Twentieth-Century American Poetics

2003 · Book · Dana Gioia

“In his preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), James Weldon Johnson celebrates "this power of the Negro to suck up the national spirit from the soil and create something artistic and original, which, at the same time, possesses the note of universal appeal," and he credits the achievement to "a remarkable racial gift of adaptability;... it is a transfusive quality.”

by Dana Gioia