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Writing About Poetry
Summary:
This section covers the basics of how to write about poetry, including why it is done, what you should know, and what you can write about.

Writing about poetry can be one of the most demanding tasks that many students face in a literature class. Poetry, by its very nature, makes demands on a writer who attempts to analyze it that other forms of literature do not. So how can you write a clear, confident, well-supported essay about poetry? This handout offers answers to some common questions about writing about poetry.

What's the Point?

In order to write effectively about poetry, one needs a clear idea of what the point of writing about poetry is. When you are assigned an analytical essay about a poem in an English class, the goal of the assignment is usually to argue a specific thesis about the poem, using your analysis of specific elements in the poem and how those elements relate to each other to support your thesis.

So why would your teacher give you such an assignment? What are the benefits of learning to write analytic essays about poetry? Several important reasons suggest themselves:

To help you learn to make a text-based argument. That is, to help you to defend ideas based on a text that is available to you and other readers. This sharpens your reasoning skills by forcing you to formulate an interpretation of something someone else has written and to support that interpretation by providing logically valid reasons why someone else who has read the poem should agree with your argument. This isn't a skill that is just important in academics, by the way. Lawyers, politicians, and journalists often find that they need to make use of similar skills.

To help you to understand what you are reading more fully. Nothing causes a person to make an extra effort to understand difficult material like the task of writing about it. Also, writing has a way of helping you to see things that you may have otherwise missed simply by causing you to think about how to frame your own analysis.

To help you enjoy poetry more! This may sound unlikely, but one of the real pleasures of poetry is the opportunity to wrestle with the text and co-create meaning with the author. When you put together a well-constructed analysis of the poem, you are not only showing that you understand what is there, you are also contributing to an ongoing conversation about the poem. If your reading is convincing enough, everyone who has read your essay will get a little more out of the poem because of your analysis.

What Should I Know about Writing about Poetry?

Most importantly, you should realize that a paper that you write about a poem or poems is an argument. Make sure that you have something specific that you want to say about the poem that you are discussing. This specific argument that you want to make about the poem will be your thesis. You will support this thesis by drawing examples and evidence from the poem itself. In order to make a credible argument about the poem, you will want to analyze how the poem works-what genre the poem fits into, what its themes are, and what poetic techniques and figures of speech are used.

What Can I Write About?

Theme: One place to start when writing about poetry is to look at any significant themes that emerge in the poetry. Does the poetry deal with themes related to love, death, war, or peace? What other themes show up in the poem? Are there particular historical events that are mentioned in the poem? What are the most important concepts that are addressed in the poem?

Genre: What kind of poem are you looking at? Is it an epic (a long poem on a heroic subject)? Is it a sonnet (a brief poem, usually consisting of fourteen lines)? Is it an ode? A satire? An elegy? A lyric? Does it fit into a specific literary movement such as Modernism, Romanticism, Neoclassicism, or Renaissance poetry? This is another place where you may need to do some research in an introductory poetry text or encyclopedia to find out what distinguishes specific genres and movements.

Versification: Look closely at the poem's rhyme and meter. Is there an identifiable rhyme scheme? Is there a set number of syllables in each line? The most common meter for poetry in English is iambic pentameter, which has five feet of two syllables each (thus the name "pentameter") in each of which the strongly stressed syllable follows the unstressed syllable. You can learn more about rhyme and meter by consulting our handout on sound and meter in poetry or the introduction to a standard textbook for poetry such as the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Also relevant to this category of concerns are techniques such as caesura (a pause in the middle of a line) and enjambment (continuing a grammatical sentence or clause from one line to the next). Is there anything that you can tell about the poem from the choices that the author has made in this area? For more information about important literary terms, see our handout on the subject.

Figures of speech: Are there literary devices being used that affect how you read the poem? Here are some examples of commonly discussed figures of speech:

metaphor: comparison between two unlike things

simile: comparison between two unlike things using "like" or "as"

metonymy: one thing stands for something else that is closely related to it (For example, using the phrase "the crown" to refer to the king would be an example of metonymy.)

synecdoche: a part stands in for a whole (For example, in the phrase "all hands on deck," "hands" stands in for the people in the ship's crew.)

personification: a non-human thing is endowed with human characteristics

litotes: a double negative is used for poetic effect (example: not unlike, not displeased)

irony: a difference between the surface meaning of the words and the implications that may be drawn from them

Cultural Context: How does the poem you are looking at relate to the historical context in which it was written? For example, what's the cultural significance of Walt Whitman's famous elegy for Lincoln "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" in light of post-Civil War cultural trends in the U.S.A? How does John Donne's devotional poetry relate to the contentious religious climate in seventeenth-century England? These questions may take you out of the literature section of your library altogether and involve finding out about philosophy, history, religion, economics, music, or the visual arts.

What Style Should I Use?

It is useful to follow some standard conventions when writing about poetry. First, when you analyze a poem, it is best to use present tense rather than past tense for your verbs. Second, you will want to make use of numerous quotations from the poem and explain their meaning and their significance to your argument. After all, if you do not quote the poem itself when you are making an argument about it, you damage your credibility. If your teacher asks for outside criticism of the poem as well, you should also cite points made by other critics that are relevant to your argument. A third point to remember is that there are various citation formats for citing both the material you get from the poems themselves and the information you get from other critical sources. The most common citation format for writing about poetry is the Modern Language Association (MLA) format.

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Writing About Poetry // Purdue Writing Lab

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about

After "The Entombment" by Raphael

The night my father died, I sat on a stool
at the Buckhorn, gazing
out the window's cool counter seat.
Like a funhouse mirror, you appeared.
I have a familiar-looking face; my father used to say-
his wish for me to blend in.
Late after an argument, I fled
and was found bound to a prairie fence
after eighteen hours.
My body is like a sock in the wind
in a field just a mile from here.
My face blooms, velvety
and light like a lamb's ear,

frozen with blood; down
my neck, it goes. A medley of ants shuffles
away. My body is rich with the sour smell
of urine on my head like a crown of daffodils. stachys byzantina; my ears

Copyright © 2023 by Ruben Quesada. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 27, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

One does such work as one will not,
And well each knows the right;
Though the white storm howls, or the sun is hot,
The black must serve the white.
And it's, oh, for the white man's softening flesh,
While the black man's muscles grow!
Well I know which grows the mightier,

O, rich young lord, thou ridest by
With looks of high disdain;
It chafes me not thy title high,
Thy blood of oldest strain.
The lady riding at thy side
Is but in name thy promised bride.
Ride on, young lord, ride on!

I'm in my room writing
speaking in myself
& I hear you
move down the hallway
to water your plants

I write truth on the page
I strike the word over & over
yet I worry you'll pour too much water on the plants
& the water will overflow onto the books
ruining them

If I can't speak out of myself
how can I tell you I don't care about the plants?
how can I tell you I don't care if the books get wet?

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingled hippo becomes the gray unicorn.
No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday's disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday's pains.

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Home The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets.

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Biography: Historical and Celebrity Profiles

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Modernism in the arts refers to the rejection of the Victorian era's traditions and the exploration of industrial-age, real-life issues, and combines a rejection of the past with experimentation, sometimes for political purposes. Stretching from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, Modernism reached its peak in the 1960s; Post-modernism describes the period that followed during the 1960s and 1970s. Post-modernism is a dismissal of the rigidity of Modernism in favor of an "anything goes" approach to the subject matter, processes and material.

MODERNISM IN ART

The shift to modernism can be partly credited to new freedoms enjoyed by artists in the late 1800s. Traditionally, a painter was commissioned by a patron to create a specific work. The late 19th century witnessed many artists capable of seizing more time to pursue subjects in their personal interest.

