The Harlem Renaissance | Poetry Foundation (2024)

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.
-Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”

In the 1920’s, creative and intellectual life flourished within African American communities in the North and Midwest regions of the United States, but nowhere more so than in Harlem. The New York City neighborhood, encompassing only three square miles, teemed with black artists, intellectuals, writers, and musicians. Black-owned businesses, from newspapers, publishing houses, and music companies to nightclubs, cabarets, and theaters, helped fuel the neighborhood’s thriving scene. Some of the era’s most important literary and artistic figures migrated to or passed through “the Negro capital of the world,” helping to define a period in which African American artists reclaimed their identity and racial pride in defiance of widespread prejudice and discrimination.

The origins of the Harlem Renaissance lie in the Great Migration of the early 20th century, when hundreds of thousands of black people migrated from the South into dense urban areas that offered relatively more economic opportunities and cultural capital. It was, in the words of editor, journalist, and critic Alain Locke, “a spiritual coming of age” for African American artists and thinkers, who seized upon their “first chances for group expression and self-determination.” Harlem Renaissance poets such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Georgia Douglas Johnson explored the beauty and pain of black life and sought to define themselves and their community outside of white stereotypes.

Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance reflected a diversity of forms and subjects. Some poets, such as Claude McKay, used culturally European forms—the sonnet was one––melded with a radical message of resistance, as in “If We Must Die.” Others, including James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, brought specifically black cultural creations into their work, infusing their poems with the rhythms of ragtime, jazz, and blues.

The collection that follows offers a sampling of poetry published during this period, along with essays by and about Harlem Renaissance writers and audio recordings and discussions of their work. You can also browse all of our Harlem Renaissance poets here.

These years marked the beginning of the Great Migration, a period between 1916 to 1970 during which millions of African Americans migrated from the South to the North to flee the economic exploitation that accompanied life as a Southern sharecropper or tenant farmer, as well as violent and pervasive racism. They sought well-paying industrial jobs left vacant in the wake of World War I, which cut off cheap immigrant labor from Europe and induced white American laborers to join the armed forces. More than 175,000 African Americans settled in Harlem alone.

• • The Lost Love

  Fenton Johnson
  

• • How Long, O Lord!

  Fenton Johnson
  

• • Who Is That A-Walking in the Corn?

  Fenton Johnson
  

• • December, 1919

  Claude McKay
  

• • If We Must Die

  Claude McKay
  

• • Joy in the Woods

  Claude McKay
  

• • To the Swimmer

  Countee Cullen
  

• • The Heart of a Woman

  Georgia Douglas Johnson
  

• • Foredoom

  Georgia Douglas Johnson
  

• • The Measure

  Georgia Douglas Johnson
  

• • My Little Dreams

  Georgia Douglas Johnson
  

• • Quest

  Georgia Douglas Johnson
  

• • The Return

  Georgia Douglas Johnson
  

• • Smothered Fires

  Georgia Douglas Johnson
  

• • An Explanation

  James Weldon Johnson
  

• • Brothers-American Drama

  James Weldon Johnson
  

The literary aspect of the Harlem Renaissance is said to have begun with a dinner at the Civic Club celebrating African American writers. The likes of Countee Cullen and W.E.B. DuBois mingled with members of the white literary establishment, and doors opened: editor and critic Alain Locke was offered the chance to create an issue of the magazine Survey Graphic on “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro,” which later became a book-length study. Even before the Civic Club dinner, writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance were publishing important early works. Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows, James Weldon Johnson’s anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry, and Jean Toomer’s Cane were all published in these years.

