Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in African American Studies
Do Not Separate Her From Her Garden: Anne Spencer's Ecopoetics, Carlyn E. Ferrari
Do Not Separate Her From Her Garden: Anne Spencer's Ecopoetics, Carlyn E. Ferrari
Doctoral Dissertations
Though she is primarily associated with the New Negro Renaissance, Anne Spencer’s writing career spanned over seventy years, and her archive consists of unpublished, undated poetry and prose about the natural world written on ephemera. This project centers Spencer’s unusual archive and writing practice to demonstrate both the range of her artistry and the degree to which her relationship with the natural world informed both her poetics and sense of being. In this project, I employ “ecopoetics” as an analytical framework that both encourages exploring the place of nature in black women’s writing and facilitates the method of close-reading and …
The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways In The Urban Landscapes Of Harlem Renaissance Poetry, Maren E. Loveland
The Fluid Pastoral: African American Spiritual Waterways In The Urban Landscapes Of Harlem Renaissance Poetry, Maren E. Loveland
Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism
In 1921 Langston Hughes penned, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers” in his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Hughes 1254). Weaving the profound pain of the African American experience with the symbolism of the primordial river, Hughes recognized the inherent power of water as a means of spiritual communication and religious significance. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the American pastoral as typified by white poets such as Robert Frost and Walt Whitman, the African American poets emerging from the Harlem Renaissance established a more nuanced pastoral landscape embedded within urban cultures, utilizing water in particular as …