The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson by Georgia Douglas Johnson

In a similar fashion, the powerful members of the New Negro movement also had strong opinions concerning the form and function that New Negro art and writing should adopt. According to Tate, American society in general and the largely male-dominated New Negro literary scene both held strong views of what proper female behavior should be. Tate reads the conventional, occasionally simple quality of Johnson’s poetry as a calculated strategic response to the race and gender based expectations of the community in which she wrote. Johnson often sounds a note of pathos or passion that will not fail to waken a response, except in those too sophisticated or cynical to respond to natural impulses.In her introduction to The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson, Claudia Tate argues convincingly that “beneath the veneer of Johnson’s traditionalist verse and genteel public persona, labored a ‘bold modernist imagination’” (xviii). In her ingenuously wrought verses, through sheer simplicity and spontaneousness, Mrs. An old theme, one which poets themselves have often wearied of, but which, like death, remains one of the imperishable themes on which is made the poetry that has moved men’s hearts through all ages. Johnson’s poems is the secret dread down in every woman’s heart, the dread of the passing of youth and beauty, and with them love. She limits herself to the purely conventional forms, rhythms and rhymes, but through them she achieves striking effects. 'Georgia Douglas Johnson is a poet neither afraid nor ashamed of her emotions. Because her papers were not saved, much of her work was lost.The anthologist James Weldon Johnson wrote of Johnson

She remained active into her eighties, until she died suddenly of a stroke in 1966. Prominent writers often debuted new works at these gatherings. These included Langston Hughes,Alain Locke, Louis Alexander, Gwendolyn Bennett, Marita Bonner, Countee Cullen Jean Toomer and Clarissa Scott Delaney. On Saturday nights she ran a Salon in Washington D.C's S Street, attended by many Harlem Renaissance writers.

She also studied music at Oberlin Conservatory and at the Cleveland College of Music, both in Ohio.Īfter the death of her husband in 1925, Johnson was forced to support herself and her two sons through a series of temporary jobs. Johnson graduated from Atlanta University Normal College in 1896. With her publication of 'The Heart of a Woman' in 1918, she became one of the most widely known African-American female poets since Frances E. Georgia Douglas Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1880.

The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson by Georgia Douglas Johnson