Harlem Renaissance Poems (From Famous Poets)
African American communities in the North and Midwest of the United States experienced a thriving artistic and intellectual life in the 1920s, but nowhere was this clearer than in Harlem. Only three square miles in size, the New York City neighborhood was teeming with black musicians, authors, painters, and intellectuals. Here are examples of Harlem Renaissance Poems for each era.
Harlem Renaissance Poems
Black-owned enterprises, including newspapers, publishing offices, music labels, nightclubs, cabarets, and theaters fueled the bustling neighborhood environment in part.
The “Negro capital of the globe,” where some of the era’s most significant literary and creative personalities immigrated or passed through, helped to define a time when African American artists rediscovered their identity and racial pride despite pervasive prejudice and discrimination.
The Great Migration of the early 20th century, when hundreds of thousands of Black people moved from the South into dense metropolitan regions that offered considerably more economic opportunity and cultural capital, is where the Harlem Renaissance first began.
For African American artists and philosophers, it was “a spiritual coming of age,” in the words of editor, writer, and critic Alain Locke, who embraced their “first opportunity for communal expression and self-determination.”
Harlem Renaissance poets like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Georgia Douglas Johnson addressed the beauty and agony of black existence as they worked to identify themselves and their community outside of White preconceptions.
The variety of genres and topics in Harlem Renaissance poetry was clear. Some poets, like Claude McKay, combined radical messages of resistance with culturally European forms—the sonnet being one among them—as in “If We Must Die.”
Others, like James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, incorporated Black cultural innovations into their works by incorporating ragtime, jazz, and blues rhythms into their poetry.
They include a selection of poetry from this time period in the collection that follows, together with articles by and about the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as audio recordings and discussions of their work.
How Long, O Lord! by Fenton Johnson
From “Three Negro Spirituals”
HOW long, O Lord, nobody knows!
My honey’s resting near the brook.
How long, O Lord, nobody knows!
How long, O Lord, nobody knows!
I pray she’ll rise on Judgment Day.
How long, O Lord, nobody knows!
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1914 -1919 Renaissance Poems
These years marked the start of the Great Migration, a period of time from 1916 to 1970 during which millions of African Americans moved from the South to the North in order to escape the violent and pervasive racism and economic exploitation that came with life as a sharecropper or tenant farmer in the South.
After World War I, which cut off cheap immigrant labor from Europe and drove white American laborers to enlist in the military, they looked for well-paying industrial jobs that had become available. In Harlem alone, over 175,000 African Americans settled.
After the Winter by Claude Mckay
Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
And against the morning’s white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
Have sheltered for the night,
We’ll turn our faces southward, love,
Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire the shafted grove
And wide-mouthed orchids smile.And we will seek the quiet hill
Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there
Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
And ferns that never fade.
1920–1924 Renaissance Poems
According to legend, the Harlem Renaissance’s literary movement got its start during a luncheon honoring African American authors held at the Civic Club.
Doors opened as authors like Countee Cullen and W.E.B. DuBois socialized with white literary figures; They gave editor and critic Alain Locke the opportunity to write an article for the journal Survey Graphic on “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” which ultimately developed into a book-length study.
Writers affiliated with the Harlem Renaissance were releasing significant early works even before the Civic Club supper. These years saw the publication of Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay, The Book of American Negro Poetry by James Weldon Johnson, and Cane by Jean Toomer.
The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth by Countee Cullen
“Live like the wind,” he said, “unfettered,
And love me while you can;
And when you will, and can be bettered,
Go to the better man.
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For you’ll grow weary, maybe, sleeping
So long a time with me:
Like this there’ll be no cause for weeping –
The wind is always free.”“Go when you please,” he would be saying,
His mouth hard on her own:
That’s why she stayed and loved the staying,
Contented to the bone.And now he’s dust, and him but twenty,
Frost that was like a flame.
Her kisses on the head death bent, he
Gave answer to his name.And now he’s dust and with dust lying
In sullen arrogance:
Death found it hard, for all his trying,
To shatter such a lance.She laid him out as fine as any
That had a priest and ring;
She never spared a silver penny
For cost of anything.
1925 -1929 Renaissance Poems
The New Negro: An Interpretation, an anthology edited by Alain Locke that featured writings by Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, was one of the major literary publications of the Harlem Renaissance that aimed to characterize the movement.
The economic renaissance that had enabled African American culture to thrive in the 1920s, however, was about to end. A stock market crash in October 1929 ignited what is now referred to as the Great Depression.
Many people lost their jobs, but African Americans were particularly severely struck since they frequently experienced the “last hired, first fired” policy. As spending limits and disposable income decreased, African American musicians witnessed a decline in their fan bases and financial support.
Sylvester’s Dying Bed by Langston Hughes
I woke up this mornin’
’Bout half-past three.
All the womens in town
Was gathered round me.Sweet gals was a-moanin’,
“Sylvester’s gonna die!”
And a hundred pretty mamas
Bowed their heads to cry.I woke up little later
’Bout half-past fo’,
The doctor ‘n’ undertaker’s
Both at ma do’.Black gals was a-beggin’,
“You can’t leave us here!”
Brown-skins cryin’, “Daddy!
Honey! Baby! Don’t go, dear!”But I felt ma time’s a-comin’,
And I know’d I’s dyin’ fast.
I seed the River Jerden
A-creepin’ muddy past—
But I’s still Sweet Papa ’Vester,
Yes, sir! Long as life do last!So I hollers, “Com’ere, babies,
Fo’ to love yo’ daddy right!”
And I reaches up to hug ’em—
When the Lawd put out the light.Then everything was darkness
In a great … big … night.
1930-1940 Renaissance Poems
Harlem had changed by the 1930s because of unemployment and local government neglect. Although academics disagree on the exact date the Harlem Renaissance ended, some consider the racial riot in Harlem in 1935 to be the movement’s bookend.
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Over 10,000 people flocked to the streets of Harlem as reports spread that cops had killed a black Puerto Rican teenager for stealing a ten-cent pocket knife from a nearby shop.
The protests quickly descended into violence, which led to three fatalities, 125 arrests, and more than $2 million in property damage. Many inhabitants left Harlem because of changes in other economic issues.
Besides influencing the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s and other global art movements of the African diaspora, such as Negrismo in the Caribbean and Négritude in the Francophone world, poets from the Harlem Renaissance had a significant influence on modern and current poetry.
Sailor by Langston Hughes
He sat upon the rolling deck
Half a world away from home,
And smoked a Capstan cigarette
And watched the blue waves tipped with foam.He had a mermaid on his arm,
An anchor on his breast,
And tattooed on his back he had
A blue bird in a nest.
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