The Harlem Renaissance

This is Unit Thirteen of American Literature, part one of two: a neighbourhood that became the capital of Black art in the country. Unit twelve closed on the argument between Washington and Du Bois about what Black Americans should ask for. This unit is the generation that stopped asking, and that is its governing idea, which part two pays off. What made it possible was a movement of people: between the wars hundreds of thousands of Black Americans left the rural South for northern cities, and one New York neighbourhood gathered the result. What made it a movement in writing was an argument, which Alain Locke's anthology named and announced, that Black American life is a subject for serious art and that the artist need not answer to white expectations. But the work reached print through patrons and publishers with expectations attached, and that dependence became a subject inside the movement itself. We take the conditions first, then Hughes, the movement's central poet, then his manifesto, then the two poets who chose to write protest in the strictest English form available, and then Toomer and Hurston. By the end you will be able to say what made the movement possible and what it argued. To account for Hughes and his five best-known poems. To state his manifesto's claim. To explain why McKay and Cullen wrote in sonnets. And to place *Cane* and Hurston's novel.

Four entries on the conditions: the migration underneath it, what the movement claimed, the book that named it, and what publication cost.

A migration, and a neighbourhood gathering it.

AML 1201 The Great Migration and a New Capital

Between the wars hundreds of thousands of Black Americans left the rural South for northern cities, and one New York neighbourhood became the centre of Black art, politics and culture in the country. The movement of people is what made the movement of writing possible, so the literary flowering followed the migration rather than causing it.

A decade, a place, an argument.

AML 1202 What the Harlem Renaissance Was

The Harlem Renaissance was a concentration of Black writers, musicians, painters and intellectuals in the nineteen twenties who argued that Black American life was a subject for serious art and that the artist need not answer to white expectations. It produced poetry, fiction, essays and a music, and it was a debate as much as a school.

An anthology that named a generation.

AML 1203 Alain Locke and *The New Negro*

The witness credits Alain Locke's anthology *The New Negro* with gathering the movement and giving it a name and a programme. The figure it announced was self-assured, urban, modern and done apologizing, and the book put poets, fiction writers and essayists between the same covers. The New Negro is a claim rather than a description.

Patrons, magazines, and a price.

AML 1204 The Patrons, the Magazines, and the Terms

The writing reached print through Black magazines, through anthologies, and through white patrons and publishers whose interest came with expectations about what Black writing should look like. The dependence became a subject inside the movement, and writers disagreed about how much it cost. That disagreement over patronage is part of the record.

Six entries on the movement's central poet: a working life in letters, and five poems that each do something different.

The poet laureate of Harlem.

AML 1205 Langston Hughes: The Life

Born in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes travelled widely before settling in the neighbourhood he came to call home, and was celebrated as the poet laureate of Harlem. He wrote poems, fiction, essays, plays and newspaper columns, and he set out to make a living from writing alone, which few American poets have managed.

Four rivers, a soul grown deep.

AML 1206 "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

Written when Hughes was still a teenager, the poem names the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile and the Mississippi, and says the speaker's soul has grown deep like the rivers. It claims a history far older than American slavery for the people the poem speaks for. The claim is a lineage, stated in geography rather than argued.

Sent to the kitchen, coming back.

AML 1207 "I, Too"

The speaker is the darker brother sent to eat in the kitchen when company comes, who laughs, eats well and grows strong, and says that tomorrow he will be at the table and nobody will dare tell him to leave. The poem answers Whitman's singing America with a promise, and it was written against that line.

A statement, an echo, a reply.

AML 1208 "The Weary Blues" and the Blues Form

Hughes brought the blues stanza into poetry: a line, its near repetition, and a third line that answers. "The Weary Blues" frames a Harlem piano player's song inside a listener's report, and the witness credits Hughes with incorporating blues, spirituals, colloquial speech and folkways into verse. The blues stanza is a form rather than a mood.

A question, answered with questions.

AML 1209 "Harlem" and the Deferred Dream

The poem asks what happens to a dream deferred, and offers its possibilities as questions: drying like a raisin in the sun, festering, stinking, crusting over, sagging like a heavy load. The last line, set apart, asks whether it explodes. The poem is eleven lines and almost all question, and that final line stands alone for a reason.

A staircase, with boards torn up.

