Folk Iambics: Prosody, Vestiges, and Sterling Brown'sOutline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes

Abstract

Studies of the New Negro Renaissance have long emphasized the emergence in black poetry of the vernacular and of folk-oriented rhythms in particular. Sterling Brown's critical work and poetry show, however, that traditional English meters had a central role in the discourse and poetics of New Negro poetry. Reading his 1931Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroestogether with James Weldon Johnson'sBook of American Negro Poetry(1922) suggests that these meters counteracted dominant racialized ideas about black bodies, rhythms, and song. The polymetrical surface of Brown's own early poem “When de Saints Go Ma'ching Home” (1927) reveals that Brown treated iambic pentameter as a vernacular form, destabilizing entrenched divisions between conventional and innovative, white and black, past and present. Future studies of black poetry might therefore look to prosodic hybridity as a powerful critique of audience ideology.