![]() This essay will build from Tate’s thesis by analyzing two poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson as they appeared in The Crisis’s March 1920 issue. Whereas Johnson’s contemporaries tended to take her poems at face value, Tate looks beyond this veneer to find a passionate poetic voice masked by superficial conventionality. ![]() As a result, her verse sometimes appears conventional to the point of being trite. Thus, in order to earn recognition as a significant author, Johnson needed to make her work reflect the many strict expectations that her society had for both black and female authors. ![]() In a similar fashion, the powerful members of the New Negro movement also had strong opinions concerning the form and function that New Negro art and writing should adopt. According to Tate, American society in general and the largely male-dominated New Negro literary scene both held strong views of what proper female behavior should be. ![]() Tate reads the conventional, occasionally simple quality of Johnson’s poetry as a calculated strategic response to the race and gender based expectations of the community in which she wrote. In her introduction to The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson, Claudia Tate argues convincingly that “beneath the veneer of Johnson’s traditionalist verse and genteel public persona, labored a ‘bold modernist imagination’” (xviii). ![]()
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