Helene Johnson, Poetic Voice of the Harlem Renaissance

By Nava Atlas | On April 10, 2018 | Updated January 7, 2025 | Comments (0)

Helene Johnson (July 7, 1906 – July 6, 1995) was an American poet active in the Harlem Renaissance movement. She grew up surrounded by her mother and aunts, strong women who inspired her distinctive poetic voice.

Born in Boston and raised by her single mother in Brookline and Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, Helene considered herself painfully shy as a child. She found her voice when she turned to writing poetry.

Helene was the cousin of Dorothy West, who would become a respected short story writer and novelist. In the mid-1920s, the two young women, drawn to the energy of Harlem, moved to New York City. Helene took classes at Columbia University, where she met and befriended Zora Neale Hurston., then an ethnology student and budding writer.

Early recognition as a bold poet

Helene and her cousin Dorothy West were among the youngest writers among those emerging in what was then called the New Negro movement. Helene was just nineteen when her first published poem, “Trees at Night,” was published in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life in 1925. A year later, the journal published six more of her poems.

She was just nineteen when her first published poem, “Trees at Night,” was published in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life in 1925. A year later, this journal published six more of her poems. Her poems also made an appearance in NAACP’s The Crisis and the first and only issue of Fire!!, Langston Hughes’ short-lived publication. As Helene grew aware of the economic and divide facing Black New Yorkers, she began to explore racial themes in her poetry.

Helene’s poem “Fulfillment” received Honorable Mention in Opportunity’s highly competitive 1926 literary contest. “Bottled,” a poem composed with innovative rhythms, was published in the May 1927 issue of Vanity Fair, and later that year, in the iconic anthology Caroling Dusk, edited by Countee Cullen. “Bottled” has remained one of her best-known poems.

The 1920s and early 1930s were a productive time. In addition to The Crisis and Opportunity, Helene’s poetry appeared in periodicals like The Messenger, Palms, Boston Saturday Evening Quill, and Challenge: A Literary Quarterly. Book-length anthologies that have included her poetry: The Book of American Negro Poetry (edited by James Weldon Johnso, revised edition, 1931), The Negro Caravan (1941), and much later, American Negro Poetry (1974).

A very private life

In 1933 Helene married William Warner Hubbell, and the couple had one daughter, Abigail (later known by her married name, Abigail McGrath). She and Hubbell later divorced. In her 1995 obituary (written by Eric Pace) in the New York Times, Abigail said that her mother worked at for Consumers Union in Mount Vernon, New York for some years.

According to Abigail, her mother didn’t stop writing after her last published poem, “Let Me Sing My Song,” appeared in a 1935 issue of Challenge. She wrote a poem nearly every day for the next few decades, until health issues ended this practice. She was a very private person, staying out of the public eye, rarely granting interviews or doing public readings of her work. The only photo of her in circulation is the one below in which she looks to be in her twenties, signed to her cousin Dorothy “with best wishes always.” Helene Johnson died at the age of eighty-nine in her Manhattan home.

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16 Poems by Helene Johnson
This photo is inscribed to “Dorothy,”
presumably Dorothy West, her cousin
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The legacy of Helene Johnson’s poetry

The Book of American Negro Poetry (edited by James Weldon Johnson, revised edition, 1931) introduces the selection of her work saying that her poems “bore the stamp of a genuine poet … A number of her best poems are done in colloquial style — a style which numberless poets of this new age have assumed to be easy; she realizes the hard fact that an effective poem in colloquial style demands as much work and workmanship as a well-wrought sonnet.” This revised edition of a critical anthology introduces Helene’s poem “Invocation,” which is not yet in the public domain.

In Notable Black American Women (1992) T. J. Bryan wrote: “Helene Johnson’s works are models for aspiring poets — especially for African American women poets who have long been led to believe that no tradition of achievement exists among Black American women in this genre prior to the 1960s … Helene Johnson is a transitional poet whose works of the 1920s and 1930s signal a striking out in new directions among Black American women poets, who began to abandon romantic themes and poetic conventions at this juncture.”

In an essay in The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972), Ronald Primeau wrote that “Helene Johnson combines an expression of unquenchable desires with a realistic description of ghetto life, and a discovery of the roots of her people … And her most famous work, ‘Poem,’ praises the whole way of being a little brown boy, calling him a jazz prince and celebrating her participation and his heritage.”

From Lehigh University’s Digital Anthology of African American Poetry: “Throughout the late 1920s, Johnson explored racial themes in a variety of ways in her poetry, including a number of ‘Harlem’-themed poems (“Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” and “Bottled” being two representative examples). A number of her poems also used natural settings to powerful effect, including “A Southern Road.” Johnson’s poems often dramatize the tension between conservative morality and Christian restraints against the sensuous riot of the emerging African American youth culture of the 1920s (“Magalu”).

Looping back to T.J. Bryan, in “The Published Poems of Helene Johnson” (The Langston Hughes Review, Fall 1987, Volume 6, No. 2, pp. 11-21. Published by: Langston Hughes Society, Penn State University Press): He offers these powerful last words on why Helene Johnson’s poetry deserves to be rediscovered and studied:

“Praised by critics when Harlem was in vogue, her poems have been forgotten or ignored by all but a few literary critics and historians writing since 1935. Until more scholars remember Johnson and other Black women poets that have been relegated to obscurity, histories of Afro-American literature will remain fragmentary … She experiments with free forms, uses Black urban speech, and addresses “unladylike” themes such as race pride and female sensuality. Because of her willingness to take chances, she is a role model that modern writers can ill afford to lose.”

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In her lifetime, thirty-four of Helene’s poems were published, representing just a part of her output. This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance (2000) gathered for the first time all of the published poetry, and for the first time, many of her unpublished poems as well as her correspondence. Edited by Verner D. Mitchell, with a forward by Cheryl A. Wall, and an afterword by Abigail McGrath, it’s a fitting tribute to a distinctive voice from the Harlem Renaissance who shouldn’t be forgotten.

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13 Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance

More about Helene Johnson

On this site

16 Poems by Helene Johnson

More information

Selected works

“Trees at Night” – Opportunity (May 1925)
“Night” – Opportunity (January 1926)
“Metamorphism” – Opportunity (March 1926)
“Fulfillment” – Opportunity (June 1926)
“Fiat Lux” – The Messenger (July 1926)
“The Little Love” – The Messenger (July 1926)
“Futility” – Opportunity (August 1926)
“Love in Midsummer” – The Messenger (October 1926)
“Magalu” – Palms (October 1926)
“Bottled” – Vanity Fair (May 1927)
“Poem” – Caroling Dusk (1927)
”Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” – Caroling Dusk (1927)
“What Do I Care For Morning” – Caroling Dusk (1927)
“A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America” – Harlem (November 1928)
“Cui Bono?” – Harlem (November 1928)
“I Am Not Proud” – Saturday Evening Quill (April 1929)

Biography

This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance,
edited by Verner D. Mitchell Mitchell, 2000

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