By Nava Atlas | On May 9, 2025 | Updated May 11, 2025 | Comments (0)
Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poetry was first published in NAACP’s The Crisis in 1916, and was subsequently included in the premier Black journals and anthologies of the 1920s. Georgia was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. Presented here is the full text of An Autumn Love Cycle, her third collection, published in 1928.
Though Black women’s poetry was regularly featured in the era’s periodicals, an entire collection by one writer was a rarity. Georgia published three poetry collections in the span of six years; one more was to come decades later.
Her first collection, The Heart of a Woman (1918) featured poems both specific to Georgia’s life yet universal to the female experience, speaking of love, loneliness, and women’s constrained roles. Decades later, the title of this book (and its eponymous poem) would inspire Maya Angelou’s 1981 memoir of the same name. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 27, 2025 | Updated May 17, 2025 | Comments (0)
Edna St. Vincent Millay was just nineteen when she began to compose “Renascence” some time toward the end of 1911. Written at a time of uncertainty about her future, it was a poem about herself, yet it dealt with the common human struggle to find hope when everything seems hopeless.
She had been an outstanding student in her tiny Maine high school, and a star contributor to the popular children’s publication St. Nicholas Magazine. Once she had passed the age limit (eighteen) for submissions, she was left without an outlet for her poetry.
Fighting despair, she grasped that no one could save her but herself. “I must exert every atom of my will and lift myself body and soul — above my situation and my surroundings …” Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On January 19, 2025 | Updated May 11, 2025 | Comments (0)
Frances Watkins Harper (1825 – 1911), also known as Frances E.W. Harper or Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, was a 19th century American poet, novelist, social reformer, lecturer, suffragist, and abolitionist.
Presented here is the full text of Poems by Frances E.W. Harper, published in 1896. (Philadelphia: George S. Ferguson Co.) She wrote prolifically from the time she published her first collection of poetry in 1845, at the age of twenty.
A freeborn African American from Baltimore, Maryland, she dedicated her life to social causes, including abolition, women’s suffrage, and the quest for equality. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On January 7, 2025 | Updated January 17, 2025 | Comments (11)
Helene Johnson (1906 – 1995) was an American poet associated with the Harlem Renaissance. This selection of poems by Helene Johnson features those from the 1920s, the period in which she was most active as a young poet.
She was just nineteen when her first published poem, “Trees at Night,” appeared 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. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On December 12, 2024 | Updated May 9, 2025 | Comments (0)
Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880 – 1966) was a respected poet and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement. Following is the full text of her first published collection, The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems (1918).
The Heart of a Woman was followed by Bronze (1922) and An Autumn Love Cycle (1928). Many years later she came out with Share My World (1962). With four published collections, it’s quite likely that Georgia was the most widely published of the female poets of her era.
Georgia’s poems were published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, particularly in the 1920s. In her poetry, Georgia addressed issues of race as well as universal themes of love, motherhood, and being a woman in a male-dominated world. Read More→
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