Glossary of Poetic Terms

A period of musical, literary, and cultural proliferation in the African-American community during the 1920s and early 1930s, especially focused around metropolitan areas including New York City. The movement was key to developing a new sense of Black identity and aesthetics as writers, visual artists, and musicians articulated new modes of African-American experience and experimented with artistic forms, modernist techniques, and folk culture. Harlem Renaissance artists and activists also influenced French and Caribbean Négritude and Negrismo movements in addition to laying a foundation for future Black Arts champions like Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka. Writing luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance include Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, William Waring Cuney, Zora Neale Hurston, Angelina Weld Grimké, James Weldon Johnson, Fenton Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, and Arna Bontemps. Important publications included the anthology The New Negro (1925), edited by Alan Locke, and the magazines Crisis, Opportunity, Fire!!, and the Messenger. See Langston Hughes’s essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) and Elizabeth Alexander’s more recent historical article “The Black Poet as Canon-Maker.”