Chapter 9 - Modernism and Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance

Summary

This chapter explores some of the recent scholarship on Harlem Renaissance women poets to assess whether limiting and gendered critical frameworks of the past are expanding enough to bring them into the fold of Modernist Studies. It curates some of the most significant scholarship to appear since the widespread development of new critical models in Harlem Renaissance and African American feminist literary criticism. It also presents a case study of three poets, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery, whose work models for us the modernism of New Negro women’s lyrical verse, a genre routinely omitted from the modernist canon. It argues that the erotic lyric or erotically charged pastoral verse largely defined for New Negro women poets what it meant to be a modern writer, as well as an artist-activist, and that we should consider the best of such poems part of the modernist canon.