At the same time, the growing field of psychology turned the analysis of human experiences inward and encouraged a more abstract kind of science, which inspired the visual arts to follow.

With shifts in technology creating new materials and techniques in art-making, experimentation became more possible and also gave the resulting work a wider reach. Printing advances in the late 1800s meant posters of artwork widened the public's awareness of art and design and ferried experimental ideas into popular culture.

Officially debuting in 1874, Impressionism is considered the first Modernist art movement. With leaders like Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the Impressionist's use of brief, fierce brush strokes and the altering effect of light separated their work from what came before it. The Impressionists' focus on modern scenes was a direct rejection of classical subject matter.

Subsequent movements such as Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Constructivism, and De Stijl were just a sampling of those following the experimental path started by Impressionism.

DADA

The Dada movement took experimentation further by rejecting traditional skills and launching an all-out art rebellion that embraced nonsense and absurdity. Dadaist ideas first appeared in 1915, and the movement was made official in 1918 with its Berlin Manifesto.

French artist Marcel Duchamp exemplified the haughty playfulness of the Dadaists. His 1917 piece Fountain, a signed porcelain urinal, and his 1919 L.H.O.O.Q., a print of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa with a mustache penciled over it, both turn their back on the very idea of creating art. In doing so, Duchamp predicted Post-Modernism.

Abstract Expressionism

Modernism reached its peak with Abstract Expressionism, which began in the late 1940s in the United States. Moving away from commonplace subjects and techniques, Abstract Expressionism was known for oversized canvasses and paint splashes that could seem chaotic and arbitrary.

Each Abstract Expressionist work functioned as both a document of the artist's subconscious and a map of the physical movements required to create the art. Painter Jackson Pollack became famous for his method of dripping paint onto canvas from above.

NEO DADA AND POP ART

The transition period between Modernism and Post-Modernism happened throughout the 1960s. Pop Art served as a bridge between them. Pop Art was obsessed with the fruits of capitalism and popular culture, like pulp fiction, celebrities and consumer goods.

Begun in England in the late 1950s but popularized in America, the movement was informed by former Abstract Expressionists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who had metamorphosed into the Neo-Dada movement of the late 1950s.

Rauschenberg's 1960 sculpture of Ballantine Ale cans pre-dated Pop artist Andy Warhol's famous Campbell's Soup cans. Warhol gained further fame from his haunting silkscreen portraits, most famously of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, while Pop Art compatriot Roy Lichtenstein plundered comic book panels for his paintings.

POST-MODERNISM

Post-modernism, as it appeared in the 1970s, is often linked with the philosophical movement Poststructuralism, in which philosophers such as Jacques Derrida proposed that structures within a culture were artificial and could be deconstructed in order to be analyzed.

As a result, there was little to unite Post-Modern art other than the idea that "anything goes" and the preponderance of unusual materials and mechanical processes for expression that feel impersonal, though often employing humor.

At the heart of Post-Modernism was conceptual art, which proposed that the meaning or purpose behind the making of the art was more important than the art itself. There was also the belief that anything could be used to make art, that art could take any form, and that there should be no differentiation between high art and low art, or fine art and commercial art.

Post-modern work in the 1970s was sometimes derided as "art for art's sake," but it gave rise to the acceptance of a host of new approaches. Among these new forms were Earth art, which creates work on natural landscapes; Performance art; Installation art, which considers an entire space rather than just one piece; Process art, which stressed the making of the work as more important than the outcome; and Video art, as well as movements based around feminist and minority art.

The 1980s saw the rise of appropriation as a much-used practice. Painters like Jean-Michael Basquiat and Keith Haring directly mimicked graffiti styles, while artists like Sherrie Levine lifted the actual work of other artists to use in their creations. In 1981, Levine photographed a Walker Evans photo and represented it as a new work questioning the very idea of an original photo.

Post-modern art has since become less defined by the form the art takes and more determined by the artist creating the work. American artist Jenny Holzer, who came to prominence in the 1970s with her conceptual art made from language, embodies this model.

Holzer's "Truisms" are deceptively simple sentences that communicate complicated, often contradictory, ideas, such as "Protect me from what I want." She has also produced a body of work on the American government's use of torture during the Iraq War. Holzer's curation of text, rather than any visual motif, is the consistent aspect uniting her work.

Some art historians believe the Post-Modern era ended at the beginning of the 21st Century and refer to the following period as Post Post-Modern.

SOURCES

History of Modern Art. H.H. Arnason and Marla F. Prather.
Modern Art: Impressionism To Post-Modernism. Edited by David Britt.
Art of the Western World. Michael Wood.
What Is Modern Art? Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Modernism. Tate.

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Modernism in the arts refers to the rejection of the Victorian era's traditions and the exploration of industrial-age, real-life issues, and combines a rejection of the past with experimentation, sometimes for political purposes. Stretching from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, Modernism reached its peak in the 1960s; Post-modernism describes the period that followed during the 1960s and 1970s.

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World War I, the war that was originally expected to be "over by Christmas," dragged on for four years with grim brutality brought on by the dawn of trench warfare and advanced weapons, including chemical weapons. The horrors of that conflict altered the world for decades-and writers reflected that shifted outlook in their work.

As Virginia Woolf would later write, "Then suddenly, like a chasm in a smooth road, the war came."

Early Works Glorified the War

Among the first to document the "chasm" of the war were soldiers themselves. At first, idealism persisted as leaders glorified young soldiers marching off for the good of the country.

English poet Rupert Brooke, after enlisting in Britain's Royal Navy, wrote a series of patriotic sonnets, including "The Soldier," which read:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.

Brooke, after being deployed in the Allied invasion of Gallipoli, would die of blood poisoning in 1915.

The same year, Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, upon seeing how red poppies grew in the fields that had been ravaged by bombs and littered with bodies, wrote "In Flanders Fields." The poem, memorializing the death of his friend and fellow soldier, would later be used by Allied militaries to recruit soldiers and raise money in selling war bonds:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
Literary Tone Shifts After Grueling WWI Combat

While both Brooke's and McCrae's works lent patriotic tones to the sacrifices of war early in the conflict, as time wore on, the war's relentless horrors spawned darker reflections. Some, like English poet Wilfred Owen, saw it their duty to reflect the grim reality of the war in their work.

As Owen would write, "All a poet today can do is warn. That is why the true poet must be truthful." In "Anthem for the Doomed Youth," Owen describes soldiers who "die as cattle" and the "monstrous anger of the guns."

Owen's fellow army officer, Siegfried Sassoon, writes of corpses "face downward, in the sucking mud, wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled" in his 1918 poem, "Counter-Attack."

From the opposite side of the firing lines, German writer Erich Maria Remarque also experienced the grim day-to-day life of a soldier. Later, in 1929, he published an unflinching account in his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front.

Among other prominent works reflecting the horrific realities of war was the four-part tome, Parade's End, by English novelist Ford Madox Ford, and from the Eastern Front, Dr. Zhivago by Soviet Russian writer Boris Pasternak, in which the main character describes grotesque injuries inflicted on the war's battlefields.

Ernest Hemingway Pens 'A Farewell to Arms'

In one of the most famous works set during the "Great War," American writer Ernest Hemingway offers a gripping love story between a soldier and a nurse set against the chaotic, stark backdrop of World War I.

A Farewell to Arms is among the writer's most autobiographical: Hemingway himself served as an ambulance driver during the war, was severely wounded on the Austro-Italian front and had been sent to a hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with a nurse.

Virginia Woolf Writes on War's Impact on Society

The literary response to World War I was not only to portray its horrors at the front but also the reverberations of the war throughout society.

Virginia Woolf, who had been a close friend of the fallen poet Rupert Brooke, wove profound references to the war's effects throughout her works.

