J. Saunders Redding and the “Surrender” of African American Women's Poetry

Abstract

J. Saunders Redding's To Make a Poet Black (1939) changed the way African American poetry would be read and valued. In an effort to articulate an African American modernism, Redding rewrote the recent history of the New Negro Renaissance, validating and skewing its literary production. The standards and values that Redding used helped to advance the reputations of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer but also led to discrimination against femininity and its associated poetic forms. By incorporating the gendered matrix of the New Criticism into African American literary studies, he helped to create a new formal consensus, which cut across the black and the white academies and united critics on the left and the right of the ideological spectrum, in opposition to women's poetry.