Melvin Tolson – Harlem Renaissance writer approaching Liberia

Melvin Beaunorus Tolson is an African American modernist poet, educator, columnist, and playwright whose work focused on the experience of African Americans and includes several poetic stories. He lived during the Harlem Renaissance and, although he did not participate, his work reflects his influences.

Tolson’s year at Columbia University from 1931 to 1932 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation put him in Harlem at the end of the Harlem Renaissance, so he became friends with many of the writers who were associated with him, especially Langston. Hughes, and was inspired to develop his poetics. talent.

In many of his poems, therefore, Tolson would revisit the atmosphere of Harlem in the 1930s. Inspired by the accomplishments of the people like Hughes around him, Tolson resolved to contribute to the proud legacy that black writers were establishing.

Your previous collection Rendezvous and Gallery it reflects the early influence of Walt Whitman, Edgar Lee Masters, and Langston Hughes, thus highlighting Tolson’s proletarian convictions and optimistic spirit. This was later evident in his interest in issues of black dignity, as well as in his elaboration of multiracial diversity in America … This must have led the West African Republic of Liberia to declare him their poet laureate in 1947 .

Born in 1900 in Moberly, Missouri, Melvin Tolson was the son of a Methodist minister and an Afro-Greek mother who was a seamstress. Thus he was raised in a Methodist Episcopal household with his father, a reverend who had taught himself the classical languages. He moved through a small-town Midwestern circuit with his parents between various churches in the Missouri and Iowa area until he finally settled in the Kansas City area. He lived in a house of contradictions. His father, who had an eighth-grade education, was skeptical of the value of a college education, but still instilled in his son a strong desire for knowledge.

As a child he liked to paint, but was forced to resign due to his mother’s disapproval of a bohemian artist who wanted to take him to Paris. So, returning to poetry, he found an appropriate outlet for his creativity. At the age of 14 he published his first poem “The Wreck of the Titanic” in the local Oskaloosa, Iowa newspaper. Then in Kansas City in 1911 he was elected a high class poet.

He graduated from Lincoln High School in Kansas City in 1919 and enrolled at Fisk University, but that year he transferred to Lincoln University for financial reasons. There he met Ruth Southall and married her on January 29, 1922. Tolson graduated with honors in 1924, then moved to Marshall, Texas, to teach public speaking and English at Wiley College.

While at Wiley, Tolson developed a series of epoch-making extracurricular activities, including coaching the junior varsity football team, running the drama club, co-founding the Southern Black Intercollegiate Speech and Dramatic Arts Association, and organizing the Wiley Forensic Society. , an award-winning debate club that earned a national reputation by breaking the color bar across the country and meeting with unprecedented success when, during their 1935 tour, they competed against the University of Southern California where Oprah Winfrey – film produced The great debaters, is based, released on December 25, 2007 (although in the film, they discuss Harvard, not USC). The film was directed by Denzel Washington.

Tolson mentored many students at Wiley encouraging them not only to be whole but also to always stand up for their rights, even though it was a rather controversial position in the southern US in the early to mid-20th century.

Starting in 1930, Tolson began writing poetry. He took a leave of absence to obtain a master’s degree in comparative literature from Columbia University in 1930-31, but did not complete it until 1940 with the writing of a thesis on the Harlem Renaissance and the writing of his first book of poems. Harlem Portrait Gallery, poems of those who appeared in Arts Quarterly, Modern Quarterly and Modern monthly.

In 1941, Dark symphony, often considered his best work winning first place in a 1939 national poetry competition, was published in Monthly Atlantic. Dark symphony Compare and contrast African-American and European-American history.

In 1944 Tolson published his first collection of poetry, Encounter with America, what includes Dark symphony Produced at the request of the publisher of Monthly Atlantic upon moving to Dodd Mead. The book quickly went through three editions from 1944 onwards.

The Washington Tribune hired Tolson to write a weekly column, Cabbage and Caviar, in which he attacked the class pretensions and lack of racial pride of the black middle class after leaving his teaching position at Wiley in the late 1940s.

Tolson began teaching at Langston University in Langston, Oklahoma, in 1947. He also served as a playwright and director of the Dust Bowl Theater there. One of his students there, Nathan Hare, the pioneer of black studies, later became the founding editor of The black scholar

Another great work of yours is Booklet for the Republic of Liberia (1953). Written in the form of an epic poem, it is perhaps the poet’s most ambitious work. It was commissioned that year and completed in 1953 for Liberia’s 1956 centennial.

The one with eight sections Booklet for the Republic of Liberia it marks the intersection of several disparate threads: Modernist stylistics superimposed on an English painting ode to an African political moment by an African-American artist. Although it has a black theme, it could be said that this poem is also about the world of men. And this theme is not simply stated, it is embodied in rich and complex language and is realized in terms of poetic imagination. Give an initial clue to its meaning with an allusive hint. But it marks Tolson’s growing poetic ambition through a vision so long, complex and allusive in some places and full of surreal dream-visions in others. However, it is still a poem little read by a black man.

That year, Liberia declared Tolson its poet laureate, who was admitted as a Liberian Knight of the Order of the Star of Africa. The 1950s and 1990s brought him growing success. He obtained poetry awards and honorary doctorates. Then he got a professorship at the Tuskegee Institute. He won the Arts and Letters award in literature from the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters. He also entered local politics and was elected Mayor of the City of Langston for four consecutive terms from 1954 to 1960.

In 1965, Tolson’s final work to appear in his life, the long poem Harlem Gallery, was published. This last poem consists of several sections, each of which begins with a letter of the Greek alphabet and focuses on exploring African-American life. Altogether, it represents a drastic departure from his early works.

In 1965, Tolson was appointed to a two-year term at the Tuskegee Institute, where he was Avalon Poet. But he did not live long enough to finish his term here. Because he died in the middle of his appointment after undergoing cancer surgery in Dallas Texas, on August 29, 1966. He was buried in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

The poems he wrote in New York were published posthumously in 1979 as A Harlem Portrait Gallery in a mix of various styles as well as free verse. The racially diverse and culturally rich community featured in A Harlem Portrait Gallery it may be based or destined to be Marshall, Texas. His poems have been characterized by their allusive, complex, modernist style and their long poetic sequences.

Tolson, a man of impressive intellect, created poetry that was “funny, witty, humorous, mocking, rude, cruel, bitter, and hilarious,” as Karl Shapiro had said of the Harlem Gallery. Langston Hughes described him as “not an intellectual. He is revered and loved by students. Cottonfield children like him. Cow beaters get it … He’s a great talker.” In New York, Tolson met important figures such as the literary critic and editor VFCalverton, who described him as “a bright and alive writer who achieves his best effects by understatement rather than exaggeration and who captures in one line or stanza what most of his contemporaries have failed. ” to capture on pages or volumes. “

Tolson’s fearless attitude toward the controversy and his vigorous defense of his religious and social views sparked not only fire, but also an invitation to publish in the Pittsburgh Messenger.

Poetry

Raise every voice and sing (1899)

Trombones of God: Seven (1927)

Selected poems (1936)

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