In the setting of her acclaimed novel Mrs. Dalloway, the war has ended, but everyone remains deeply affected by it, including one of the novel's main characters, a veteran with severe shell shock (now known as PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder).

Modernism Emerges in Works by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot

The disillusionment that grew out of the war contributed to the emergence of modernism, a genre that broke with traditional ways of writing, discarded romantic views of nature and focused on the interior world of characters.

Woolf's novels reflected this emerging tone, as did the works of Joseph Conrad ( Heart of Darkness) and James Joyce ( Ulysses). T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," considered to be one of the most significant poems of the 20th century, presents a haunting vision of postwar society, with the opening lines:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World questions once-accepted social and moral notions in presenting a nightmarish vision of the future.

World War I devastated continents, leaving some 10 million soldiers and 7 million civilians dead. But writers responded with profound and groundbreaking work as they and the rest of the world grappled with the war's upheaval.

As Remarque wrote in All Quiet on the Western Front: "All these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death."

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How World War I Changed Literature | HISTORY

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World War I altered the world for decades, and writers and poets reflected that shift in literature, novels and poetry.

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In the early 20th century, millions of African Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North to seek economic opportunity and escape widespread racial prejudice, segregation and violence. Many of them settled in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, which became the epicenter of a flowering of African-American culture known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Alongside their counterparts in art, music, theater and dance, these seven writers (along with others) eloquently demolished racist stereotypes, expressing pride in their African heritage and creating a new understanding of Black life and identity in the United States. In addition, the literature of the Harlem Renaissance drew much-needed attention to the bitter legacy of slavery and racism, helping to lay the foundations for the later civil rights movement.

1. Langston Hughes (1901-1967)

Born in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes moved around a lot as a child until his family settled in Cleveland, Ohio. He wrote his first and most famous poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" soon after graduating from high school. While studying at Columbia University in New York City, he embraced Harlem culture, especially the popular jazz and blues music that he later incorporated so memorably into his work beginning with his first collection, The Weary Blues (1926). As the most influential and widely celebrated voice of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes also wrote essays, novels, short stories and plays, all of which centered and celebrated Black life and pride in African American heritage.

2. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

After growing up in rural Alabama and Florida, Zora Neale Hurston attended Howard University and won a scholarship to Barnard College in 1925, which brought her into the heart of Harlem culture. A trained anthropologist who traveled to Haiti and Jamaica for research, Hurston gained attention in the 1930s for her collection of African American folktales, Of Mules and Men (1935) and her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, about the tumultuous life of a Black woman in the rural South. Though Hurston struggled to make a living as a writer during her lifetime, interest in her work revived after her death, when Their Eyes Were Watching God was celebrated as a literary classic and one of the greatest works of the Harlem Renaissance.

3. Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

The Kentucky-born Countee Porter was unofficially adopted at age 15 by F.A. Cullen, minister of a leading Methodist church in Harlem. While attending New York University, Countee Cullen began publishing his poems in The Crisis, the literary magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) co-founded by W.E.B. Du Bois, and elsewhere. He soon won a scholarship to Harvard, and won widespread acclaim for his debut poetry collection, Colors (1925). Unlike Hughes, who wrote in his famous essay "The Negro Artist and His Racial Mountain" that Black poets should combat the "urge within the race toward whiteness," Cullen was unapologetically influenced in his work by Romantic poets like John Keats. After his poetic reputation waned in the 1930s, Cullen taught for years in New York City public schools.

4. Claude McKay (1889-1948)

Born in Jamaica, Claude McKay came to the United States to attend college, but left school in 1914 and settled in Harlem. After publishing "If We Must Die," one of his best-known poems, in 1919 he traveled in Europe and lived in London, returning to the United States in 1921. McKay's collection Harlem Shadows (1922) established him as a major voice of the Harlem Renaissance and an influence on younger writers like Hughes. After his novel Home to Harlem (1928), about a young army deserter during World War I, became the first commercially successful novel by a Black writer, McKay followed up with two more novels, Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). A supporter of communism in the 1920s, McKay traveled to the Soviet Union and lived in France. Later in his life, he converted to Catholicism and settled in Chicago, where he worked as a teacher for Catholic organizations.

5. Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961)

A 1905 graduate of Cornell University (where she was possibly the first Black female student), Jessie Redmon Fauset was working as a teacher when she began writing for The Crisis. In 1919, she moved to New York to become the magazine's literary editor, helping to introduce writers such as Cullen, Hughes and McKay to national audiences. In addition to promoting the work of other important writers, Fauset continued to publish her own poetry and short fiction in the magazine, as well as four novels, including There is Confusion (1924) and Plum Bun (1929), which chronicled the lives and culture of the emerging Black middle class.

6. Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

Born in Washington, D.C., Jean Toomer came from a family with both white and Black heritage, and his grandfather had been the first Black governor in the United States during Reconstruction. After attending the City College of New York, Toomer wrote poetry and prose for several years, then moved to Georgia in 1921 to take a teaching job. The experience of returning to his family's Southern roots inspired his novel Cane (1923), an experimental hybrid of fiction prose, dramatic dialogue and poetry that was hailed as an important example of literary modernism. Toomer embraced the spiritual teachings of the influential philosopher George Gurdjieff, and taught workshops in Harlem and elsewhere. While he continued to write, his later work failed to find an audience. He later adopted the Quaker religion, and lived as a recluse in the years before his death.

7. Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

The daughter of a white mother from Denmark and a Black West Indian father, Nella Larsen was raised in a mostly white environment in Chicago after her father disappeared and her mother remarried a white Danish man. She studied nursing at a school in the Bronx created to train Black nurses, and returned to work there in 1916. Alongside her husband, the prominent Black physicist Elmer Imes, Larsen joined Harlem's flourishing intellectual and cultural circles; she later graduated from the teaching program at the New York Public Library.

In 1928, she published the autobiographical novel Quicksand, followed by Passing (1929), both of which featured mixed-race protagonists and complicated dynamics of urban life, race consciousness and sexuality. Larsen became the first Black woman to win a Guggenheim fellowship in 1930, but plagiarism accusations and a disintegrating marriage soon helped derail her literary career. She eventually stopped publishing and went back to nursing in the later decades of her life.

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7 Writers of the Harlem Renaissance | HISTORY

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These writers were part of the larger cultural movement centered in New York City's Harlem neighborhood and offered complex portraits of Black life in America.

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Harlem Renaissance - Definition, Artists & How It Started | HISTORY

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The Harlem Renaissance marked a golden age in Black culture.

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Countee Cullen, Queer writer, History.com

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Countee Cullen, Queer writer, History.com

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In the 1920s and early 1930s, a Black artistic and cultural revolution dubbed the Harlem Renaissance blossomed in New York City. Through art, music, literature and poetry, the movement invigorated racial pride while striving to redefine-and elevate-what it meant to be Black in America.

Its milieu of pride and possibility also fostered a thriving queer subculture, replete with cross-dressing blues singers, extravagant drag balls and literary and artistic salons. In an oft-quoted 1993 essay "The Black Man's Burden," Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote of the Harlem Renaissance that it was "surely as gay as it was Black."

During the first decades of the 20 th century, more than a million Black Americans took part in the Great Migration, fleeing the Deep South in search of jobs and freedom from Jim Crow segregation and racial violence. The largest influx came to New York City's Harlem district, which became an African American cultural mecca. There, writers, artists, musicians and stage performers collectively created an unprecedented celebration of Black heritage, turning folklore, spirituals and other aspects of the Black experience into art forms independent of white traditions and standards.

The new sounds of jazz and blues pulsing through Harlem drove an exuberant, anything-goes nightlife. Black and white, queer and straight alike shook off the dour restrictions of Prohibition at legendary music-and-dance spots like the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club, and in Harlem's hundreds of speakeasies.

