The new poems posted on the web are for Thursday’s class.

Questions for Harlem Renaissance Poets I

1. In general I will want to discuss cultural pressures and opportunities presenting themselves to Afro-American writers. How do they engage “white” modernism while addressing what seemed needs distinctive to the worlds they had to live in? How did they reconcile art with practical life, and with white fantasies of what black practical life should look like?

2. Who is the Victorian poet that Mckay’ s dramatic monologue (500) is modeled on? To what purposes does the put that form?

3. How can we see the choice of sonnet form as a heroic one in McKay’s cultural context, in relation to form and not to content. How does McKay put that form to social use in “The Harlem Dancer” (501)? Why does each section of the poem produce a more narrow and precise focus, until he reaches the face? How does that mime the experience of watching her and bring the sonnet from the domain of discourse into the domain of experience?

4. What is the basic difference between the first and the second quatrains of “If we Must Die”? How then does the sextet part of the sonnet change the force of “we must,” and what are the implications of that? What is the effect of “dying” in the last line?

5. “The lynching” is a Shakespearean sonnet—three quatrains and a couplet rather than an Italian sonnet, with octet and sextet. What is the relation between the women in the last quatrain and the little lads in the couplet. Why does the couplet completely change tense and why does it characterize the body as “thing”? What is the relation between “fiendish glee” and the father in heaven?

6. What can you praise about “The White City”?

7. How is Countee Cullen’s “Yes I do Marvel” ( 727) structured? Why is there a turn after eight lines and another for the final couplet. Why is it hard to understand why god could make a poet black and bid him sing? What does singing involve?

8. What are the terms of the personal conflict in Cullen’s Heritage? How does the last stanza of the poem bring his sense of conflict to a climax? What are some of the meanings of “civilized”?

9. How does the refrain deepen meaning in Hughes “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (687)? What does the short penultimate stanza add to that sense of depth?

10. How do the sounds change in the refrain line of “When Sue Wears Red”? What does that do for the poem?

11. Why does “the Weary Blues” (688) so stress the observing “I” in relation to the singer’s “I.” Perhaps there is something there about the identification blues requires of its audience. But how can he create that identification in the poem, and how does going into the singer’s sleep contribute to identification?

12. Why does a poem like “Gals’ Cry for Dying lover reject complexity? How can this rejection of complexity appear as a strength for poetry? Are there aspects of spirit lost when we emphasize complexity? But how poetry honor those aspects without being simplistic or propagandistic? We will stress next time the relation between economy and believable or workable simplicity.