Contemporary Reviews Of Georgia Douglas Johnson Essay

, Research Paper

William Stanley Braithwaite

The poems in this book are intensely feminine and for me this means more than anything

else that they are deeply human. We are yet scarcely aware, in spite of our boasted

twentieth-century progress, of what lies deeply hidden, of mystery and passion, of

domestic love and joy and sorrow, of romantic visions and practical ambitions, in the

heart of a woman. The emancipation of woman is yet to be wholly accomplished; though woman

has stamped her image on every age of the world’s history, and in the heart of almost

every man since time began, it is only a little over half of a century since she has

either spoken or acted with a sense of freedom. During this time she has made little more

than a start to catch up with man in the wonderful things he has to his credit; and yet

all that man has to his credit would scarcely have been achieved except for the devotion

and love and inspiring comradeship of woman.

Here, then, is lifted the veil, in these poignant songs and lyrics. To look upon what

is revealed is to give one a sense of infinite sympathy; to make one kneel in spirit to

the marvelous patience, the wonderful endurance, the persistent faith, which are hidden in

this nature.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,

And enters some alien cage in its plight,

And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars

While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

sings the poet. And

The songs of the singer

Are tones that repeat

The cry of the heart

Till it ceases to beat.

This verse just quoted is from "The Dreams of the Dreamer," and with the

previous quotation tells us that this woman’s heart is keyed in the plaintive, knows the

sorrowful agents of life and experience which knock and enter at the door of dreams. But

women have made the saddest songs of the world, Sappho no less than Elizabeth Barrett

Browning, Ruth the Moabite no less than Amy Levy, the Jewess who broke her heart against

the London pavements; and no less does sadness echo its tender and appealing sigh in these

songs and lyrics of Georgia Douglas Johnson. But sadness is a kind of felicity with woman,

paradoxical as it may seem; and it is so because through this inexplicable felicity they

touched, intuitionally caress, reality.

So here engaging life at its most reserved sources, whether the form or substance

through which it articulates be nature, or the seasons, touch of hands or lips, love,

desire, or any of the emotional abstractions which sweep like fire or wind or cooling

water through the blood, Mrs. Johnson creates just the reality of woman’s heart and

experience with astonishing raptures. It is a kind of privilege to know so much about the

secrets of woman’s nature, a privilege all the more to be cherished when given, as in

these poems, with such exquisite utterance, with such a lyric sensibility.

William Stanley Braithwaite, "Introduction," The Heart of a Woman and

Other Poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson (Boston: Cornhill Co., 1918), pp. vii-ix

J. R. Fauset

In these days of vers libre and the deliberate straining for poetic effect

these lyrics of Mrs. Johnson bring with them a certain sense of relief and freshness. Also

the utter absence of the material theme makes appeal. We are all very wary of the war note

and are glad to return to the softer pipings of old time themes—love, friendship,

longing, despair—all of which are set forth in The Heart of a Woman.

The book has artistry, but it is its sincerity which gives it its value. Here are the

little sharp experiences of life mirrored poignantly, sometimes feverishly, always truly.

Each lyric is an instantaneous photograph of one of the many moments in existence which

affect one briefly perhaps, but indelibly. Mr. Braithwaite says in his introduction that

this author engages "life at its most reserved sources whether the form or substance

through which it articulates be nature, or the seasons, touch of hands or lips, love,

desire or any of the emotional abstractions which sweep like fire or wind or cooling water

through the blood." The ability to give a faithful and recognizable portrayal of

these sources, is Mrs. Johnson’s distinction.

In this work, Mrs. Johnson, although a woman of color, is dealing with life as it is

regardless of the part that she may play in the great drama. Here she is a woman of that

imagination that characterizes any literary person choosing this field as a means of

directing the thought of the world. Several of her poems bearing on the Negro race have

appeared in the Crisis. In these efforts she manifests the radical tendencies

characteristic of every thinking Negro of a developed mind and sings beautifully not in

the tone of the lamentations of the prophets of old but, while portraying the trials and

tribulations besetting a despised and rejected people, she sings the song of hope. In

reading her works the inevitable impression is that it does not yet appear what she will

be. Adhering to her task with the devotion hitherto manifested, there is no reason why she

should not in the near future take rank among the best writers of the world.

J. R. Fauset, [Review of The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems], Journal of

Negro History 4, No.4 (October 1919): 467-68

W. E. B. Du Bois

Those who know what it means to be a colored woman in 1922—and know it not so much

in fact as in feeling, apprehension, unrest and delicate yet stem thought—must read

Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Bronze. Much of it will not touch this reader and that,

and some of it will mystify and puzzle them as a sort of reiteration and over-emphasis.

