Anne Spencer

While Spencer befriended many Harlem Renaissance artists, her most fruitful relationship was with James Weldon Johnson. Not only did he discover her, but he also selected her pen name, Anne Spencer. Also, Johnson introduced her to H. L. Mencken who, like Carl Van Vechten, aided black writers. While Mencken helped Anne publish her first poem, "Before the Feast at Shushan," she later declined his patronage.



Spencer published most of her poems during the 1920s in the period's most prestigious collections: James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922); Robert T. Kerlin's Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923); Louis Untermeyer's American Poetry Since 1900 (1923); Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925); and Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1925). One of her last poems, "For Jim, Easter Eve," was published in Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps's The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 in 1948.



Many of Spencer's poems convey a romantic concern with the human search for beauty and meaning in an unfriendly universe, as well as people's unstable attempts to impose order on God's earth. Poems in this vein include "At the Carnival" and "Change." However, Spencer cannot be viewed solely as a "nature" or "religious" poet, for her complex work is very diversified.



"Black Man O' Mine," for instance, uses erotic imagery to celebrate black love. While Spencer did not write "protest" poetry, she wrote Johnson that "The Tom-Tom forced into poetry seems a sad state to me" (quoted in J. Lee Green's biography; author's emphasis)--she was aware of white oppression. The persona of "White Things" addresses racism metaphorically: "They [white things] turned the blood in a ruby rose/To a poor white poppy-flower." In addition she worked fervently with NAACP secretary Johnson and helped establish the Lynchburg chapter of that organization in 1918. Thus, an unequivocally black, feminist voice coexisted with one enamored of the earth's splendor.



Anne Spencer loved to work in her garden. She was a horticulturalist by nature. Her rare green thumb allowed her to cultivate a garden that attracted several members of the black artistic community for over half a century: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Paul Robeson, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou are just a few of the artists to visit her Lynchburg home. Her devotion to illuminating the beauty of God's garden and humankind's place in it the works of writers such as Alice Walker, who also sees a cosmic and spiritual relationship between human beings and the earth. Though many of her writings were lost, critics continue to rediscover the voice of Anne Spencer--a voice that pulsates through black women's writing in the later half of the twentieth century on into the new millennium.



Anne Spencer, a forerunner for African-American female writers.