Studies in Genre: Black Poetry from Wheatley to Wright

Catalog description

This class will explore African American poets burdened with a dual set of aesthetic expectations. Laboring under the need to reflect Euro-American ideals of perfection and innovation, they must also speak to and for a set of African American cultural traditions. In part these concerns reflect problems of audience. A third burden of black poets, as with all artists, is the deeply personal need to illustrate powerful feelings through poetry, to make passions rational, or to communicate an intense love of life. Examining the synthesis or lack thereof of these aims shall be the focus of class discussions. And since the need to appease two different audiences and the poet’s own desires has produced a body of poetic expression that is curiously hybrid in its construction and effect, concepts associated with the notion of double consciousness will complement these discussions, supplying us with a tool by which to explore the hybridicity such texts evince.