Books like Poetry by James Weldon Johnson
This collection contains the poems written by James Weldon Johnson between 1899 and 1922. During this period of Johnson’s life, he worked as a Broadway songwriter with his brother John Rosamund in the early 1900s, served as a United States Consul in Venezuela from 1906 to 1908 and in Nicaragua from 1909 to 1913, and was appointed as the first executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1920. Johnson’s work arose in the milieu of the 1920s “Harlem Renaissance,” a term which Johnson personally refused to use, favoring “the flowering of Negro literature” instead.
Perhaps among the most notable works anthologized in this collection are the lyrics of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a hymn originally written as a poem by Johnson in 1899. Having been dubbed “The Black National Anthem,” the hymn has taken on the significance of a rallying cry for black Americans and is a frequent inclusion in Christian hymnals.
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Books similar to Poetry (10 similar books)
Langston Hughes was a leading poet in the Harlem Renaissance and a pioneer in the form of jazz poetry. While working as a hotel busboy in Washington, D.C. in the early 1920s, he was “discovered” by fellow poet Vachel Lindsay, who helped publicize his work. In 1926 he published his first poetry collection, The Weary Blues, which opens with one of his best-known poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Themes he explores in his poetry include the lives of the Black working class, jazz and blues music, and race consciousness.
This Standard Ebooks edition compiles all of the publicly-accessible poems by Langston Hughes known to be in the U.S. public domain, which is limited to about the first decade of his work.
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