After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown Gary Edward Holcomb (bio) Tidwell, John Edgar, and Steven C. Tracy, eds. After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Until the arrival of Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925), the defining Harlem Renaissance text was James Weldon Johnson's 1922 The Book of American Negro Poetry. With a blend of poems by both established and nascent New Negro illuminati, including Jessie Fauset, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Claude McKay, Johnson's compilation familiarized readers with the poetry of the burgeoning literary movement, but not only the anthology's assembled verse had an impact. Correspondingly influential was Johnson's preface, which pled for a black poetics that reflected the unique condition of African American experience. The substance of Johnson's appeal might nevertheless surprise some twenty-first century readers, as the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry called for a lyric mode that abstained from the use of dialect. Although an assiduous champion of Southern spirituals and slave songs, Johnson argued that conventional vernacular verse had more to do with minstrelsy than with the authentic poetic speech of Southern black folk. Johnson's leading light was McKay, as the Caribbean immigrant had eschewed the regional colloquial speech poetry of his Jamaican youth in favor of what he, and Johnson, deemed an elevated and therefore more suitably renaissance style for the New Negro 1920s, for McKay this customarily and appropriately being the Shakespearean sonnet. For the author of "O Black and Unknown Bards" (1908), McKay's black cris de coeur stirred the reader in ways vernacular verse could not. Ten years later, Johnson's views would undergo a dramatic shift, as now the critic was eager to further the cause of dialect poetry. His tune was changed by the publication of Sterling Brown's Southern Road (1932), a collection for which Johnson himself contributed the introduction, coining the hyphenate "Sterling-Brownian" for lyricism that "capture[d] the visionary energy and wisdom of African American culture" (Tidwell and Tracy 11). With the arrival of Southern Road Brown, the author of such touchstones as "Ma Rainey," "Odyssey of Big Boy," "Remembering Nat Turner," "Sam Smiley," "Slim Hears 'The Call,'" "Strong Men," and "After Winter," had arrived. Locke's review would celebrate Brown for initiating "new directions in African American poetry" (Tidwell and Tracy 9). The year before releasing Southern Road, Brown published his Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes, a text that would also serve as a supplemental update to the expanded 1931 reprinting of Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry. In effect, at the onset of the 1930s Brown was poised to assume two key positions in African American letters. He was on the way toward taking up the role first Johnson and later Locke had filled during the Harlem Renaissance, as the primary arbiter of Negro prosody. And he was in position to assume the laurel leaves, worn first by McKay, then Countee Cullen, and ultimately by Langston Hughes, during the 1920s, as leading poet of the New Negro movement. In 1935 Brown's progress as a poet hit a roadblock, however, when publishers rejected his much anticipated next volume, aptly titled No Hiding Place. The trouble publishers had with No Hiding Place was with the palpable political content of the poetry: "The folk metaphysic that so carefully defined Southern Road had shifted to a more proletarian voice. As reasons for their unwillingness to bring out this collection, publishers cited Southern antipathies toward labor causes and communist ideology . . . " (Tidwell and Tracy 9). Yet despite this setback, Brown did go on to occupy the seat of foremost literary critic of [End Page 1033] African American letters during the 1930s and on into the 1940s, doing so from his office in the English department at Howard University. He continued to publish his poetry, moreover, which he distributed fairly evenly between black cultural journals like the Crisis and Opportunity and leftist periodicals like the Nation and Partisan Review. Among his most notable achievements during the Great Depression and early war period was in the role of editor...