Robert Thomas Kerlin

“ Enter the camp with me, if you will, and we shall watch together this moving panorama of soldier life; we shall see and hear and feel what as visions and impressions will remain with us forever—and not painfully so altogether, either on account of the evils or the hardships, for everywhere the good is more than the evil and the hardships are endured as by brave soldiers. If your heart be sound and good, as the examining surgeon assured me mine was; if you appreciate the immense significance of this national uprising in arms in the cause of humanity ”

“ Nothing in the life of the nation has seemed to me more significant than that dark civilization which the colored man has built up in the midst of a white society organized against it. The Negro has been driven under all the burdens of oppression, both material and spiritual, to the brink of desperation, but he has always been saved by his philosophy of life. He has advanced against all opposition by a certain elevation of his spirit. He has been made strong in tribulation. He has constrained oppression to give him wings. ”

“ In every home it has a place and is cherished. Its contents are better known and more loved than the contents of any other book. Untutored, nameless poets, nature-inspired, gave this priceless boon to all generations of children, and to all sorts and conditions—an immortal book. As a life-long teacher and student of poetry, I venture, with no fear, the assertion that from no book of verse in our language can the whole art of poetry be so effectively learned as from Mother Goose’s Melodies. ”

“ On the Kentucky plantation where Stephen Collins Foster one June morning, when the mocking birds were singing and “the darkies were gay,” composed and his sister sang, “My Old Kentucky Home,” there was among those first delighted listeners who paused in their tasks to hear the immortal song at its birth a slave girl in whose soul were strange melodies of her own. Born of free people of color, she was bonded to the owner of this plantation, yet her soul was such as must be free. Faithful in her work, respectful and obedient, she was yet a dangerous character among slaves, being too spirited. ”

“ The war is over; so let the sweet-smelling incense of comradeship and fraternity rise on a common altar of Peace.
And now the Chaplain, in bidding his comrades farewell, would make his final words to them worthy of their remembrance, safe for their guidance, and strong for their support to the very end of life. For six months in camp he sought to be their moral guide, their spiritual pastor, and their faithful ministrant in every need of body, mind, and heart. He would still be their counsellor, their friend and helper. ”

“ As a witness of the Negro’s untutored gift for song there are the Spirituals, his “canticles of love and woe,” chanted wildly, in that darkness which only a few rays from heaven brightened. Since they afford, as it were, a background for the song of cultured art which now begins to appear, I must here give a word to these crude old plantation songs. They are one of the most notable contributions of any people, similarly circumstanced, to the world’s treasury of song, altogether the most appealing. Their significance for history and for art—more especially for art—awaits interpretation. ”

“ As for the last, being a fighter by profession, he comes to entertain a high sense of honor, and is called upon to maintain his rights and stand up for his cause. Of course, there is code of laws for army life, which, although unwritten, are none the less strict. There is, therefore, no school of character better than the camp. It, indeed, ruins many. So does every occupation and every environment. But those who set themselves strongly against the evils of this way of life acquire a strength and nobleness which are not possible under less strenuous and trying conditions. ”

“ The productions I have seen in the Negro magazines and newspapers from William Moore’s pen give me the idea of a poet distinctly original and distinctly endowed with imagination. If there appears some obscurity in his poems let it not be too hastily set down against him as a fault. Some ideas are intrinsically obscure. The expression of them that should be lucid would be false, inadequate. Some poets there needs must be who, escaping from the inevitable, the commonplace, will transport us out into infinity to confront the eternal mysteries. ”

“ In the prime of his years, one of the strongest among his comrades, after ten days of suffering, he passed away—Corporal John B. McNair, a soldier of his country, whose courage was shown not upon the field of carnage where the trumpet and flag inspire on to the deadly charge and heroic deed, but only in a battle where he fought alone, with nothing to inspire, nothing but now and then the kind look or word of comrades to cheer. But he died his country's defender in the cause of humanity. His will be a soldier's reward in heaven. ”

“ No one will deny to the Negro this gift. Whoever has listened to a colored preacher’s sermon, either of the old or the new school, will recall perhaps more than one example of poetic phrasing, more than one word-picture, that rendered some idea vivid beyond vanishing. It no doubt has been made, in the ignorant or illiterate, an object of jest, just as the other two endowments have been; but these three gifts are the three supreme gifts of the poet,{6} and the poet is the supreme outcome of the race: power of feeling, power of imagination, power of expression—and these make the poet. ”

“ Not less distinctive in quality than Mrs. Johnson’s, and not less beautiful in artistry, are the brief lyrics of Miss Angelina W. Grimké, also of the city of Washington. If hers should be called imagist poetry or no I cannot say, but I am certain that more vivid imaging of objects has not been done in verse by any contemporary. This, too, in stanzas that suggest in their perfection of form the work of the old lapidaries. Nor is there but a surface or formal beauty. There is passion, there is beauty of idea, the soul of lyric poetry is there as well as the form. ”