But none can fail to be caught here and there by a word—a phrase—a period that

tells a life history or even paints the history of a generation. Can you not see that

marching of the mantled with

Voices strange to ecstasy ?

Have you ever looked on the "twilight faces" of their throngs, or seen the

black mother with her son when

Her heart is sandaling his feet?

Or can you not conceive that infinite sorrow of a dark child wandering the world:

Seeking the breast of an unknown face!

I hope Mrs. Johnson will have wide reading. Her word is simple, sometimes trite, but it

is singularly sincere and true, and as a revelation of the soul struggle of the women of a

race it is invaluable.

W. E. B. Du Bois, "Foreword," Bronze: A Book of Verse by

Georgia Douglas Johnson (Boston: B. J. Brimmer Co., 1922), p. 7

Alain Leroy Locke

In Bronze, Mrs. Johnson has at last come to her own—if not also in a

peculiar way, into her own. A certain maturity that is to be expected of a third

volume of verse, is here, but it is the homecoming of the mind and heart to intimately

racial thought and experience which is to be especially noted and commended. We can say of

this that it is timely both for the author and her readers: for her, it represents the

fruition of a premeditated plan not to speak racially until she has learned to speak and

attract attention in the universal key; for her readers, of many classes and sections of

opinion, it represents more perhaps an occasion of seeing the "color problem" at

the heart, as it affects the inner life. Even if it were not very readable poetry, it

would, from this latter point of view, be important as human documentation of a much

needed sort. "Not wholly this or that"—"Frail children of sorrow,

determined by a hue"—"Shall I say, ‘My son, you’re branded in this

country’s pageantry’"—the phrase Du Bois has singled out, "With voices

strange to ecstasy"—"This spirit-choking atmosphere"—"My

every fibre fierce rebels, against this servile role"—or

Don’t knock at my door, little child

I cannot let you in;

You know not what a world this is—

there are volumes in these phrases. After this), the race question becomes, as it must

to all intelligent observers, a human problem, a common problem.

One of Mrs. Johnson’s literary virtues is condensation. She often distills the trite

and commonplace into an elixir. Following the old-fashioned lyric strain and the

sentimentalist cult of the common emotions, she succeeds because by sincerity and

condensation, her poetry escapes to a large extent its own limitations. Here in the

subject of these verses, there is however a double pitfall; avoiding sentimentality is to

come dangerously close to propaganda. This is also deftly avoided—more by instinct

than by calculation. Mrs. Johnson’s silences and periods are eloquent, she stops short of

the preachy and prosaic and is always lyrical and human. Almost before one has shaped his

life to "Oh! the pity of it, a certain fresh breeze of faith and courage blows over

the heart, and the mind revives to a healthy, humanistic optimist. Mrs. Johnson seems to

me to hear a message, a message that gains through being softly but intensely insinuated

between the lines of her poems—"Let the traditional instincts of women heal the

world that travails under the accumulated woes of the uncompensated instincts of

men", or to speak more in her way, "May the saving grace of the mother-heart

save humanity."

Alain Leroy Locke, [Review of Bronze: A Book of Verse], Crisis 25, No.4

(February 1923): 161

Effie Lee Newsome

It is well-nigh impossible to think of this vital product from the pen of Georgia

Douglas Johnson without having communicated to one some of the intense conviction that

WROUGHT it into being. It has been stated that authors can convince only to the extent of

their persuasion: Georgia Douglas Johnson has molded with the very pulsations of her

heart.

Her heart—for this is the potent factor in her creative force—has molded a

"Bronze" that challenges not altogether with the sharp angles of accusation, but

as well with the graceliness of heart’s call to heart for sympathy in the problems of

race; as in "The Octoroon;" as also in the ever-recurring light and shadow theme

of colored woman’s motherhood:

The infant eyes look out amazed upon the frowning earth,

A stranger, in a land now strange, child of the mantled birth;

Waxing, he wonders mote and more; the scowling grows apace,

A world, behind its barring doors, reviles his ebon face!

And we must quote, further, the two lines that conclude if not solve the problem of the

poem:

Yet from this maelstrom issues forth a God-like entity,

That loves a world all loveless, and smiles on Calvary!

In ending this finesse of workmanship Mrs. Johnson—or still shall we say,

"her heart?"—polishes the bronze with the glory and rich lustre that bronze