American Negro Poetry An Anthology [Paperback]

With 200,000 copies in print, this anthology has for decades been seen as a fundamental collection of African-American verse. Bontemps (1902-73), an important figure during and after the Harlem Renaissance, author of more than 25 novels, and longtime librarian at Fisk University, last revised this classic anthology just before his death, adding such crucial new voices as Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Bob Kaufman, among others.

This edition, issued in 1996, reprints the poems in Bontemps's revised volume along with updated biographical notes. Nearly seventy poets are represented, their works indexed by both author and title.

[Bontemps's] most distinctive works are ringing affirmations of the human passion for freedom and the desire for social justice inherent in us all. Arnold Rampersad called him the conscience of his era and it could be fairly added that his tendency to fuse history and imagination represents his personal legacy to a collective memory. Charles L. James, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (on the life and work of Arna Bontemps, editor of American Negro Poetry)

Arna Bontemps(1902-1973), produced more than twenty-five novels, anthologies, children's books, and histories of black life, including the novelGod Sends SundayandThe Story of the Negro. Bontemps's later years were spent at Fisk University as chief librarian and writer-in-residence.

Introduction

James Weldon Johnson
O Black and Unknown Bards
Go Down Death (A Funeral Sermon)

Paul Laurence Dunbar
Dawn
Compensation
The Debt
Life
My Sort o' Man
The Party
A Song
Sympathy
We Wear the Mask

William Stanley Braithwaite
Rhapsody
Scintilla

Angelina W. Grimk?
To Clarissa Scott Delany
The Black Finger

Anne Spencer
For Jim, Easter Eve
Lines to a Nasturtium (A lover muses)
Letter lã&