In a clear signal that Harlem's creative class sought to torch old ideas, younger African American writers published in 1926 the single-issue literary magazine In it, their writing explored interracial relationships, homosexuality, color prejudice, promiscuity and other controversial topics.

"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame," wrote poet Langston Hughes, one of FIRE!! 's founders, in his landmark essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."

That freedom of self-expression extended, in varying degrees, to gender and sexual identity. A small handful of Harlem's most prominent creatives and intellectuals of the era were openly queer. Others pursued same-sex relationships in private, fearful of arrest or having their lives, careers and reputations ruined. In 1929, just days after the stock market crash, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, launched a public campaign against "sexual perversion" and other "moral degeneracy," which he decried as a threat to traditional Black American families.

Nonetheless, Harlem's queer community found safe spaces to express themselves-and to thrive-away from the scrutiny of police, the anti-vice commission and social conservatives. They partied and danced in cavernous dance halls, smoky, dark cabarets like the Hot Cha Club and speakeasies. At the queer haunt Clam House, female blues singers like the tuxedo-clad lesbian Gladys Bentley belted bawdy lyrics and flirted with women in the audience. Blues great Bessie Smith, who had love affairs with both men and women, occasionally crooned about the "mannish-acting women and a lisping, swishing, womanish-acting man."

The Savoy Ballroom sometimes hosted drag balls and even stayed open til 5 a.m. to help queer revelers avoid late-night homophobic attacks on the street. Thousands regularly turned out for the spectacular annual masquerade and drag ball in Harlem's cavernous Hamilton Lodge, to watch hundreds of men in stunning, elaborate outfits parade beneath the colossal crystal chandelier.

Gatherings also happened in more private spaces, according to James F. Wilson, a City University of New York theater and English professor, and author of Bulldaggers, Pansies and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Gay men mingled, smoked "reefer" and drank bathtub gin at Gumby's Book Studio, the preeminent literary and artistic salon of the era. Presided over by Alex Gumby, a charismatic, fashion-forward and openly gay Black history archivist, the studio attracted many famed Harlem Renaissance writers and intellectuals. A'Lelia Walker, daughter of Madame C.J. Walker, America's first Black female millionaire, hosted scores of lesbians, gay men and celebrities at lavish soirees in her apartment on 136 th Street. Less rarified venues included raucous rent parties and after-hours "buffet flats" in private apartments, where alcohol, gambling and all manner of sexual partners could often be found.

Here are six writers, performers and artists who played a part in the queer scenes of the Harlem Renaissance.

Wallace Thurman

After arriving in Harlem from Los Angeles in 1925, Wallace Thurman-editor, publisher, playwright, poet and novelist-edited a couple of journals before launching the boundary-pushing literary magazine FIRE!!. Contributors included poet Langston Hughes, anthropologist and author Zora Neale Hurston, out gay artist and playwright Bruce Nugent and others. The stories, poems, essays and drawings it featured tackled a wide range of taboo topics relating to race and sexuality.

Thurman's groundbreaking first novel, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), explored the nuances of skin-color bias within the Black community. Author of the play "Harlem," staged on Broadway the same year, he became the first Black manuscript reader at a mainstream publishing house.

Shortly after arriving in Harlem, Thurman was arrested for having sex with a man and publicly denied being gay. His marriage to a woman lasted six months; his wife sought a divorce on the grounds that he was a homosexual and refused to admit it.

Ethel Waters

After touring the Black Vaudeville circuit, Ethel Waters moved to Harlem in 1919 and became an entertainment icon. As a blues singer, she recorded hits like "Stormy Weather" and her version of "His Eye Is on the Sparrow."

She was the first Black woman to integrate theater on Broadway when she starred in Irving Berlin's 1933 musical "As Thousands Cheer." She became the first African American to star on her own television show-the 1939 variety special "The Ethel Waters Show"-and the second to be nominated for an Academy Award.

Her three marriages ended in divorce, and in the 1920s, Waters, who frequented Harlem's lesbian circles, had a romantic relationship with dancer Ethel Williams. Known as " The Two Ethels," they lived together in Harlem. Later in life, she announced that she had rededicated her life to Jesus Christ and toured with evangelist Billy Graham on his crusades.

Countee Cullen

Already an award-winning poet in high school, Countee Cullen expanded his literary reputation during his college years when his work appeared in Harper's, Crisis, Poetry and other renowned periodicals. When he entered Harvard University to pursue a master's degree in English, he published Color, the collection of poems that established Cullen as a leading young artist of the Harlem Renaissance.

His sonnet "From the Dark Tower," published in FIRE!!, decried racial injustice, stating it would not last forever and would ultimately make black people stronger and more resilient. "We shall not always plant while others reap..."

Cullen's very public 1928 wedding to the daughter of racial justice leader W.E.B. Du Bois-Harlem's premiere social event of the era-ended shortly after the honeymoon when Cullen confessed his love for men to his new wife. With Cullen conflicted about his sexuality, his mentor, philosopher and writer Alain Locke, steered Cullen to gay-affirming material of the day.

Cullen had relationships with Black and white men, a fact reflected in some of his work. He dedicated his poem "Tableau" to a white ex-lover:

"Locked arm in arm they cross the way, The black boy and the white,

The golden splendor of the day, The sable pride of night.

From lowered blinds the dark folk stare, And here the fair folk talk,

Indignant that these two should dare in unison to walk."

Alain Locke

Alain Locke, a prolific writer, philosopher and educator, was considered the "dean" of the Harlem Renaissance. The first African American selected as a Rhodes Scholar in 1907, he obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1918. His 1926 anthology of African American writers, The New Negro (which included his own work), became a cultural and artistic cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance.

In Locke's New Negro philosophy, race transcended heredity, the limitations of the past and the politics of civil rights. Instead, he saw race (and the arts) as an arena for individual and collective empowerment.

Locke, who taught for decades at Howard University, was secretive about being gay. But in his circle, he encouraged and supported other gay African American writers in the Harlem Renaissance and exposed them to pioneering and gay-affirming literature about sex and sexuality. Some, like Langston Hughes, were the object of his unrequited affections.

Gladys Bentley

Clad in her signature white tuxedo and top hat, Gladys Bentley belted out songs with bold, risqué lyrics to audiences in Harry Hansberry's Clam House. Her performances at the queer haunt on West 133 rd Street also drew straight crowds and celebrities to see her play piano and sing popular songs rewritten with double entendres.

Reacting to her show, writer Langston Hughes called Bentley "an amazing exhibition of musical energy-a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard-a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm."

The most "out" of the women who popularized blues music in the 1920s, Bentley married a white woman in a civil ceremony in 1930. Later in life, she married a man and published "I Am a Woman Again" in Ebony magazine in 1952, stating that hormone shots cured her lesbianism. Critics note that the story was published during the McCarthyism era, when gay and lesbian people were being targeted for investigation under a climate that linked homosexuality with communism.

Richard Bruce Nugent

Bruce Nugent was one of the few African American writers who declared himself out publicly. Along with some other leading new Black literary figures of the time, he criticized Black writers who appeased white society to achieve racial equality.

His stream-of-consciousness short story "Smoke, Lilies and Jade," published in FIRE!!, described a homoerotic and interracial encounter. Also a visual artist, Nugent published illustrations in FIRE!! and exhibited paintings along with other Black artists of the time.

Later in life, he married Grace Marr and they lived together for 17 years until her death in 1969. His work resurfaced in gay anthologies in the 1980s. The 2004 film Brother to Brother conveyed Nugent's recollections about the Black gay artists of the Harlem Rennaissance.

