Robert Thomas Kerlin

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Death and the mysteries of life, the pain and the grief that flesh and soul are heirs to, the eternal problems that address themselves to all generations and races, produce in the soul of the Negro the same reactions as of old they produced in the soul of David or of Homer, or as, in our own day, in the soul of a Wordsworth or a Shelley. ”

“ It therefore becomes a creative soul. Rhythm visibly takes hold of the Negro and sways his entire being. It makes him one with the universal Power that Goethe describes, in famous lines, as “at the roaring loom of time, weaving for God the garment thou seest him by.”
But fervor of feeling must have some originating cause. That cause is a conception—the vivid, concrete presentation of an object or idea to the mind. The Negro has this endowment also. Ideas enter his mind with a vividness and power which betoken an extraordinary faculty of imagination. ”

“ Her poem shall therefore conclude this presentation:{69}
THE SINGER
Because his speech was blunt and manner plain
Untaught in subtle phrases of the wise,
Because the years of slavery and pain
Ne’er dimmed the light of faith within his eyes;
Because of ebon skin and humble pride,
The world with hatred thrust the youth aside.
But fragrance wafts from every trodden flower,
And through our grief we rise to nobler things,
Within the heart in sorrow’s darkest hour
A well of sweetness there unbidden springs;
Despised of men, discarded and alone—
The world of nature claimed him as her own. ”

“ And puts sweet music into my soul.
—Joseph S. Cotter, Jr. “Sweet music in the soul”—that is heaven’s kind gift to this people, music of sorrow and of faith; music, low and plaintive, of hope almost failing; music, clear and strong, born of vision triumphant; music, alas, sometimes marred by the strident notes of hatred and revenge. Verily, poets learn in suffering what they teach in song. ”

“ THE NEGROES HERITAGE OF SONG
As an empire may grow up within an empire without observation so a republic of letters within a republic of letters. That thing is happening today in this land of ours. A literature of significance on many accounts, and not without various and considerable merits. Its producers are Negroes. Culture, talent, genius—or something very like it—are theirs. Nor is it “the mantle of Dunbar” they wrap themselves in, but an unborrowed singing robe, that better fits “the New Negro.” ”

“ I see the haughty sons of a haughty race pouring out their lustful passion upon black womanhood, filling our land with a bronzed and tawny brood.
I see also the patriarchal solicitude of the kindly-hearted owners of men, in whose breast not even iniquitous system could sour the milk of human kindness.
I hear the groans, the sorrows, the sighings, the soul striving of these benighted creatures of God, rising up from the low grounds of sorrow and reaching the ear of Him Who regardeth man of the lowliest estate. ”

“ Bearing the diploma of the Lyric Muse, Mr. Leslie Pinckney Hill, schoolmaster of Cheyney, Pennsylvania, and authentic singer, is one of the Leslie Pinckney Hill newest arrivals on the slopes of Parnassus. A first glance tells that he is an agile climber, sinewy, easy of movement, light of step, with both grace and strength. Every indication in form and motion is for some point far up toward the summit. Youthful he is, ambitious, plainly, and, in spite of a burden, buoyant. ”

“ Hill’s race knows no other wings. On the wings of oppression the Negro poet and the Negro people are rising toward the summits of Parnassus, Pisgah, and other peaks. This they know, too, and of it they are justly proud. ”

“ Of all the Negro poets whose writings I have perused, Edward Smythe Jones is the most difficult to estimate with certainty. There is an eloquence and luxuriance of language and imagery in his stanzas which perplexes the critic and yet persuades him to repeated readings. The result, however, fails to become clear. If, with his copiousness, the reserve of disciplined art ever becomes his, and his critical faculty is trained to match his creative, then poetry of noteworthy merit may be expected from him. ”

“ We are not better than our fellows, Lord; we are but weak and human men. When our devils do deviltry, curse Thou the doer and the deed,—curse them as we curse them, do to them all and more than ever they have done to innocence and weakness, to womanhood and home.
⁠Have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!
And yet, whose is the deeper guilt? Who made these devils? Who nursed them in crime and fed them on injustice? Who ravished and debauched their mothers and their grandmothers? Who bought and sold their crime and waxed fat and rich on public iniquity? ”

“ The fountain of poetry sprang up in what threatened to be a desert life.—The artist-nature within manifested itself in a new realm, the realm of words set to tuneful measures. This artisan, turned by affliction into a poet, is Raymond Garfield Dandridge. ”

“ Tell me, little child, are you not happy in that realm no white man can enter? In much of this utterance of protest, this arraignment of the white man’s civilization that rebukes God, there may be more passion than poesy. But out of such passion, as it were a rumbling of thunder, the lightning will one day leap. A poet born and reared in South Carolina, Joshua Henry Jones, Jr., appeals from man’s inhumanities to God’s prevailing power in passionate stanzas of which this is the first, the rest being like:
They’ve lynched a man in Dixie. ”

“ Simple and crude as it was it had a merit unknown to the polished verse of the schools. Potential Negro poets might do well to ponder this fact of literary history. There is nothing more precious in English literature than this crude old poetry of the people.
There is a book of rhymes which, every Christmas season, is the favorite gift, the most gladly received, of all that Santa Claus brings. Nor so at Christmas only; it is a perennial pleasure, a boon to all children, young and old in years. This book is Mother Goose’s Melodies. How many “immortal” epics of learned poets it has outlived! ”

“ Dunbar wrote his first book between the runs of the elevator he tended; Leon R. Harris was left in infancy to the dreary shelter of an orphanage, then indentured to a brutal farmer; Carmichael came from the cabin of an unlettered farmer in the Black Belt of Alabama; of a dozen others the story is similar. Born in poverty, up through adversities they struggled, with little human help save perhaps from the croons and caresses of a singing mother, and a few terms at a wretched school, they toiled into the kingdom of knowledge and entered the world of poetry. ”

“ But the sister art of poetry may anticipate music in the great feat of embodying artistically the yearning, suffering, prayerful soul of the African in those centuries when he could only with patience endure and trust in God—and wail these mournfullest of melodies. ”

“ Yet of all forms whereby the soul of a people expresses itself the most potent, the most effective, is poetry. The re-born soul of the Negro is following the tradition of all races in all times by pouring itself into that form of words which embodies the most of passionate thought and feeling. ”

“ 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. ”