Negro Poets and Their Poems (Annotated)

Enriched Edition. A Landmark African American Poetry Anthology from Phillis Wheatley to the Harlem RenaissanceBy Robert Thomas Kerlin

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Length5h 30m

About this audiobook

Negro Poets and Their Poems is a landmark anthology that gathers African American verse from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century, placing spiritual longing, racial protest, dialect lyric, and modernist experimentation in a single evolving tradition. Kerlin's editorial style is earnest, explanatory, and canon-forming: he frames poets such as Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Georgia Douglas Johnson not as curiosities, but as participants in American letters. Published amid the New Negro ferment, the volume helped prepare readers for the Harlem Renaissance's claim to literary authority. Robert Thomas Kerlin was a white Southern scholar, clergyman, and educator whose intellectual life was marked by an unusual public commitment to racial justice for his time. His sympathy for Black cultural achievement was sharpened by his criticism of racial violence and injustice, including his defense of African Americans after the Elaine massacre controversy. That moral and pedagogical purpose informs the anthology's insistence that Black poetry be read historically, aesthetically, and nationally. This book is recommended to readers interested in African American literary history, anthology-making, and the cultural prelude to the Harlem Renaissance. Though inevitably shaped by its era, it remains a valuable document of recognition, advocacy, and poetic recovery.

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