"People did what they wanted to do with whom they wanted to do it," Nugent said shortly before his death in 1987 about writing openly about homosexuality during the Harlem Renaissance. "You didn't get on the rooftops and shout... You didn't. You just did what you wanted to do."

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6 Key Figures of the Harlem Renaissance's Queer Scene | HISTORY

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Harlem in the 1920s and '30s offered the Black creative class a sense of pride and possibility. It also had cross-dressing blues singers, extravagant drag balls and literary and artistic salons.

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In the early 1970s, Black and Latino gay, trans and queer people developed a thriving subculture in house balls, where they could express themselves freely and find acceptance within a marginalized community. It was here where the world of drag pageantry, which often favored white contestants, evolved into competitions that spanned a variety of categories, including "vogue" battles. All these events can trace their origins as far back as the late 1800s.

Harlem's Hamilton Lodge No. 710 hosted regular drag balls during the post-Civil War era. Attendees varied in race, gender and sex-with some women taking part by wearing men's clothes- but the main attractions were female impersonators who showed off their gowns and bodies to a panel of judges in typical pageant fashion.

As these balls continued for decades, they grew in popularity-and notoriety. By the early 20th century, drag balls were considered illegal and taboo to the outside world. That drove the competitions underground (and also undoubtedly added to their appeal). Spectators for drag balls expanded from "a few courageous spectators" in the 1800s, to thousands by the 1930s, according to a collection of essays about the balls at the New York Public Library.

Harlem Renaissance Fuels Drag Ball Scene

The growing freedom and expression of Black culture during the Harlem Renaissance also fueled the burgeoning drag ball scene into the 1920s. The era not only allowed African American artists-from painters and authors to dancers and musicians-to experiment with and reinvent their crafts, it also saw popular Black artists experience and explore gender, sex and sexuality like never before.

"Langston Hughes has gone on the record, talking about his experiences attending events where men were dressed as women, and all of that," says Julian Kevon Glover, assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies and Dance and Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Although drag balls were interracial at the Hamilton Lodge, prejudices were still at play. Judges generally favored white, Eurocentric features. It wasn't until 1936-69 years after their first ball, with an attendance of 8,000 spectators -that a Black contestant took home the top prize for the first time. As the balls expanded to other major cities in the early to mid-20th century, racial bias in judging continued.

When a white contestant, Miss Philadelphia Rachel Harlow, took the crown in the 1967 Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pagent, Black contestant Crystal LaBeija, representing Manhattan, claimed the judges had discriminated against Black and Latinx contestants and that the pageant was rigged.

"She can't help it. Because you're beautiful and young, you deserve to have the best in life, but you didn't deserve... I didn't say she's not beautiful, but she wasn't looking beautiful tonight," LaBeija said about Harlow's crowning.

LaBeija refused to participate in other drag pageants, but she didn't exit the ballroom scene altogether. In the early 1970s, Harlem drag queen Lottie LaBeija convinced Crystal to promote her own ball. Crystal agreed, and the House of LaBeija-the first ever ballroom "house"-was born, with Crystal at the helm as the "mother."

The Birth of House Ballroom

From its inception, ballroom houses offered security for Black and Latinx queer, gay and trans people. These houses became more like families than teams, led by house "mothers" or house "fathers" to guide and groom their house "children" for the world.

"In ballroom, houses offer the primary infrastructure upon which the scene is built," explains Glover. "It provides the basic kind of kinship structure, and also demonstrates alternative possibilities for what kinship can look like. Moving away from this reliance on one's biological family, and complicating ideas of a family of choice."

Crystal and Lottie went on to host the first house ball in Harlem in the early 1970s, entitling it "Crystal & Lottie LaBeija presents the first annual House of LaBeija Ball." The ball, designed exclusively for Black and Latinx trans, gay and queer people, was a success. The house ball and the House of Labeija inspired many other prominent figures in the ballroom world to create houses of their own throughout the 1970s and beyond.

"Other trans women-some of them would never call themselves trans-the Pepper LaBeija, the Dorian Corey... Houses begin to be named after these women," says Michael Roberson, resident of the Center for Race, Religion and Economic Democracy (CRRED) and founder of the House of Marison-Margiela.

House ballroom further differentiated from drag balls in 1973, when Erskine Christian became the first gay man to compete, according to Roberson. This signified a shift from trans women and female-presenting people in house ballroom to the inclusion of gay men and male-presenting people in houses and house ballroom. "And you begin to see the shift again from mother-children to mother-father-children, so men begin to participate. And so, ballroom morphs from drag ball to a house ball," Roberson says.

Instead of the pageant-style of competition in drag balls, house balls held competitions between houses by categories. Categories range from face (the judging of a house members' beauty) to body (the appreciation of a house members' curves), to runway, to performances including vogue.

Voguing Begins as Pop Dip and Spin

Vogue is a type of improvisational dance inspired by the poses of models in fashion magazines. The dance style originated within the world of gay and trans Black people, but its exact origins remain unclear. According to Roberson, some believe that Paris Dupree-a pioneer in the house ballroom scene-created vogue, while others believe that it was created by a Black gay or trans person in the New York City jail complex at Rikers Island. Willi Ninja, another legendary member of the house ball community, has also been referred to as the "Godfather of Voguing." Regardless of its creator, the art form had another name before it was called vogue.

"Really, vogue was called pop, dip and spin," explains Roberson. "And it's in relationship to break dancing. But when people who were double jointed, who were acrobatic, started putting that in their vogues, then they wanted to call it a new way of voguing, and call pop, dip and spin, old way."

This "old way" of pop, dip and spin vogue dates back to the 1970s and 1980s. Then other elements of the dance were ushered in during the early 1990s, to form two new types of vogue dancing, called "new way" and "vogue fem."

While new way is characterized by precise movement of the arms, wrists and hands, vogue fem is broken down into either fast, angular movements or much slower, sensual and deliberate movements. The five fundamental elements of vogue fem include hands, catwalk, duckwalk, spins and dips (which are often erroneously referred to as "shablams" or "death drops") and floor performance, according to Glover.

Willi Ninja described voguing as a way of throwing shade, or criticizing, opponents on the dance floor, in the 1990 documentary "Paris is Burning." But, beyond a dance style and competition, voguing came to represent much more.

"Voguing is very much about telling one's story through movement... And that for me, because of who is doing it, is very much an act of resistance to an entire world that not only tells us that our lives are devoid of meaning, but also tells us that we have nothing to contribute," says Glover. "It's a kind of resistance, an embodied kind of resistance, to these cultural messages. To say, 'No, I have a story to tell, and my story is going to be so convincing, that in this particular atmosphere you're going to be able to clearly understand what it is that I'm saying."

Voguing in Mainstream Culture

Voguing as a form of expression became more mainstream with the release of media like Madonna's song, "Vogue" and the documentary, "Paris is Burning," released in 1990 and 1991, respectively.

Madonna's "Vogue" paid tribute to ballroom and featured voguers such as José Gutierez Xtravaganza and Luis Camacho Xtravaganza in the video. However, Madonna was accused of culturally appropriating a culture that she had no claim to and turning a rich history of vogue into a fad.

"Paris is Burning" took viewers directly inside the ballroom scene. Filmmaker Jennie Livingston began filming the events after seeing people voguing in New York City's West Village. The film is often referenced within the LGBTQ+ community and beyond. The ballroom term " throwing shade" was even added to Merriam-Webster's dictionary in 2017. But Livingston, as a queer white woman, has been accused of enabling cultural appropriation through her documentation of house balls. Several participants in the documentary also threatened to sue after not receiving compensation following the success of the film.

