ours out the bitterness and rebellion in his
heart in those two sonnet-tragedies, "If We Must Die" and "To the White
Fiends," in a manner that strikes terror; and when as a cosmic poet he
creates the atmosphere and mood of poetic beauty in the absolute, as he
does in "Spring in New Hampshire" and "The Harlem Dancer." Mr. McKay gives
evidence that he has passed beyond the danger which threatens many of the
new Negro poets--the danger of allowing the purely polemical phases of the
race problem to choke their sense of artistry.

Mr. McKay's earliest work is unknown in this country. It consists of poems
written and published in his native Jamaica. I was fortunate enough to run
across this first volume, and I could not refrain from reproducing here
one of the poems written in the West Indian Negro dialect. I have done
this not only to illustrate the widest range of the poet's talent and to
offer a comparison between the American and the West Indian dialects, but
on account of the intrinsic worth of the poem itself. I was much tempted
to introduce several more, in spite of the fact that they might require a
glossary, because however greater work Mr. McKay may do he can never do
anything more touching and charming than these poems in the Jamaica
dialect.

Fenton Johnson is a young poet of the ultra-modern school who gives
promise of greater work than he has yet done. Jessie Fauset shows that she
possesses the lyric gift, and she works with care and finish. Miss Fauset
is especially adept in her translations from the French. Georgia Douglas
Johnson is a poet neither afraid nor ashamed of her emotions. She limits
herself to the purely conventional forms, rhythms and rhymes, but through
them she achieves striking effects. The principal theme of Mrs. Johnson's
poems is the secret dread down in every woman's heart, the dread of the
passing of youth and beauty, and with them love. An old theme, one which
poets themselves have often wearied of, but which, like death, remains one
of the imperishable themes on which is made the poetry that has moved
men's hearts through all ages. In her ingenuously wrought verses, through
sheer simplicity and spontaneousness, Mrs. Johnson often sounds a note of
pathos or passion that will not fail to waken a response, except in those
too sophisticated or cynical to respond to natural impulses. Of the half
dozen or so of colored women writing creditable verse, Anne Spencer is the
most modern and least o