The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson by Georgia Douglas Johnson

You do not read a poem in a magazine as you may read a poem on its own. Therefore, by closely examining the magazine itself, we can gain a better understanding of just what those standards were, and how they influenced Johnson’s work. It was equally important for those works to play to the (gender-based) expectations of The Crisis’s audience. Because the magazine represented the NAACP to the public, it was very important for the pieces it published to adhere to the standards for New Negro artwork held by its editor, W.E.B. Analyzing Johnson’s poetry in this way is an ideal way to continue exploring the pattern that Tate points out because, in The Crisis, all the pressures that Tate identifies are at play. Because the goal of this essay is to examine the relationship between these particular poems and the content that surrounds them, the analysis will be limited to this single issue of the magazine. This issue houses two poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson and a wide range of other illuminating content. This analysis will focus on The Crisis’s issue for March 1920, which was volume nineteen, number five. This essay will build from Tate’s thesis by analyzing two poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson as they appeared in The Crisis’s March 1920 issue. Whereas Johnson’s contemporaries tended to take her poems at face value, Tate looks beyond this veneer to find a passionate poetic voice masked by superficial conventionality. As a result, her verse sometimes appears conventional to the point of being trite.

Thus, in order to earn recognition as a significant author, Johnson needed to make her work reflect the many strict expectations that her society had for both black and female authors.

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. 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).

The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson by Georgia Douglas Johnson