With Juneteenth celebrated this month, I was curious about America’s Black women poets. So I went to my New Oxford Book of American Verse. Flipping through its early pages, I came soon to a short poem by Phyllis Wheatley, who lived in the eighteenth century and was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry. The poem is called “On Being Brought from Africa to America”:

 'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

I’m struck, in these last two lines, by their rejection of blackness as “a diabolic die.” No, Wheatley insists, even “Negros black as Cain” may be redeemed in heaven. Wheatley’s poem piqued my curiosity about subsequent American poets of “sable race”—especially women. So I went to The Poetry Foundation website (my go-to source for poets and poems) and spent several enjoyable days searching for and reading these poets.

I found none for the two centuries after Wheatley. But then I came upon Audre Lorde’s title poem in her 1976 collection Coal, which also speaks in the first person about her blackness. Lorde was a member of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s-1970s, which celebrated being black in America. “Coal” (which you can hear her read here) begins:

I
Is the total black, being spoken
From the earth's inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame   
How a sound comes into a word, coloured   
By who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows
Singing out within the crash of passing sun…

And it ends:

Love is a word another kind of open—
As a diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am black because I come from the earth's inside   
Take my word for jewel in your open light.

This is a striking image: her blackness as valuable, as precious, as a diamond—because both come from “the earth’s inside.”

Just four years later, Gwendolyn Brooks published her collection Primer For Blacks (1980). Brooks is one of our most celebrated twentieth century poets. The first Black poet awarded a Pulitzer Prize, she was also the first Black woman to be U.S. Poet Laureate (at the time called Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress).

The poem of Brooks’s that I want to focus on is the title poem of Primer For Blacks. It’s too long for me to treat the whole poem, but you can read it all here. It begins straightforwardly:

Blackness
is a title,
is a preoccupation,
is a commitment Blacks
are to comprehend—
and in which you are
to perceive your Glory.

Then a bit later, Brooks plays with the color black, its many possible shades:

Blackness
stretches over the land.
Blackness—
the Black of it,
the rust-red of it,
the milk and cream of it,
the tan and yellow-tan of it,
the deep-brown middle-brown high-brown of it,
Blackness
marches on.

By the final lines, the poem gets wonderfully wild, playing with indentations and shouting out certain words in all caps:

      All of you——
      you COLORED ones,
      you NEGRO ones,
those of you who proudly cry
      “I’m half INDian”——
      those of you who proudly screech
      “I’VE got the blood of George WASHington in MY veins”
      ALL of you——
               you proper Blacks,
      you half-Blacks,
      you wish-I-weren’t Blacks,
      Niggeroes and Niggerenes.

      You.

It’s great fun. Some of the Blacks “screech” proudly, some don’t want to be Black at all. Worse, some are addressed with the racial slurs “Niggeroes and Niggerenes.”

The next major African-American poet I must of course address is Maya Angelou, a near-contemporary of Gwendolyn Brooks. Angelou’s most famous poem is probably “Caged Bird” (1983). Through its six stanzas, the poem contrasts the freedom of the free bird—it “leaps / on the back of the wind” and “names the sky his own”—with the caged bird:

But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and   
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings   
with a fearful trill   
of things unknown   
but longed for still   
and his tune is heard   
on the distant hill   
for the caged bird   
sings of freedom.

So the poem is giving us this caged bird as a metaphor for Black people throughout American history.

Maya Angelou became a household name after Bill Clinton invited her to compose a poem for his 1993 inauguration. The Poetry Foundation describes this event: “Americans all across the country watched as she read ‘On the Pulse of Morning,’ which… calls for peace, racial and religious harmony, and social justice for people of different origins, incomes, genders, and sexual orientations. It recalls the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech as it urges America to ‘Give birth again / To the Dream’ of equality.”

Which brings us naturally to our most recently famous African-American female poet. When the 22-year-old Amanda Gorman read her poem “The Hill We Climb” at Joe Biden’s 2021 Presidential inauguration, she was following Maya Angelou in more ways than one. For afterwards, Gorman wrote on Twitter: “While reciting my poem, I wore a ring with a caged bird—a gift from @Oprah for the occasion, to symbolize Maya Angelou, a previous inaugural poet.”

“The Hill We Climb” is a celebration of and challenge to our nation, with just one reference—a delightful one—to Gorman’s race:

We, the successors of a country and a time
where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one.

From Phyllis Wheatley’s slavery to Amanda Gorman’s reciting for a president is, in one sense, a journey from bondage to even more than freedom: to celebratory fame. But in another sense, as Maya Angelou reminds us, African-Americans’ history continues to live within them.

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.

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