Poetry Commons^™

“Something Large And Old Awoke”: Ecopoetics And Compassion In Tracy K. Smith’S Wade In The Water, Kaitlin Hoelzer

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Susa Young Gates Award Essay

First Place

Both historical and contemporary Black poets have used their work to identify, condemn, and suggest solutions to problems stemming from racism in American society. Indeed, as Arnold Rampersad notes in his introduction to The Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry, many Black poets use “poetry as a vehicle of protest against social injustice in America.” Art is inherently political, even when its arguments do not overtly engage in political debates. As Lorraine Hansberry argues, all art is rooted in a particular social and political consciousness. The choice is “not whether one will …

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 …