Helene Johnson’s African (and) American Sonnets
Though sonnets were popular during the early twentieth century in the United States, the academic focus on modernism’s break with established poetic convention has limited sonnet scholarship about the period. An exception is the Harlem Renaissance, whose male writers have enjoyed a successful revival that has less effectively included their female peers. As a result, the innovative work African American women writers were doing within the sonnet form during the period remains understudied, preventing the full adaptability of the form and innovation of black women writers from being appreciated.
Helene Johnson’s (1906-1995) sonnets offer complex, sometimes deliberately ambiguous portrayals of black women’s interiority as a counter to cultural stereotypes about them and their poetry. The critical and popular neglect of Johnson’s work, the sonnets especially, today impoverishes our ability to understand the way women poets in the 1920s and 1930s and particularly in the Harlem Renaissance adapted received forms to engage with their contemporary conflicts of artistic and cultural identity.
Johnson’s work intervenes in this discussion of innovative continuation of the sonnet tradition by adding to and complicating ways of forging (female) poetic identity: who the black female artist is and who she can be are related but distinct questions from who the white female artist is and who she can be in the early twentieth century. In addition, the variety of her sonnet forms highlights experimentation and the adaptability of the form. Her varied sonnets, published over a decade, present distinct views and styles, highlighting both the multiplicity of the individual and of black women more generally while also making a sustained argument for the myriad uses of the sonnet. This paper/talk will read two of her sonnets, “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America” (1928) and “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” (1927), to show her investment in the form, using it to speak a black woman’s experiences. These poems also utilize the sonnet’s history and “constrained” form to contrast America with an imagined Africa.
Helene Johnson’s (1906-1995) sonnets offer complex, sometimes deliberately ambiguous portrayals of black women’s interiority as a counter to cultural stereotypes about them and their poetry. The critical and popular neglect of Johnson’s work, the sonnets especially, today impoverishes our ability to understand the way women poets in the 1920s and 1930s and particularly in the Harlem Renaissance adapted received forms to engage with their contemporary conflicts of artistic and cultural identity.
Johnson’s work intervenes in this discussion of innovative continuation of the sonnet tradition by adding to and complicating ways of forging (female) poetic identity: who the black female artist is and who she can be are related but distinct questions from who the white female artist is and who she can be in the early twentieth century. In addition, the variety of her sonnet forms highlights experimentation and the adaptability of the form. Her varied sonnets, published over a decade, present distinct views and styles, highlighting both the multiplicity of the individual and of black women more generally while also making a sustained argument for the myriad uses of the sonnet. This paper/talk will read two of her sonnets, “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America” (1928) and “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” (1927), to show her investment in the form, using it to speak a black woman’s experiences. These poems also utilize the sonnet’s history and “constrained” form to contrast America with an imagined Africa.
Eleanor Wakefield teaches English and writing at the University of Oregon. Her dissertation is on early-twentieth-century American women's sonnets. Her most recent publication, "Among Dark Trees: Poetic Identity and the Sonnet Form in 'Into My Own,'" appears in The Robert Frost Review.