The Online Books Page

American poetry -- African American authors -- History and criticism

See also what's at your library, or elsewhere.

• American poetry -- African American authors
• American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism
• American poetry -- History and criticism

• Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2011), by Jon Woodson (PDF at Ohio State)
• The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, c2011), by Howard Rambsy (PDF files at Project MUSE)
• Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews, and Interviews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c2007), by Elizabeth Alexander (page images at HathiTrust)

Items below (if any) are from related and broader terms.

• Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (originally New York and London: Harper and Bros., 1927; reprinted Lincoln, NE: Zea Books, 2023), ed. by Countee Cullen, illust. by Aaron Douglas (PDF at unl.edu)
• Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c2006), ed. by Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, and Camille T. Dungy (page images at HathiTrust)
• The Book of American Negro Poetry, Chosen and Edited With an Essay on the Negro's Creative Genius (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., c1922), ed. by James Weldon Johnson
  • Gutenberg text
  • multiple formats at archive.org
  • page images at HathiTrust
• Bronze: A Book Of Verse (Boston: B. J. Brimmer, 1922), by Georgia Douglas Johnson, contrib. by W. E. B. Du Bois (mulitiple formats at archive.org)

• North American Negro Poets: A Bibliographical Checklist of Their Writings, 1760-1944 (Hattiesburg, MS: The Book Farm, 1945), by Dorothy Porter Wesley, contrib. by Arthur Alfonso Schomburg (page images at HathiTrust)

• The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2008), by April C. E. Langley (PDF at Ohio State)
• Mutha' is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2007), by LaMonda Horton-Stallings (PDF at Ohio State)
• Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Modernism: From Spatial Narrative to Jazz Haiku (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2006), by Yoshinobu Hakutani (PDF from Ohio State University Press)
• Conjuring the Folk: Forms of Modernity in African America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c2000), by David Nicholls (page images at HathiTrust)
• The Sage in Harlem: H. L. Mencken and the Black Writers of the 1920s (originally published 1984; open access edition Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), by Charles Scruggs (multiple formats with commentary at Project MUSE)
• Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2018), by Felice Blake (PDF at Ohio State)
• Black American Literature: Notes on the Problem of Definition (Ball State Monograph #22; Muncie, IN: Ball State University, 1971), by Joseph F. Trimmer (PDF at bsu.edu)
• Hemingway and the Black Renaissance (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2012), ed. by Gary Edward Holcomb and Charles Scruggs (PDF at Ohio State)
• A Decade of Negro Self-Expression (Trustees of the John Slater Fund occasional paper #26; 1928), by Alain Locke, contrib. by Howard Washington Odum (multiple formats at archive.org)
• The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1925), ed. by Alain Locke, illust. by Winold Reiss (page images at HathiTrust)
• The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (revised edition; New York: Duffield and Co., 1921), by Benjamin Brawley (multiple formats at archive.org)
• The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (New York: Duffield and Co., 1918), by Benjamin Brawley (multiple formats at archive.org)
• The Work of the Afro-American Woman (second edition; Philadelphia: G. S. Ferguson Co., 1908), by Mrs. N. F. Mossell (mutiple formats at archive.org)

• Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c2013), ed. by George Hutchinson and John K. Young (multiple formats with commentary at fulcrum.org)

• Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2010), by Taylor Hagood (PDF at Ohio State)

• Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2018), by Felice Blake (PDF at Ohio State)
• The Ethics of Swagger: Prizewinning African American Novels, 1977-1993 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2013), by Michael D. Hill (PDF at Ohio State)
• Contemporary African American Fiction: New Critical Essays (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2009), ed. by Dana A. Williams (PDF at Ohio State)
• Folklore in New World Black Fiction: Writing and the Oral Traditional Aesthetics (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2007), by Chiji Akoma (PDF at Ohio State)
• The Negro in American Fiction (originally published 1937; reprinted Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1968), by Sterling A. Brown (page images at HathiTrust)
• Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New-Wave Trajectory (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2008), ed. by Marleen S. Barr (PDF at Ohio State)

• Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry (originally published 2003; open access edition Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), by Anthony Hecht (multiple formats with commentary at Project MUSE)
• The Poet's Poet: Essays on the Character and Mission of the Poet As Interpreted in English Verse of the Last One Hundred and Fifty Years, by Elizabeth Atkins (Gutenberg text)
• America's Coming-of-Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915), by Van Wyck Brooks (page images at HathiTrust)
• Hypnotic Poetry: A Study of Trance-Inducing Technique in Certain Poems, and Its Literary Significance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), by Edward Douglas Snyder, contrib. by James H. Leuba (page images at HathiTrust)

• Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2013), by Nadia Nurhussein (PDF at Ohio State)

• The Erotic Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000), by Vivian R. Pollak (frame-dependent HTML with commentary at UC Press)

• A Poetics of Resistance: Women Writing in El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c1994), by Mary K. DeShazer (page images at HathiTrust)
• Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom (electronic edition), by Morgan Gibson (HTML at Light and Dust)

• Truth (first and second editions, 1831 and 1832), by William Joseph Snelling (HTML with commentary at merrycoz.org)

• Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2013), by Nadia Nurhussein (PDF at Ohio State)
• Poets of the South: A Series of Biographical and Critical Studies With Typical Poems, Annotated, by F. V. N. Painter (Gutenberg text)
• Poets of the South: A Series of Biographical and Critical Studies With Typical Poems, Annotated (New York et al.: American Book Co., c1903), by F. V. N. Painter
  • multiple formats at archive.org
  • page images at HathiTrust; US access only
• The Walt Whitman Archive, by Walt Whitman, ed. by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price (HTML at whitmanarchive.org)

• After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), by Vernon Lionel Shetley (page images at HathiTrust)
• ABC of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), by Christopher Beach (HTML at UC Press)
• At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c1980), by Kathleen M. Woodward (PDF files at Ohio State)
• Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews, and Interviews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c2007), by Elizabeth Alexander (page images at HathiTrust)
• Looking for Native Ground: Contemporary Appalachian Poetry (Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press, c1989), by Rita Sims Quillen (PDF at appstate.edu)
• Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2013), by Nadia Nurhussein (PDF at Ohio State)
• I Made You to Find Me: The Coming of Age of the Woman Poet and the Politics of Poetic Address (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, c2009), by Jane Hedley (PDF at Ohio State)
• Poetry's Afterlife: Verse in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), by Kevin Stein (HTML with commentary at digitalculture.org)
• Giant Hours with Poet Preachers, by William L. Stidger, ed. by Edwin Markham
  • Gutenberg text
  • multiple formats at archive.org
• Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1917), by Amy Lowell (page images at HathiTrust)
• The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century, by William Lyon Phelps (Gutenberg text)
• Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1919), by Conrad Aiken (multiple formats at archive.org)

More items available under broader and related terms at left.