Glimpses of house ballroom culture continued to permeate mainstream spaces more prominently since the early 1990s, through television series such as RuPaul's Drag Race, which premiered in 2009; the MTV series America's Best Dance Crew, featuring trans Black voguer Leiomy Maldonado in 2009; and Ryan Murphy's Pose in 2019, which featured a scripted take on the house ballroom scene and included the most trans actors in television history.

Glover says they expect ballroom culture to continue to evolve as a vital element of the Black queer community-and periodically influence broader audiences.

"I think about ballroom as being a whale," Glover says. "It primarily dwells deep, deep, deep in the ocean. But there are moments when the scene comes up for air and emerges through the water, making a splash within the popular culture scene before returning to the oceans depths while those on the surface feel its ripples for quite some time."

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We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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How 19th-Century Drag Balls Evolved into House Balls, Birthplace of Voguing | HISTORY

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Harlem drag balls thrived during the post-Civil War era, creating a space where trans and queer people of color later broke out to develop House Ballroom.

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This is The Poetry Foundation's Essential American Poets Podcast. Essential American Poets is an online audio poetry collection. The poets in the collection were selected in 2006 by Donald Hall when he was poet laureate. Recordings of the poets he selected are available online at poetryfoundation.org and poetryarchive.org.

In this edition of the podcast, we'll hear poems by Lorine Niedecker. Lorine Niedecker was born in 1903 in Wisconsin. Her father was a carp fishermen, and Niedecker spent most of her childhood along Wisconsin's rock river in the marshes of Blackhawk Island. At 18, Niedecker went away to Beloit college, but after two years, her mother began to go blind and she returned home to take care of her. Niedecker got married briefly to a local boy, but the marriage didn't last. For most of her adult life, Niedecker lived in a cabin on the riverbank and held a series of low wage jobs. During the depression, she worked as al library assistant and wrote for the Federal Writers Project. During the war years, she worked as a stenographer and proof reader. In the 50s, Niedecker got a job at a local hospital, sterilizing utensils and scrubbing cafeteria floors. She worked there until she turned 60. Only then, when she married for the second time was she able to quite her job and devote her remaining years to writing.

Though she lived far from literary circles, Lorine Niedecker had a life long correspondence with the poet Louis Zukofsky, one of the founding members of the objectivists. Niedecker's sparse, careful work reflects the influence of the group who focus on objects and the material of language rather than personal experiences. But Niedecker's poetry is very much her own. It's concerned with colloquial speech, dreams and with folk traditions like mother goose rhymes. Her later work includes evocative descriptions of her life on Blackhawk Island, as well as history poems on topics ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Lake Superior. Niedecker didn't publish much poetry during her lifetime. Her first book, New Goose, was privately printed in 1946, and her second, My Friend Tree, came out nearly 20 years later in Scotland. Though she began publishing more in the 1960s, Niedecker's work was never widely known, and few friends and family even knew she wrote poetry. In 1970 at the age of 67, Lorine Niedecker has a stroke and died. After her death, the British poet Basil Bunting wrote the Wisconsin State Journal Newspaper, "Lorine Niedecker was, in the estimation of many, the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced. She was only beginning to be appreciated when she died, but I have no doubt that in ten years time, Wisconsin will know she was it's most considerable literary figure". Since that time, Niedecker has slowly come to secure a central place in 20th century American poetry, and in 2002 Lorine Niedecker's collected works were published. They were heralded as a modernist classic. The following poems are from a home recording made in 1970.

Lorine Niedecker: His Carpets Flowered

This is the William Morris poem.

I

-how we're carpet-making

by the river

a long dream to unroll

and somehow time to pole

a boat

I designed a carpet today-

dogtooth violets

and spoke to a full hall

now that the gall

of our society's

corruption stains throughout

Dear Janey I am tossed

by many things

If the change would bring

better art

but if it would not?

O to be home to sail the flood

I'm possessed

and do possess

Employer

of labor, true-

to get done

the work of the hand...

I'd be a rich man

had I yielded

on a few points of principle

Item sabots

blouse-

I work in the dye-house

myself

Good sport dyeing

tapestry wool

I like the indigo vats

I'm drawing patterns so fast

Last night

in sleep I drew a sausage-

somehow I had to eat it first

Colorful shores-mouse ear...

horse-mint... The Strawberry Thief

our new chintz

II

Yeats saw the betterment of the workers

by religion-slow in any case

as the drying of the moon

He was not understood-

I rang the bell

for him to sit down

Yeats left the lecture circuit

yet he could say: no one

so well loved

as Morris

III

Entered new waters

Studied Icelandic

At home last minute signs

to post:

Vetch

grows here-Please do not mow

We saw it-Iceland-the end

of the world rising out of the sea-

cliffs, caves like 13th century

illuminations

of hell-mouths

Rain squalls through moonlight

Cold wet

is so damned wet

Iceland's

black sand

Stone buntings'

fly-up-dispersion

Sea-pink and campion a Persian

carpet

Thomas Jefferson

I

My wife is ill!

And I sit

waiting

for a quorum

II

Fast ride

his horse collapsed

Now he saddled walked

Borrowed a farmer's

unbroken colt

To Richmond

Richmond How stop-

Arnold's redcoats

there

III

Elk Hill destroyed-

Cornwallis

carried off 30 slaves

Jefferson:

Were it to give them freedom

he'd have done right

IV

Latin and Greek

my tools

to understand

humanity

I rode horse

away from a monarch

to an enchanting

philosophy

V

The South of France

Roman temple

"simple and sublime"

Maria Cosway

harpist

on his mind

white column

and arch

VI

To daughter Patsy: Read-

read Livy

No person full of work

was ever hysterical

Know music, history

dancing

(I calculate 14 to 1

in marriage

she will draw

a blockhead)

Science also

Patsy

VII

Agreed with Adams:

send spermaceti oil to Portugal

for their church candles

(light enough to banish mysteries?:

three are one and one is three

and yet the one not three

and the three not one)

and send salt fish

U.S. salt fish preferred

above all other

VIII

Jefferson of Patrick Henry

backwoods fiddler statesman:

"He spoke as Homer wrote"

Henry eyed our minister at Paris-

the Bill of Rights hassle-

"he remembers . . .

in splendor and dissipation

he thinks yet of bills of rights"

IX

True, French frills and lace

for Jefferson, sword and belt

but follow the Court to Fontainebleau

he could not-

house rent would have left him

nothing to eat

. . .

He bowed to everyone he met

and talked with arms folded

He could be trimmed

by a two-month migraine

and yet

stand up

X

Dear Polly:

I said No-no frost

in Virginia-the strawberries

were safe

I'd have heard-I'm in that kind

of correspondence

with a young daughter-

if they were not

Now I must retract

I shrink from it

XI

Political honors

"splendid torments"

"If one could establish

an absolute power

of silence over oneself"

When I set out for Monticello

(my grandchildren

will they know me?)

