The New Negro

"The New Negro" is an essay by Alain Locke that helped shape a new cultural movement coined the, "Harlem Renaissance." Locke contemplated the creation of black culture and race that would be based on shared experience rather than a shared oppressor (white patriarchal society). The ideas about creating common goals, founding a black racial brotherhood, and working for equality were not wholly new when Locke published his essay. Much earlier in American literature, Martin Delany published his novel, Blake, or Huts of America. In Delany's novel, the protagonist is taken as a slave, endeavors to find his family who are taken from him, incites a slave rebellion in the United States, and eventually leaves for Liberia. Blake (the protagonist) realizes in the course of the novel that blacks cannot cooperate and cohabitate effectively in the United States; his solution is to racially, "create the world anew," in Liberia (Milton).

In "The New Negro," Locke asserts that previously "the negro" has been more concept than reality, more socially-constructed myth than person. Locke asserts, "His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality. Through having had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends and benefactors he has had to subscribe to the traditional positions from which his case has been viewed. Little true social or self-understanding has or could come from such a situation," (1).

Locke describes his contemporary movement of the case of "the negro" as a "spiritual emancipation," (1). Overcoming the internal prejudice---the misunderstanding of self, position, and value then allows "the negro" to contemplate and undertake the task of searching for a collective consciousness.

Locke also describes what he identifies as the underlying reasons for this spirutal emanicipation and formation of the "new negro." Locke believes that migration toward the Northern section of the United States and increased urbanization are contributing to black social transformations. The Harlem Renaissance ended up containing many different, albeit racially black, ethnicities. Ultimately, it became a cultural awakening that based itself on Locke's notion that, "In the very process of being transplanted, the Negro is being transformed," (Locke 2). Transplantation and collaboration (in Harlem) brought the transformation and cultural growth of the Harlem Renaissance.

Works Cited

Locke, Alain. The New Negro. http://books.google.com/books?id=kuiSuqS4J38C&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22the+new+negro%22+alain+locke&source=bl&ots=gGvbGq_OGc&sig=ed1qFRNosBfLkTvyyef_TJRmUw8&hl=en&ei=yerPS8ezDIGW8QTT082gCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false Accessed 4/12/10.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_1/index.shtml Accessed 4/22/10.

Ezra Pound's Imagism

Ezra Pound led writers in early 20th Century into a new style writing that he termed "Imagism." Pound was reacting to the earlier, sentimental and ornate style of poetry. Various writers turned to Pound to edit their writing and get it published, including W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost.

For example, Ezra Pound is responsible for the content and form of T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. This poem is said to show the every essence of the American Modern literature movement. Pound edited out quite a bit of Eliot's poem's content and encouraged devices like, "sudden shifts in perspective, unacknowledged quotations in different languages, and the presentation of an individual consciousness against a panorama of the age," (Norton 348). Pound's primary body of work is "The Cantos," which he continually updated and published throughout his life.

Pound established several rules to govern the Imagist movement; "the direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective, to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation, use musical phrasing in terms of rhythm," (Norton 347). Pound's own definition of an 'Image' is, "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time," (Norton 347). He expresses his definition of a captured image in his poem "In a Station of the Metro." The whole poem is all of one sentence; nothing superfluous or ornate to dress its expression of image. The poem states,

"The apparition of these wet faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough," (Pound 351).

I chose to display the poem separate from the text of the paragraph because in the Imagist movement, the presentation of the text influences the image expressed to the readers. In Pound's above poem, readers can actually visualize the long "metro" of the first line moving past the "station" of the second line. The another image supplied by poem is that of metaphor of the metro as a, "wet, black bough" with its passengers, "these faces in the crowd," being, "petals."