Automatic aesthetics: Race, technology, and poetics in the Harlem Renaissance and American New Poetry (James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen)

The Harlem Renaissance's legacy is usually seen as the re-discovery of black vernacular culture; since the conventional verse forms of many of the poets don't fit this model, they are seen as evidence of colonized minds. But this isn't so. These poets had a sophisticated understanding of what it means to be a black poet within Western traditions. This project adds a sense of that intellectual history to the movement.; The first part of this study links the Renaissance to 1920s urban theory. New technologies, electricity, the skyscraper, new transportation networks, were crucial to ideas of what it meant to be modern and American. They were seen as initiating a new stage of human evolution. The "skyscraper primitives," as the white avant-garde called themselves, and Amy Lowell's "New Poetry," saw American culture as arising from the nation's technological and industrial strength. Within "automatic primitivism," as I call these ideas, black culture was seen as another impersonal force, authentic because it reflected mass minds not individuals. Renaissance intellectuals, therefore, particularly James Weldon Johnson, confront a definition of the black poet as mechanical and primitive, and therefore a sense that the black poet exists in a very limited cultural space.; In part two I discuss Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, who represent two related approaches to this compression. Hughes argues that "truly great" black poetry much come from the masses, and be affiliated with black music. Close readings of Hughes's poetry, however, show his awareness of the cost of privileging music over language in a poem. I name this difficulty "jazzaphobia" because Hughes's poetry is inflected by both a fear as well as the lionization of black music. In Cullen's case, while critics have argued that Cullen assumes a place in Western poetic history that denies his race, Cullen presents his relationship with John Keats as disruptive. Keats's influence brings beauty to the poet, but at the expense of the coherence of the poet's subjectivity. A key trope is what Cullen calls the "bright mausoleum." For a poet to be black and to sing is akin to a haunting. The black poet inhabits poetry much as a ghost inhabits the world.