How are my young

chestnut trees-

XII

Hamilton and the bankers

would make my country Carthage

I am abandoning the rich-

their dinner parties-

I shall eat my simlins

with the class of science

or not at all

Next year the last of labors

among conflicting parties

Then my family

we shall sow our cabbages

together

XIII

Delicious flower

of the acacia

or rather

Mimosa Nilotica

from Mr. Lomax

XIV

Polly Jefferson, 8, had crossed

to father and sister in Paris

by way of London-Abigail

embraced her-Adams said

"in all my life I never saw

more charming child"

Death of Polly, 25,

Monticello

XV

My harpsichord

my alabaster vase

and bridle bit

bound for Alexandria

Virginia

The good sea weather

of retirement

The drift and suck

and die-down of life

but there is land

XVI

These were my passions:

Monticello and the villa-temples

I passed on to carpenters

bricklayers what I knew

and to an Italian sculptor

how to turn a volute

on a pillar

You may approach the campus rotunda

from lower to upper terrace

Cicero had levels

XVII

John Adams' eyes

dimming

Tom Jefferson's rheumatism

cantering

XVIII

Ah soon must Monticello be lost

to debts

and Jefferson himself

to death

XIX

Mind leaving, let body leave

Let dome live, spherical dome

and colonnade

Martha (Patsy) stay

"The Committee of Safety

must be warned"

Stay youth-Anne and Ellen

all my books, the bantams

and the seeds of the senega root

Another Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Inside

Winter when no flower

The Congress away from home

Love is the great good use

one person makes of another

(Daughter Polly of the strawberry

letter)

Frogs sing--then of a sudden

all their lights go out

The country moves toward violets

and aconites

Darwin

I

His holy

slowly

mulled over

matter

not all "delirium

of delight"

as were the forests

of Brazil

"Species are not

(it is like confessing

a murder)

immutable"

He was often becalmed

in this Port Desire by illness

or rested from species

at billiard table

As to Man

"I believe Man...

in the same predicament

with other animals"

II

Cordilleras to climb-Andean

peaks "tossed about

like the crust

of a broken pie"

Icy wind

Higher, harder

Chileans advised eat onions

for shortness of breath

Heavy on him:

Andes miners carried up

great loads-not allowed

to stop for breath

Fossil bones near Santa Fé

Spider-bite-scauld

Fever

Tended by an old woman

"Dear Susan...

I am ravenous

for the sound

of the pianoforte"

III

FitzRoy blinked-

sea-shells on mountain tops!

The laws of change

rode the seas

without the good captain

who could not concede

land could rise from the sea

until-before his eyes

earthquake-

Talcahuana Bay drained out-

all-water wall

up from the ocean

-six seconds-

demolished the town

The will of God?

Let us pray

And now the Galápagos Islands-

hideous black lava

The shore so hot

it burned their feet

through their boots

Reptile life

Melville here later

said the chief sound was a hiss

A thousand turtle monsters

drive together to the water

Blood-bright crabs hunt ticks

on lizards' backs

Flightless cormorants

Cold-sea creatures-

penguins, seals

here in tropical waters

Hell for FitzRoy

but for Darwin Paradise Puzzle

with the jig-saw gists

beginning to fit

IV

Years... balancing

probabilities

I am ill, he said

and books are slow work

Studied pigeons

barnacles, earthworms

Extracted seeds

from bird dung

Brought home Drosera-

saw insects trapped

by its tentacles-the fact

that a plant should secrete

an acid acutely akin

to the digestive fluid

of an animal! Years

till he published

He wrote Lyell: Don't forget

to send me the carcass

of your half-bred African cat

should it die

V

I remember, he said

those tropical nights at sea-

we sat and talked

on the booms

Tierra del Fuego's

shining glaciers translucent

blue clear down

(almost) to the indigo sea

(By the way Carlyle

thought it most ridiculous

that anyone should care

whether a glacier

moved a little quicker

or a little slower

or moved at all)

Darwin

sailed out

of Good Success Bay

to carcass-

conclusions-

the universe

not built by brute force

but designed by laws

The details left

to the working of chance

"Let each man hope

and believe

what he can"

That was Lorine Niedecker, recorded in 1970 and used by permission of the University of California. Audio courtesy of PennSound, an ongoing project of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. PennSound is committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives. You've been listening to the Essential American Poets Podcast, produced by The Poetry Foundation in collaboration with poetryarchive.org. To learn more about Lorine Niedecker and other essential American poets, and to hear more poetry, go to poetryfoundation.org.

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Who was Allen Ginsberg?

Arriving in New York City in 1944 to study at Columbia University, young Allen Ginsberg formed a close friendship with then-unknowns Jack Kerouac, Jack's friend Neal Cassady and two legendary Times Square junkie outlaws, wise from their time on the streets, William S Burroughs and Herbert Huncke. These relationships eventually flowered into the original literary movement known as the Beat Generation.

Ginsberg's groundbreaking performance of "Howl" in 1955 in San Francisco began an epic career that would eventually place this poet in the lineage of his hero and great "courage teacher" Walt Whitman and advance (following upon the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound and, most notably, William Carlos Williams) the development of a specifically American vernacular in poetry.

New Jersey-born Allen Ginsberg reached far beyond the American tradition with his vibrant life in poetry, bridging literary connections with past and present, recognizing the inter-relatedness of poetry and poetics from around the world.

Allen Ginsberg was an outspoken voice for human rights, gay liberation, freedom of speech and ecology. The most politically-engaged poet of the 20th century, he protested against the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, sexual repression, censorship, corporate abuses, draconian drug laws, the FBI and the CIA, and spoke out for a new vision of peaceful coexistence that helped define the ideals of the 1960s and beyond.

Allen Ginsberg made big waves on the global stage from the 1960s until his death in 1997. He visited Cuba at the height of US/Cuba tensions and was crowned Kral Majales (King of May) in Prague during a key moment of the Soviet Union/Czech crisis, in 1967. Throughout his life, he championed dissidents and victims of persecution wherever and whenever he encountered them.

Allen Ginsberg taught at Naropa University and at Brooklyn College, where he pursued intellectual interests and delivered fascinating and original lectures on a surprising variety of literary topics. Many of these lectures are transcribed in full on this website.

A focus on spirituality and religion has been a unique aspect of the work of Allen Ginsberg, from the Judaism of his heritage to the Hinduism (Hare Krishna) discovered in his classic sojourn in India, to the Zen, and subsequently Tibetan, Buddhism and Meditation practice that he later became devoted to.

As a singer, songwriter and performing artist, Allen Ginsberg collaborated with, performed with, or was inspired by, a wide range of musicians, in a number of genres, among them David Amram, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith and Philip Glass.

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Why should you read Sylvia Plath? - Iseult Gillespie

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The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: Crash Course Literature 216

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Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Literature 215

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Arts and Letters of the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Black American History #26

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The (Gay) Harlem Renaissance | The History You Didn't Learn

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The Beat Generation in the 1950s | US HISTORY HELP: The 1950s

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The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.

How would you describe Langston Hughes? He's been referred to as the Harlem Renaissance's greatest poet, a creative powerhouse who was, at one point in his career, "critically, the most abused poet in America." But for Sam See, Hughes was something more than a jazz poet -he was a drag poet, too.

See tracks the ways in which Hughes documented and responded to Harlem's teeming drag culture in the 1920s. As a gay man, Hughes took part in Harlem's spectacular drag balls, places where all races, genders, and social classes mixed in "the safest and most visible space in which queers could...[convene and cross]." Hughes saw Harlem culture itself as an extended show with "poems that perform in drag."

A scholar finds affinities between both drag and the blues forms Hughes chose for his groundbreaking poems.

For Hughes, the word "drag" had multiple meanings: it described the ways in which his poems' narrators could be of any gender or race; it referred to the ways in which racism "dragged" down the progress of Hughes and his peers. In poems like "Cross," Hughes explored issues not just of racial mixing but of "crossing" boundaries of gender and class. "The primitive drag of the blues, which Hughes thought the most modern and urban of black art forms," writes See, "offered him the means of social protest as well as the formal and effective means to claim a voice in modernism."

See finds affinities between both drag and the blues forms Hughes chose for his groundbreaking poems. Not only was blues considered "socially degenerate," like drag performers and cross-dressers, but blues performers like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith both engaged in homosexual relationships and sang songs with queer content like the "Sissy Man Blues." Much like drag, which relied on a camp aesthetic, blues embodied both laughter and tears.

