The Vintage Book of African American Poetry [Paperback]

Michael S. Harper (Editor), Anthony Walton (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2000

In The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, editors Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton present the definitive collection of black verse in the United States--200 years of vision, struggle, power, beauty, and triumph from 52 outstanding poets.

From the neoclassical stylings of slave-born Phillis Wheatley to the wistful lyricism of Paul Lawrence Dunbar . . . the rigorous wisdom of Gwendolyn Brooks...the chiseled modernism of Robert Hayden...the extraordinary prosody of Sterling A. Brown...the breathtaking, expansive narratives of Rita Dove...the plaintive rhapsodies of an imprisoned Elderidge Knight . . . The postmodern artistry of Yusef Komunyaka.  Here, too, is a landmark exploration of lesser-known artists whose efforts birthed the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movements--and changed forever our national literature and the course of America itself.

Meticulously researched, thoughtfully structured, The Vintage Book of African-American Poetry is a collection of inestimable value to students, educators, and all those interested in the ever-evolving tradition that is American poetry.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This anthology of the work of 50 African American poets complements co-editors Harper and Walton's Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep (LJ 12/93), which showcased 35 recent African American poets. Included in chronological order here are over two centuries of poets, from Jupitor Hammon (1720-1800) to Reginald Shepherd (b.1963). Critical opinions in the headnotes are more persuasive and sweeping than the brief notes of the earlier one. For example, the editors argue that Sterling Brown's "body of poetry" is one of the greatest produced by an American in this century and that Robert Hayden has "amassed a nearly flawless collection of poems regarded as among the finest by an American of this century." Such assessment should bring into sharper focus the importance of issues like "belonging," dialect, identity, and race in a multiethnic society. More than ever, one sees that African American poetry essentially begins with Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), whose pioneering poetry ("different voicings") endures. That so few African American poets before Dunbar's era were allowed to achieve "voice and freedom" is a tragic waste. The editors' eloquent, outspoken vision provides a springboard for further examination of what constitutes the mainstream of American poetry.
-Frank Allen, Northampton Community Coll., Tannersville, PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

After the triumph of their last editorial collaboration, Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans since 1945 (1994), poets Harper and Walton have teamed up again, this time to select the best of two centuries of African American poetry. In their introduction, they write that if there is a single, overarching theme shared by the 52 poets gathered here, it is the "quest for identity and a belonging that will not compromise the self," a crucial search that continues unabated as racial inequality persists. The most haunting works are those written by slaves, such as George Moses Horton and Frances E. W. Harper, who wrote that slaveowners "tried to hide / Book learning from our eyes; / Knowledge didn't agree with slavery--/ 'Twould make us all too wise." So she and others taught themselves, and their bid for spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and artistic freedom has found fruition in every poet who followed on that long, long road to justice, from Sterling A. Brown to Toi Derricotte, Elizabeth Alexander, and Reginald Shepherd. Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375703004
• ISBN-13: 978-0375703003
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #155,154 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 4.3 stars: A splendid anthology; please read, December 15, 2001

By 

dylanissimus "dylanissimus" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (Paperback)

The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, edited by Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton, is reminiscent of a somewhat earlier anthology EVERY SHUT EYE AIN'T ASLEEP (also edited by Mr Harper and Mr Walton). The poems in the Vintage Book span three centuries, from Jupitor Hammon and Phillis Wheatley, to Carl Phillips and Reginald Shepherd; the 20th century, as one might expect, is most generously and gloriously represented. This reviewer has always prized the work of Countee Cullen and of Robert Hayden; and is grateful to make the acquaintance of Sterling A. Brown and Gwendolyn Bennett (her poem "To A Dark Girl," written early in the last cnetury, is an irreducible greatness); Langston Hughes is shown to advantage in the selection of his work, many of the chosen poems being new to this reader. It shames us that hithertofore we had not been familiar with the work of Boston-born William Stanley Braithwaite. Claude McKay and Jean Toomer appear in these pages, McKay's finely wrought sonnets being familiar from other anthologies. New to us, and a gift for which the reader is grateful, is Margaret Walker's "October Journey," of Keatsian loveliness.

Stylistic diversity exists here, and surfaces in a salient fashion as we reach the middle of the twentieth century: Gwendolyn Brooks (both formal and colloquial); Bob Kaufman (can we cavil at the omission of his fine eulogistic poem "Afterwards, They Shall Dance"?); Etheridge Knight (whose diamond-like haiku enliven our sense of the possibilities of the form); and the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, whose "Bounty" is indeed a marvel. Raymond Patterson's baldly unsubtle imitation of Wallace Stevens ("Twenty-Six Ways of Looking at a Blackman") strikes this reader as a culpable generosity of inclusion on the part of the anthologists.

We find merit in the poems of Audre Lorde and Lucille Clifton; Sonia Sanchez's piece urging nuclear disarmament does not affect us positively, on either a political or an esthetic level, a slack garrulity that is too long-winded to be a slogan and too formless to be a poem. Jay Wright, Michael S. Harper, Al Young and Toi Derricotte (almost exactly contemporaneous) fashion lyrics of beauty, ingenuity, toughmindedness and considerable appeal. We value Marilyn Nelson's poem (charmingly sardonic) called "Emily Dickinson's Defunct." Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, and Rita Dove -- justly renowned poets -- are in the Vintage Book (Komunyakaa a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1994, Dove a recent U. S. poet laureate). Nathaniel Mackey's poems display an unparalled intelligence and ability to renovate and renew the language; his work should be more widely known. Elizabeth Alexander cages wrath within formality in "The Venus Hottentot", and is quite effective in her sequence of poems about Muhammad Ali. And finally, an autumnophile reviewer must congratulate Anthony Walton on the achievement of his lyric "The Summer Was Too Long"; great poetic force is also to be found in his poems on Thelonious Sphere Monk and Emmett Till.

In short, this is a splendid anthology, recommended to all. There are lapses into the ineffectual stridency of sloganeering; nonetheless, we venture to say that the reader will be nourished and fortified by the majority of the poems in the Vintage Book of African American Poetry. These are lyrics of immitigable beauty, of consummate artistry, of serious esthetic accomplishment.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too many giants left out, January 23, 2011

By 

Reader746 - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (Paperback)

I like this book, but I can only give it two stars because it left out too many important African American poets. The back cover claims that the book presents "the definitive collection of black verse in the United States," but I keep shaking my head at the absence of Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Naomi Long Madgett, Dudley Randall, E. Ethelbert Miller, June Jordan, Mari Evans, Angela Jackson, Wanda Coleman and Patricia Smith. How could the editors leave out such giants? By the year 2000 (when the book was published), all ten of those poets had made ground-breaking contributions to African American poetry as well as the evolution of poetry in general as a universal art form. As for the poets they did include, I agree with most of them, but I question the importance of esoteric poets like Reginald Shepard and Carl Phillips. I also wonder why they only included one or two poems by Melvin Tolson, Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti and Gayle Jones, yet included many more for some of the other poets.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, March 30, 2000

By 

A. Jones (Misawa AB Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (Paperback)

An excellcent collect of African American Poetry. Never really been interested in poetry, but after reading this book can't wait to read more poetry any kind of poetry.