African American Poetry: : 250 Years of Struggle & Song

A literary landmark, the biggest and most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song gathers 250 poets from the colonial period to the present.

Across a turbulent history, from such vital centres as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition. This tradition serves both as a reckoning with American realities and as an imaginative response to them. Capturing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture as never before.

One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, featuring enslaved individuals like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton, and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who voice their passionate resistance to slavery.

Kevin Young's fresh, revelatory presentation of the Harlem Renaissance reexamines the achievements of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, alongside works by lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Mae V. Cowdery. The later flowering of the still influential Black Arts Movement is represented here with breadth and originality, including many long out-of-print or hard-to-find poems.

This collection showcases all the significant movements and currents, including the nineteenth-century Francophone poets known as Les Cenelles, the Chicago Renaissance that flourished around Gwendolyn Brooks, the early 1960s Umbra group, and the more recent work of writers affiliated with Cave Canem and the Dark Room Collective.

Also featured are poems by singular, hard-to-classify figures such as the enslaved potter David Drake, the allusive modernist Melvin B. Tolson, and the Cleveland-based experimentalist Russell Atkins. This Library of America volume also includes biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.