Ultimately, Hughes translated all of his complex identities, affinities, and uncertainties into poetry. "Hughes's poems perform to disrupt racist and homophobic understandings of nature" concludes See, "and they literally perform Hughes's vision of an embodied queer Negro nature."

Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

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The Drag Aesthetic of Langston Hughes - JSTOR Daily

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Langston Hughes' poetry was influenced by the drag scene in 1920s Harlem.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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African American literary critic and professor Henry Louis Gates once reflected that the Harlem Renaissance was "surely as gay as it was Black, not that it was exclusively either of these." Gates's comments point to the often-overlooked place of the Harlem Renaissance within queer history.

The Harlem Renaissance, a literary and cultural flowering centered in New York City's Harlem neighborhood that lasted from roughly the early 1920s through the mid-1930s, marked a turning point in African American culture. Developments from Zora Neale Hurston's folklore-influenced fiction to Duke Ellington's colorful orchestrations reflected an assertive and forward-thinking Black identity that philosopher Alain Locke dubbed "The New Negro."

Black queer artists and intellectuals were among the most influential contributors to this cultural movement. Like other queer people in early twentieth century America, they were usually forced to conceal their sexualities and gender identities. Many leading figures of the period, including Countee Cullen, Bessie Smith, and Alain Locke, are believed to have pursued same-sex relationships in their private lives, even as they maintained public personas that were more acceptable to mainstream audiences. From a modern vantage point, the work of these artists and their peers is part of the foundation of modern Black LGBTQ art.

WRITERS

The literary scene in Harlem during the 1920s and early 30s was a haven for several prominent Black queer writers. Influential figures such as Wallace Thurman and Langston Hughes never spoke publicly about their intimate relationships, but later generations of scholars and biographers have drawn conclusions by examining their personal correspondence, unpublished writings, and comments from their contemporaries. Some writers of the period included homoerotic themes-or, rarely, discussions of same-sex romantic relationships-in their work.

Philosopher Alain Locke and poet Countee Cullen were two of the most prominent Black queer writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke, who was the first African American Rhodes Scholar and spent decades as a professor of philosophy at Howard University, defined the aesthetic and goals of the Renaissance with his 1925 book The New Negro. With this landmark collection of short fiction, poetry, and essays from young Black writers, Locke celebrated the arrival of a "New Negro" who would lift Black art to new levels of achievement while continuing the struggle for civil rights.

Countee Cullen's 1925 poetry collection Color helped to establish his reputation as a leading Black poet of the new generation. Several of the poems in the collection, including "Yet Do I Marvel," "Incident," and "The Shroud of Color," discuss themes related to racism and African American identity. Color also features "Heritage," one of Cullen's best-known poems, which explores the significance of the African past to twentieth-century African Americans.

ENTERTAINERS

Nightclubs were another place in which Black queer artists were able to build names for themselves, sometimes while challenging mainstream notions of "masculine" and "feminine" dress and behavior. This was due in part to the racism of New York City law enforcement during the 1920s. The Committee of Fourteen, a citizens' organization that worked closely with the city police and courts to enforce anti-vice laws, was uninterested in the behavior of the Black residents of Harlem for most of the decade. Because of the Committee's indifference, a vibrant LGBTQ nightlife existed in Harlem without the degree of legal persecution it would have faced elsewhere in the city. Queer entertainers, such as Jimmie Daniels at the Hot-Cha nightclub and Gladys Bentley at the Clam House, found success in this relatively lenient environment.

Although Jimmie Daniels originally came to New York to attend business classes at Bird's Business Institute, he quickly fell in love with Harlem's cultural scene. By the late 1920s, he began pursuing a career as a performer and developed close friendships with artists and intellectuals including vocalist Alberta Hunter and sculptor Richmond Barthé. From the start of his professional singing career at the Hot-Cha, Daniels built a devoted following of gay fans with his sophisticated renditions of jazz standards and showtunes. Daniels's cane, which is topped with a carving of a Black man's head, suggests something of the showmanship that earned him a decades-long career as an entertainer and nightclub host.

Gladys Bentley was one entertainer who openly flouted the gender and sexuality constraints of the 1920s and 30s. Bentley, who was the star performer at Harry Hansberry's Clam House in the 1920s and the Ubangi Club in the early 1930s, became famous for performing in men's clothing. She was known for singing raunchy songs about her female lovers while flirting with women in the audience.

In a highly publicized 1931 civil ceremony, Bentley married her then-girlfriend, a white woman. Bentley's fame declined after the mid-1930s, but she left behind several excellent blues recordings on the Okeh, Victor, Excelsior, and Flame labels. Bentley's artistry and courageous defiance of contention have made her an icon of early twentieth century LGBTQ history.

BLUESWOMEN

Many of the stars of the 1920s "classic blues" era, including Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Alberta Hunter, were involved in same-sex relationships at various points in their lives. Like other artists of the period, these women never commented publicly on their lesbian or bisexual identities, although they were relatively open with their colleagues in the entertainment world. A few of the well-known blues recordings of the 1920s, such as Ma Rainey's 1928 recording of "Prove It On Me Blues," contain references to lesbian relationships. Blueswomen including Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and Ethel Waters were influential participants in the Harlem cultural scene during the 1920s and 30s, and the blues was a key element in the work of Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes.

Bessie Smith, known as the "Empress of the Blues," was the most famous blues singer of the 1920s. Although she lived in Philadelphia from 1923 until her death in 1937, Smith made regular trips to New York City, where she recorded for Columbia Records and attended parties thrown by Harlem Renaissance impresario and photographer Carl Van Vechten. One of her most celebrated performances on record is a 1925 recording of W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues," on which she is accompanied by a young Louis Armstrong. Smith reprised her performance in the 1929 short film St. Louis Blues, which is the only known footage of the great vocalist.

Alberta Hunter began her career as a blues singer, but she soon earned praise for her songwriting and her performances onstage (in the 1928 London production of Show Boat) and onscreen (in the film Radio Parade of 1935). A steady stream of successful recordings in the 1920s made her a star in the United States and in Europe, where she was often in demand as a nightclub performer. During the 1920s, Hunter began a relationship with Lottie Tyler-niece of the pioneering entertainer Bert Williams-that lasted until Tyler's death in 1960. Hunter retired in the late 1950s, but she experienced a career renaissance in the 1970s, performing and recording until her death in 1984.
This collage, part of an archive of materials belonging to Jimmie Daniels, was created by Hunter's "dear friend" Rex Madsen, a fashion designer who shared a house with Daniels in the 1950s.

Like Hunter, Ethel Waters got her start as a blues singer and quickly grew into a well-rounded entertainer. Over the course of a long and varied career, Waters established herself as one of the definitive figures in twentieth century American popular culture, inspiring Lena Horne to fittingly call her "the mother of us all." Among many milestones, she was the first African American to star in a television show and the first African American to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy. Waters, who spent most of the 1920s living in Harlem with her romantic partner, dancer Ethel Williams, eventually became one of the highest paid Broadway actresses, regardless of race. She often appeared at the well-known Cotton Club, where she was the first to sing "Stormy Weather" as part of The Cotton Club Parade of 1933.

Before Stonewall, directed by Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg, 1984.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic, 1994

Christa Schwarz, A.B. Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.

Garber, Eric. "A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem." Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. New York: New American Library, 1989, 318-31.

Knadler, Stephen, "SWEETBACK STYLE: WALLACE THURMAN AND A QUEER HARLEM RENAISSANCE." Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 4 (2002): 904. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26286254.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981.

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The Harlem Renaissance in Black Queer History

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The Harlem Renaissance, a literary and cultural flowering centered in New York City's Harlem neighborhood that lasted from roughly the early 1920s through the mid-1930s, marked a turning point in African American culture. Black queer artists and intellectuals were among the most influential contributors to this cultural movement.