Late-Century African American Poets and Realist Gentility

This chapter argues that late-century black poets carved out a new postbellum form of African American poetic realism. These poets, too, have fallen prey to the twilight narrative. While critics often fault their work as “conventional,” this chapter contests the scholarly argument that the “conventionality” of black genteel verse is a problem to be lamented, showing it instead to have been an arena for innovation. Priscilla Jane Thompson, George Marion McClellan, William H. A. [W. H. A.] Moore, and Henrietta Cordelia Ray all carved out unique forms of African American poetic expression in which “gentility” became a performance space that opened up a realist counterpoetics of their own. As they performed the genteel, these poets engaged and claimed its tropes, undermining and countering its fantasies and rewriting them as black-voiced reality checks on the genteel poetic mode.