Sterling Brown and the georgic tradition in African-American literature

Abstract

ABSTRACTSterling A. Brown, the important New Negro Renaissance poet, critic and scholar, has long been praised for his georgic poetry about rural African-American labour and culture. However, Brown’s scholarship and criticism were also strongly influenced by the georgic, and a pastoral/georgic binary is present in much of his writing. We can see the influence of the georgic in his influential study of plantation pastoral and literary stereotypes, in his description of folk art and culture as georgic art, and in his construction of an African-American literary canon that denigrates early African-American poetry in favour of vernacular art. By studying Brown’s writings about literature, we can see the resilience of the georgic in the African-American literary tradition and also recognize ways that Brown at times undervalued the pastoral mode and meditative poetry about the beauty of nature.