The Book of American Negro Poetry

📅 1922 ✏️ James Weldon Johnson 📖 Harcourt, Brace and Company 📚 Revised edition (1931) expanded with additional poets from the Harlem Renaissance

African AmericanCanon-FormationHarlem Renaissance20th CenturyLandmark

The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), edited by James Weldon Johnson, was the first major anthology of African American poetry published in the United States, collecting work from Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Fenton Johnson, and others in a landmark act of Black literary recovery and canon-formation. Johnson's substantial introduction remains a foundational document of African American literary criticism.

Overview

Published by Harcourt, Brace and Company in 1922, The Book of American Negro Poetry was the first major anthology devoted exclusively to African American poetry. Its editor, James Weldon Johnson, was himself a poet, novelist, critic, songwriter (co-author of "Lift Every Voice and Sing"), and a leading figure of the NAACP. The anthology was designed not merely to collect work but to make a public case: that Black American poets had produced a substantial and dignified body of poetry that deserved recognition within the American literary tradition.

Scope and Contents

The first edition gathered poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Fenton Johnson, William Stanley Braithwaite, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and other African American poets from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also featured the work of younger poets who would define the Harlem Renaissance — including Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, who were only beginning to emerge when the anthology went to press. The selection demonstrated the range of Black American poetic practice, from Dunbar's dialect verse to McKay's formally accomplished sonnets to the experimental free verse of the younger generation.

Johnson's Introduction and Its Influence

Johnson's lengthy introduction was itself a landmark of Black literary criticism. He argued forcefully for the distinctiveness of African American poetry — tracing its roots through the spirituals and the blues — while insisting that Black poets could and should work within the full range of English poetic forms, not only dialect or folk-derived modes. The introduction also explicitly situated Black poetry as a national American achievement, not a segregated subcategory, making a case for integration that was as much political as literary.

The 1931 Revised Edition

Nine years later, Johnson prepared a substantially revised and expanded edition in 1931, adding poets who had emerged since 1922 — including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, and others who had established themselves during the intervening decade. The 1931 edition thus documented the Harlem Renaissance's full flowering, effectively bridging the early recovery work of the first edition with the movement's mature achievement.

Historical Significance

The Book of American Negro Poetry was the first systematic attempt to demonstrate that African American poets constituted a continuous, substantial, and artistically serious tradition — at a time when many mainstream critics and readers assumed either that no such tradition existed or that it was limited to dialect verse of folkloric interest. Together with Johnson's own novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and his editorial work on The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925, with J. Rosamond Johnson), this anthology cemented Johnson's role as the single most important literary canon-builder of early twentieth-century Black America.

Criticism

Johnson's editorial choices reflected his own literary values: he favoured formal, well-wrought verse and was cautious about more radical, experimental, or vernacular-inflected Black poetry. His introduction's brief dismissal of dialect poetry — which he characterized as a limited mode that Black poets should leave behind — was controversial then and remains debated, as later critics have reclaimed dialect and vernacular forms as central to the Black poetic tradition. Nonetheless, the anthology's foundational importance is universally acknowledged.

Related Anthologies

The New Negro: An Interpretation, An Anthology of American Negro Literature

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Book of American Negro Poetry?

The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), edited by James Weldon Johnson, was the first major anthology of African American poetry, collecting work from Dunbar, McKay, and emerging Harlem Renaissance poets. It was published by Harcourt, Brace and Company and remains a landmark of Black literary canon-formation.

Why is James Weldon Johnson's introduction important?

Johnson's introduction was a foundational document of African American literary criticism, arguing that Black American poets had produced a substantial, dignified body of work deserving of national recognition and tracing Black poetic roots through spirituals and blues into formal English verse.

How did the 1931 edition differ from the 1922 original?

The 1931 revised edition expanded the anthology to include poets who had emerged during the Harlem Renaissance — notably Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Sterling Brown — documenting the movement's full flowering and bridging early recovery work with mature achievement.

Last updated: 2026-07-01