Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that American poets of the last hundred years use laughter to promote recognition of shared humanity across difference. Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols the boundary between in-group and out-group, but laughter can also help us cross or re-draw that boundary, creating a more democratic understanding of shared experience. Poets’ uses of humor reveal and reinforce deep-seated beliefs about the possibility of empathic mutual understanding among unlike interlocutors. These beliefs also shape poets’ senses of audience and their attitudes toward the notion that poets are somehow exceptional. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they make a claim about the basic ethical function of poetry, because humor and poetry share fundamental structures: both combine disparate subjects into newly meaningful wholes. Taking W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore on one side and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot on the other as competing models of how humor can embrace, exclude, and transform, the book charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and Lucille Clifton, among others. Poets whose race, gender, sexual orientation, or experimentalism place them outside the American mainstream are especially interested in humor’s potential to transcend the very differences it demarcates. Such writers increasingly replace mockery, satire, and other humorous attacks with comic forms that heighten readers’ understanding of and empathy with individuals, while revealing the failures of dominant hierarchical moral and logical systems.

Flying Africans, Black Pilots

This chapter resumes the exposition of the interface as a cultural form begun in Chapter 2, in relation to Conrad’s sea captains. In advancing that account into the middle decades of the twentieth century, it addresses a new technology: mechanically powered flight. The paradigmatic interface was now the cockpit of an aeroplane, rather than the quarterdeck of a ship. This is not a straightforward story of technological progress. In the United States, race had come to determine what is gained and lost by passage across the threshold of the interface. The chapter’s topic is the conjunction of interwar aviation technology with a version of the slavery-era legend of the Flying Africans which gained traction in African-American politics and culture (especially Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement) in the 1920s, and subsequently caught the attention of blues singers like Lead Belly and writers like Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, and Ralph Ellison.

How Not to Introduce Blues Prosody:

This article delivers a two-pronged intervention into blues prosody. First, it argues that scholars have repeatedly misidentified the metrical organization of blues poems by Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. The dominant approach to these poems has sought to explain their rhythms with models of alternating stress, including both classical foot prosody and the beat prosody of Derek Attridge. The article shows that the systematic organization of blues structures originates in West African call-and-response patterning (not alternating stress), and is better explained by models of syntax and musical phrasing. Second, it argues that these misclassifications — far from being esoteric matters of taxonomy — lie at the heart of African American aesthetics and identity politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Whereas literary blues verse has long been oversimplified with conventional metrics like “free verse,” “accentual verse,” and “iambic pentameter,” the article suggests that its rhythms arise instead from a rich and complex vernacular style that cannot be explained by the constraints of Anglo-American versification.

Capital Gains

This chapter follows Gloria Richardson’s ongoing intellectual development at Howard University in Washington, DC. Under the tutelage of intellectual giants such as E. Franklin Frazier, Rayford Logan, and Sterling Brown, Richardson broadened and sharpened her social, economic, and political philosophies. Through her sociology courses, Richardson obtained the knowledge and research skills that would provecritical to her leadership of the Cambridge movement. It was also during her time at Howard that Richardson participated in her first organized protest against racism.

New Negro and Genteel Protest

Scholarly accounts of the Harlem Renaissance often foreground its politically radical and aesthetically innovative aspects. This tends to obscure the continuing strength of genteel ideas in African American writing of the period. This chapter traces the productivity of the sonnet during the Harlem Renaissance to its productive revisions of the genteel tradition. Drawing on a range of previously neglected poems, it situates Claude McKay’s epochal “If We Must Die” against the gradual transformation of the protest sonnet over the 1910s. In a second step it shows how genteel conventions shaped the subversive variety of protest that Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, and Helene Johnson explored from the mid-twenties. The ambivalent position of the sonnet in between gentility and protest, the chapter argues, is behind the difficulties that scholars like Houston A. Baker have faced in assessing the interplay of formal mastery and deformative self-assertion in the Harlem Renaissance sonnet.

Diversity as Evolutionary in Children’s Literature: The Blog Effect

The call for better representation of African Americans in children’s literature can be traced back about eighty years through the works of social and literary leaders including Sterling Brown. In 1933, he wrote of the pervasiveness of stereotypes of African Americans in literature, happy slaves and the representation of African Americans in American literature.