Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

I chose to study the Harlem Renaissance because all the books and poetry and art I have seen and read that have come out of the Harlem Renaissance have been some of the most influential, true, and beautiful pieces of art and literature I have been exposed to. Somehow, after being repressed for such a time in their history, and maybe because of that, when the Blacks of America stood up, stretched, smiled and let their voices be heard, there were angels dancing on their tongues and doves flew from their fingertips. Or, that's how I saw it at least. It was beautiful. Authors like James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes emerged and shared themselves. They saw a beauty in the human condition and human relations that is rarely equaled. There is some process that occurs when a people go through something collectively, as a people, and come out from it still singing, thriving, and moving as men. That is what I admire about these artists, and it is that thriving element in their work, be it sad, be it happy, be it urban or rural, be it violent or be it romantic -- the feeling that permeates their voices draws me to them.

Zora Neale Hurston's story "Sweat" empowers the black woman, like usual. the skinny, shy woman rises up to her potential and shows us how strong she is. "Delia's habitual meekness seemed to slip from her shoulders like a blown scarf." Her abusive husband is a good-for- nothing, worst-sort-on-earth type who sleeps around and scares poor delia with snakes. He gets what was coming to him anyway, the result of his own prank: a rattlesnake bite and death. "She never moved, he called, the sun kept rising."
Early on in the story, Delia is shown as a hard-working, submissive woman, eager to make her comfortable home even more comfortable by working hard and sweating hard -- doing whatever needed to be done for life to be worth living. But that husband made her shoulders low:"Delia never looked up from her work, and her thin, stooped shoulders sagged further." Everyone loved her from afar, she was a beautiful woman beaten down by a man over fifteen years, but still strove for everything. A happy woman sings and so she sang after she declared: "Ah hates you tuh de same degree dat Ah useter love yuh." and had that man leave her house.
This woman rid herself of her man just like the Black people rid their backs of whites, in a way, in Harlem, in their own cultures, in their writing and in their singing, before they had true freedom (by law).
I love in Hurston's novels, her rural settings, her slow towns and southern heat that virtually pours out of her writing like I can feel in on the street. The people are care free, the men are lazy as Rip Van Winkle ("The village men on Joe Clark's porch even chewed cane listlessly.") and stars twinkle in everyone's eyes.
Her words are inspirational, and moving. They move the part of you that grew up a long time ago, the part of your parents that did that too. She touches the freedom that everyone wants to feel all the time and touches the spot in me that wants to break free every second of my life.
This is a true Rebirth.


The poets all hold a simplicity in their poetry that moves me with its beauty like a sunset, or a full moon -- so simple yet so powerful.
Countee Cullen could display his bitterness in 12 short lines, 3 short verses, but it makes me sigh when he closes with "That's all I remember." How fleeting and frustrating!
Langston Hughes softens me with his personal touches. He holds the world and makes it his. "My soul runs deep like the rivers." His budding curiosity, his love for the land, the histories of his life and his country. Everything is so obvious with him, he could (and did) touch a whole population with his verse.
Edwin Arlington Robinson in Richard Corey displays a very subtle knife about a beautiful man, patient but boring people, the man's evidential suicide.

"He was always human when he talked

But still he fluttered pulses when he said

'Good-morning,' and he glittered when he walked"

Sad, sad, sad is when a man can inspire but he can't move others to action. I am not sure, this is what our poet wanted to express but he expressed that to me, and he expressed how much people can misunderstand. I wonder if they misunderstood him too...
Frost brought poetry to daily life. He wrote of his frustrations like they were works of art, his convictions like philosophical maxims (maybe he thought they were that good) and he gave a little cuteness to his rhyme, a little familiarity to his verse. He was a poet for the working man, for the man of reason and he reasoned in Mending Wall:
"There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard."
yet he keeps a magical edge to fight and wend his way through his words.