The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson (Modern Library Classics) by James Weldon Johnson

The Essential Writings of James Weldon Johnson (Modern Library Classics) by James Weldon Johnson

Author:James Weldon Johnson [Johnson, James Weldon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307796868
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-21T16:00:00+00:00


PART THREE

POETRY

POETRY

“I am glad,” writes James Weldon Johnson to Joel E. Spingarn, “that you like ‘The Creation.’ I have been experimenting for some time to find a form which would hold all the character of ‘Negro’ poetry, and at the same time be capable of expressing deep emotion and lofty sentiment—something which I have not found possible in the ‘dialect’ form. I believe I have it in ‘The Creation.’ ” In this letter of December 11, 1920, the first of many such letters to his friend Spingarn on the subject of the poems that would comprise God’s Trombones, Johnson sketches in broad outline the aesthetic challenges and goals associated with this much celebrated volume of verse. “The Creation” and the other six folk sermons that comprise God’s Trombones were born of Johnson’s desire to “take the primitive stuff of the old-time Negro sermons and, through art-governed expression, make it into poetry.”

Johnson wrote “The Creation” in 1919 after hearing a black preacher address a congregation in Kansas City. Johnson was impressed by the delivery and performance of this unnamed black preacher who, as he recalled in Along This Way, “excited my envy” through his mastery of language and the occasion and who, as a consequence, stirred “something primordial in me.” A few weeks later Johnson completed “The Creation,” which was subsequently published in The Freeman. While he was deeply committed to completing his volume of folk sermons, six years would pass before he “formulated the subject matter and chose the title of the second poem of the group” entitled “Go Down Death,” a funeral sermon.

Johnson resumed his work on what would become God’s Trombones after the publication in 1925 of the very successful The Book of American Negro Spirituals, a two-volume work he co-edited with his brother J. Rosamond Johnson. Johnson writes that the completion of this volume and its accompanying introduction had a similar effect on him as that of hearing the black evangelist in Kansas City in 1919. “This work tempered in me,” recalls Johnson, “to just the right mood to go on with what I had started when I wrote ‘The Creation.’ I was in touch with the deepest revelation of the Negro’s soul that has yet been made, and I felt myself attuned to it.” On Thanksgiving day, 1926, Johnson wrote “Go Down Death.” Remembering the exhilaration associated with writing this funeral sermon Johnson observes: “As I worked, my own spirit rose till it reached a degree almost of ecstasy. The poem shaped itself easily and before the hour for dinner I had written it as it stands published.” Wishing to preserve the special mood born of writing the second sermon, Johnson left Manhattan and retired to Five Acres, his country residence in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where he wrote the remaining five sermons. As he struggled to give voice to “the old-time Negro preacher,” Johnson states that his “aim was to interpret what was in the mind, to express, if possible, the dream to which, despite limitations, he strove to give utterance.



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