AML 1210 "Mother to Son"

A mother tells her son that life for her has been no crystal stair but a staircase with tacks, splinters and torn boards, and that she has kept climbing anyway. One extended metaphor carries the whole poem, and it ends by telling him not to turn back. The single figure does all of the work.

Six entries: a manifesto that answered critics on both sides, and two poets who put protest inside the strictest English form.

Without fear or shame.

AML 1211 "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"

In this essay of nineteen twenty-six Hughes writes that the younger Black artists intend to express their individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame, that if white people are pleased they are glad, and that if they are not pleased it does not matter. The essay answers Black critics as well as white ones.

A hell he confesses to loving.

AML 1212 Claude McKay and "America"

Born in Jamaica in eighteen eighty-nine to farming parents, McKay published *Songs of Jamaica* before coming to New York. His sonnet "America" says the country feeds him bread of bitterness and steals his breath, and then that he loves this cultured hell that tests his youth. The poem's love and its accusation are one sentence.

Fourteen lines, holding the unbearable.

AML 1213 The Sonnet as Protest

McKay wrote protest in the strictest English form, and the choice is itself the argument: a Black poet claiming the sonnet claims the whole tradition. "The Lynching" puts an atrocity inside fourteen rhymed lines, and the containment makes it harder to look away from rather than easier. The formality is a claim on the tradition.

A sonnet ending on his own case.

AML 1214 Countee Cullen and "Yet Do I Marvel"

Cullen, born in nineteen-oh-three and raised in Harlem by a minister's family, wrote in traditional forms and on English models. "Yet Do I Marvel" is a sonnet that grants God's inscrutable ways and closes by marvelling at the curious thing of making a poet Black and bidding him sing. The closing couplet is the whole poem's point.

What is Africa to me?

AML 1215 "Heritage" and the Question of Africa

"Heritage" repeats the question of what Africa is to the speaker, running through remembered images of a continent he has never seen and a Christianity he cannot fully hold, and ending without resolving either one. The poem is the movement's clearest statement of a divided inheritance, and its question is asked and not answered.

The tradition, or the blues.

AML 1216 Cullen's Traditionalism and the Quarrel It Caused

Cullen wanted to be a poet rather than a Black poet, and wrote in the English tradition on purpose. Hughes's manifesto argues the opposite case, that the artist should build on Black speech and music. The disagreement runs through the movement, and the course reports it without settling it. Both positions are inside the movement, not outside it.

Three entries to close the part: a book that refuses to be one genre, and a novelist who collected the folklore she then wrote from.

Poems, sketches and stories together.

AML 1217 Jean Toomer and *Cane*

The witness says Toomer, like Cullen, imagined an American identity that would transcend race, and used traditional rhyme and meter rather than seeking new forms. His major work *Cane*, published in nineteen twenty-three, mixes poems, sketches and stories and moves between the rural South and the northern city. The form refuses a genre.

An anthropologist collecting her own.

AML 1218 Zora Neale Hurston: Anthropologist and Novelist

Raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-Black towns, Hurston lost her mother young, moved among relatives, and worked her way to Howard and then to anthropology. She collected folklore in the South and in the Caribbean and wrote fiction out of it. The fieldwork and the fiction are one project rather than two careers.

Three marriages, told on a porch.

AML 1219 *Their Eyes Were Watching God*

The witness calls the novel of nineteen thirty-seven a moving depiction of a woman's maturation through three marriages, evoking Black life on the land in the rural South. Janie tells her own story to a friend on a porch, and that frame makes the whole novel a told story rather than a narrated one.

That is the movement and its central figures. Part two finishes Hurston and takes the legacy. You can say what made the Renaissance possible, a migration of hundreds of thousands out of the rural South, and what it argued, that Black American life is a subject for serious art answerable to nobody's expectations. You can name the anthology that gathered and named it, and the patrons whose interest came with terms attached. You can account for Hughes, who set out to live by writing, and for five poems that each do something different: four rivers claiming a lineage, a darker brother promising to sit at the table, a blues stanza brought into verse, eleven lines that are almost all question, and a staircase with the boards torn up. You can state the manifesto's claim to write without fear or shame. You can explain why McKay put an atrocity inside fourteen rhymed lines and why Cullen ended a sonnet on his own case, and report the quarrel between the tradition and the blues without settling it. And you can place *Cane* and Hurston's porch.