• • Common Dust

  Georgia Douglas Johnson
  

• • Your World

    See Also

    The Harlem Renaissance: Origins, Influences, and Currents - Google Arts & CultureHarlem Renaissance | Definition, Artists, Writers, Poems, Literature, & FactsA New African American Identity: The Harlem RenaissanceHow the Harlem Renaissance helped forge a new sense of Black identity

  Georgia Douglas Johnson
  

• • A Dream

  Fenton Johnson
  

• • The Wonderful Morning

  Fenton Johnson
  

• • After the Winter

  Claude McKay
  

• • America

  Claude McKay
  

• • Harlem Shadows

  Claude McKay
  

• • The Lynching

  Claude McKay
  

• • On Broadway

  Claude McKay
  

• • Romance

  Claude McKay
  

• • The Snow Fairy

  Claude McKay
  

• • Subway Wind

  Claude McKay
  

• • To One Coming North

  Claude McKay
  

• • Sence You Went Away

  James Weldon Johnson
  

• • At the Carnival

  Anne Spencer
  

• • Dunbar

  Anne Spencer
  

• • Translation

  Anne Spencer
  

• • The Wife-Woman

  Anne Spencer
  

• • Banking Coal

  Jean Toomer
  

• • Georgia Dusk

  Jean Toomer
  

• • Harvest Song

  Jean Toomer
  

• • November Cotton Flower

  Jean Toomer
  

• • Reapers

  Jean Toomer
  

  See Also

  Harlem Renaissance ‑ Definition, Artists & How It Started | HISTORY

• • Seventh Street

  Jean Toomer
  

• • Song of the Son

  Jean Toomer
  

• • Storm Ending

  Jean Toomer
  

• • Simon the Cyrenian Speaks

  Countee Cullen
  

These years encompassed some of the landmark achievements of the literary Harlem Renaissance, such as Alain Locke’s anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation, which included works by Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston and sought to define the movement. Yet the economic boom that had allowed African American culture to flourish in the 1920s was about to end. In October 1929, a stock market crash sparked what is now known as the Great Depression. Millions were thrown out of work––and African Americans, who tended to be “last hired, first fired,” were hit especially hard. African American artists saw their audiences and support dwindle as budgets and disposable incomes shrank.

• • No Images

  William Waring Cuney
  

• • Epitaphs

  Countee Cullen
  

• • For Amy Lowell

  Countee Cullen
  

• • Two Thoughts of Death

  Countee Cullen
  

• • The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth

  Countee Cullen
  

• • Threnody for a Brown Girl

  Countee Cullen
  

• • Brass Spittoons

  Langston Hughes
  

• • Nineteen-twenty-nine

  William Waring Cuney
  

• • A Poet to His Baby Son

  James Weldon Johnson
  

• • Sylvester’s Dying Bed

  Langston Hughes
  

• • Dying Beast

  Langston Hughes
  

• • Sailor

  Langston Hughes
  

• • Claude McKay's Art

  Melvin B. Tolson
  

• • 200 Years of Afro-American Poetry

  Langston Hughes
  

• • Langston Hughes 101

  Benjamin Voigt
  

• • Langston Hughes and the Broadway Blues

  Franklin Bruno
  

• • The Black Poet as Canon-Maker

  Elizabeth Alexander
  

• • Jazz as Communication

  Langston Hughes
  

• • On Newly Discovered Langston Hughes Poems

  Arnold Rampersad
  

• • The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

  Langston Hughes
  

• • Experience, Experiment

  Patricia Spears Jones
  

• • Sticks and Stones and Words as Weapons

  Opal Palmer Adisa
  

• • Weakness Stalks in Pride: A Discussion of James Weldon Johnson's “O Southland!”

  From Poem Talk
  

• • I've Known Rivers

  From Poetry Off the Shelf
  

• • When the Weary Blues Met Jazz

  From Poetry Off the Shelf
  

• • Revisiting the Great Migration through paintings and poetry

  From NewsHour Poetry Series
  

• • No Images

  From Poetry Off the Shelf
  

• • Library of Congress: A Guide to Harlem Renaissance Materials

• • Encyclopaedia Brittanica entry on the Harlem Renaissance

• • New York Public Library: Online Exhibit of Harlem 1900-1940

• • Humanities Texas, The Harlem Renaissance: What Was It, and Why Does It Matter?

• • Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute: Social Contributions of the Harlem Renaissance

• • Literary Timeline of the Harlem Renaissance

• • An Archive for Virtual Harlem