ABSTRACT

The Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and black-power movements of the sixties are often compared as times of rebirth and renewal in the life and arts of the black man. It is ironic, then, that we are forgetting the poetry of a man whose works span both periods. In 1925 Frank Home’s “Letters Found Near a Suicide” won the poetry prize in The Crisis;1 James Weldon Johnson included many of Home’s poems in the various editions of The Book of American Negro Poetry,2 as did Countee Cullen in his Caroling Dusk in 1927;3 in 1937 Sterling Brown cited the “intellectual irony” and “race pride” in Home’s works;4 and he was represented in Hughes and Bontemps’ The Poetry of the Negro, 17461949, as well as in the new, revised edition.5 But Bontemps and Hughes would remember, whereas today’s editors have forgotten the poems of the twenties and passed over those of the sixties. The more recent comprehensive anthologies—from Emmanuel and Gross’s Dark Symphony (1968) to Ruth Miller’s Blackamerican Literature (1971), and Davis and Redding’s Cavalcade (1971)—omit Home’s works entirely.