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. 7Bennett, in Hatred, one of the most widely reprinted of Renaissancepoems, lays a curse on her enemies, the implacability of which is matchedonly by its assurance: I shall hate you like a dart of singing steel.whilerekindled fires in my eyes shall wound you like swift arrows. 8 Both wereknown for their poetry exalting Black pride.In Bennett s To A Dark Girl, for example, the speaker sees something of old forgotten queens in the waya young girl walks, while Johnson admires a disdainful and magnificent Black man sauntering down a Harlem street, his laughter arrogant andbold. 9Two things are noteworthy about Brown s remarks.The first is that,until recently, women were considered part of the Renaissance mainstreamand used as examples of modern Black pride writers.Indeed, fully half ofthe poetry by women in the pages of Opportunity and The Crisis from 1920through 1931 dealt explicitly with race issues.10 Prejudice, lynching,stereotypes, white cultural imperialism, finding strength in one s ancestorsand culture, the beauty of Blackness, and the assertion of rights were allpopular subjects during the decade for both men and women.Moreover, 225The Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissancenearly as many women s poems were published as those by men.11 Yet as timewent on, the image of women s poetry grew to be that of the pastoral orromantic lyric with only occasional references to the vast amount of racepoems produced.12Second, in mentioning well known poets Anne Spencer and GeorgiaDouglas Johnson, Brown fails to indicate that they wrote on race themeseven though they composed powerful pieces about political and racial issues.While the majority of their work is comparatively private, they were clearlyinterested in and supportive of the new militance.Spencer addressedlynching, female oppression, and racism in her writing.13 Johnson reflectedoften on the ironies of race prejudice and imperialism, berating white menfor being weak-kneed.afraid to face the counsel of their timid hearts. 14Similarly, nature poet Effie Lee Newsome wrote of African boys aspathfinders for a new world while Mae V.Cowdery, known for her lovepoetry, ventured occasionally into political areas.15 Conversely, the racepoets tried their hand at personal topics.16From looking at the output of each poet, it is clear that while a givenwoman might have preferred one kind of subject over another, he generallydid not confine herself to it.As a group, these women hared a sensibility thattranscended the categories into which they were placed.In part because therace poets were overshadowed by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, andSterling Brown, later criticism would focus on the lyricists, obscuring theimplicit connection between the social and personal writing most of themdid.Jessie Fauset is one of the writers who concentrated on the privateworld of romantic love in her poetry yet she stated in 1922 that the issue ofrace was always with her: I cannot if I will forget the fact of color in almosteverything I do or say. 17 Anne Spencer, who excelled at lush descriptionsof her garden, fought against racial discrimination in her small Virginia townand declared in the headnote to her verse in Countée Cullen s anthology: Iproudly love being a Negro woman. 18 Angelina Weld Grimké chose towrite imagistic nature poems and at the same time admired her activist fatherand abolitionist aunt, Charlotte Forten Grimké.The seeming contrastbetween these women s personal struggles against racism and the nonracialquality of their writing is a characteristic shared by many female poets of thetime and has been interpreted as an escapist impulse, evidence of a self-denying identification with white culture, or a declaration of independencefrom the role Black writers were expected to fill
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