’s in-clusions of excerpts from the work of most of thoseNegro poets whose poems were extant at the time ofhis compilation, there would be scant reason for theassembling and publication of another such collectionwere it not for the new voices that within the past threeto five years have sung so significantly as to make im-perative an anthology recording some snatches of theirsongs. To those intelligently familiar with what ispopularly termed the renaissance in art and literature
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