Negro Poets and Their Poems

A critical anthology and survey that traces the development of Black poetic expression from plantation spirituals and secular folk rhymes through nineteenth-century verse to the early twentieth-century renaissance. It explains the origins and double meanings of spirituals, presents vernacular secular songs, and profiles earlier writers alongside a broad group of contemporaneous poets and women writers. Chapters combine selections, analysis, and biographical sketches to examine recurring themes such as faith, sorrow, resilience, and creative innovation, and to consider emerging techniques and forms including free verse and prose-poems within a living poetic tradition.