“ Many are the forms of expression that the life of a developing people or group finds for itself—business and wealth, education and culture, political and social unrest and agitation, literature and art. It can scarcely happen that any people or group has a vital significance for other peoples or groups, or any real potency, until it begins to express itself in poetry. When, however, a race or a portion of our common race begins to embody its aspirations, its grievances, its animating spirit in song the world may well take notice. ”

“ Not without hurt to itself may the oyster produce its pearl. These poems from the heart of a woman remind me of nothing so much as a string of pearls. Each one is witness to a bruise or gash to the spirit. The lyric cry has not been more piercing in anything written on American soil, piercing all the more for the perfect restraint, the sure artistry. It was a heart surcharged with sorrow in which these pearls of poesy took shape from secret wounds. ”

“ The heart of one woman speaks in them for thousands in America, else inarticulate. “We weep,” says the African proverb, “we weep in our hearts like the tortoise.” Without one word or hint of race in all the book there is yet between its covers the unwritten, unwritable tragedy of that borderland race which knows not where it belongs in the world, a truly homeless race in soul. ”

“ Each has a race to run.
⁠Rise! young Negro—rise!
Enter now while we’re young,
Though weak and just begun.
⁠Rise! young Negro—rise!
Our banner flown will some day read:
⁠Rise! young Negro—rise!
Victory’s ours! We’ve won the race.
Then let us live in God by grace.
⁠Rise! young Negro—rise!
In spirit and in form both these productions seem to be quite noteworthy. The first has in it something darkly and terribly ominous, while the second has all the fervor of religion in its youth. The class of poems to follow will afford a contrast. ”

“ In other races oratory and poetry have been accepted as the tokens of noble qualities of character, lofty spiritual gifts. Such they are, in all races. They spring from mankind's supreme spiritual impulses, from mankind's loftiest aspirations—the aspirations for freedom, for justice, for virtue, for honor and distinction.
That these impulses, these aspirations, and these endowments are in the American Negro and are now exhibiting themselves in verse—it is this I wish to show to the skeptically minded. ”

“ In a very striking way these folk-songs of the plantation suggest the old English folk-songs of unknown authorship and origin—the ancient traditional ballads, long despised and neglected, but ever living on and loved in the hearts of the people. This unstudied poetry of the people, the unlettered common folk, had supreme virtues, the elemental and universal virtues of simplicity, sincerity, veracity. It had the power, in an artificial age, to bring poetry back to reality, to genuine emotion, to effectiveness, to the common interests of mankind. ”

“ Great praise does indeed rightly belong to that black slave-folk who gave to the world this treasure of religious song. To the world, I say, for they belong as truly to the whole world as do the quaint and incomparable animal stories of Uncle Remus. Their appeal is to every human heart, but especially to the heart that has known great sorrow and which looks to God for help. ”

“ I will quote but two of its dozen or so stanzas:
She dwells alone, and never heeds
How strange may sound her own footfall,
And yet is prompt to others’ needs,
Or ready at a neighbor’s call.
But still her world is one apart,
Serene above desire and change;
There are no hills beyond her heart,
Beyond her gate, no winds that range.
Here is the true artist’s imagination that penetrates to the secrets of life. No poet’s lyrics, with their deceptive simplicity, better reward study for a full appreciation of their idea. ”

“ Our happiness not seldom springs out of seeming misfortune. An illustration is afforded by Mr. Irvin W. Underhill, of Philadelphia, to whom blindness brought a more glorious seeing—the seeing of truth, of greater meaning in life, of greater beauty in the world. Out of this new vision springs a corresponding message in verse, a message not of bitterness for{185}
Irvin W. Underhill
what might to another man, in the middle years of his life, have seemed a bitter loss, but of love, and exhortation, and encouragement. Blind, he lives in the Light. ”

“ The space between Phillis Wheatley and this new singer was desert. But Nature, as people think, produces freaks, or sports; therefore a Negro poet was not absolutely beyond belief, since poets are rather freakish, abnormal creatures anyway. Incredulity therefore yielded to an attitude scarcely worthier, namely, that dishonoring, irreverent interpretation of a supreme human phenomenon which consists in denominating it a freak of nature. But Dunbar is a fact, as Burns, as Whittier, as Riley, are facts—a fact of great moment to a people and for a people. ”

“ Genius here as elsewhere will direct the born poet and instruct him when to use dialect and when the language that centuries of tradition have refined and standardized and encrusted with poetic associations. There is a world of poetic wealth in the strangely naïve heart of the rough-schooled Negro for which the smooth-worn, disconsonanted language of the cabin and the field is beautifully appropriate. There is also another world of poetic wealth in the Negro of culture for which only the language of culture is adequate. ”

“ But this is how he can say a thing in prose:
“As the Goddess of Music takes down her lute, touches its silver chords, and sets the summer melodies of nature to words, so an inspiration{105} comes to me in my profoundest slumbers and gently awakens my highest faculties to the finest thought and serenest contemplation herein expressed. Always remember that a book is your best friend when it compels you to think, disenthralls your reason, enkindles your hopes, vivifies your imagination, and makes easier all the burdens of your daily life.” ”