“I, as a black poet, have absorbed the Great Ideas of the Great White World, and interpreted them in the melting-pot idiom of my people. My roots are in Africa, Europe, and America.” – Melvin B. Tolson, 1965 interview
It’s Tolson’s birthday today.
If you’ve seen Denzel Washington’s wonderful film The Great Debaters, then you know of Melvin B. Tolson’s leadership in the “debate” world of HBCUs, and the crucial role these debates played in fermenting the rhetoric and style of argument that would then pour into the civil rights movement. It’s a fascinating film about an important part of American history, and I highly recommend it!
Melvin Tolson was a poet, but he was also a teacher and coach of the celebrated debate team, Wiley Forensic Society, at Wiley College in Texas. He was the one who began to push for debate teams from black colleges to debate teams from white colleges. This was radical, and completely unknown territory. Because … what if the debate teams from HBCUs won? (They did. Often.)
The debate team at Wiley College
Tolson was born in 1898. His parents instilled in him the importance of education. He went to a couple of different universities, became a teacher, and then went off to Columbia to get his Master’s. By this point it was the early 1930s. His thesis was on the Harlem Renaissance. Tolson was deeply influenced by the Modernist writers – he read them all – Joyce, Stein, Pound, Eliot – as well as all of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. He wasn’t from New York City. He was born in Missouri, went to colleges in the Midwest, so I think there’s something about his reaction to the Harlem Renaissance – as well as the Modernists – that had a freshness of perspective, a freshness of insight. He wasn’t a city boy, steeped in this stuff like it was the air he breathed. He felt in it the revelation that it was, the break with tradition.
Here he is reading his poem “Dark Symphony.” He’s got such a distinctive voice. He throws himself out there IN his voice. It makes me think of how he worked with his debate team kids on prosody, projection, using the voice to make rhetorical points, to build a case. This was part of many intersecting traditions, cultural and religious and political, which would reach its apex in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches, with their inevitable build, their use of repetition, the way the tension increases and increases until finally some transcendence breaks through. I love listening to him.
“Dark Symphony” was included in his first published collection of poetry, Rendezvous with America, in 1944.
Much of his poetry was inspired by his time in New York, which was pretty brief, all things considered. He wrote episodic poems, impressionistic, about Harlem, its denizens, its environment. He taught at Wiley from the 1920s to 1947, and then he moved to Langston University where he taught for the next 17 years. Honestly, his influence can’t even be measured. Teachers like this change the world. Their influence spans generations.
In 1965, he published Harlem Gallery: Book One, The Curator. Although coming into the fervor of the 1960s, Harlem Gallery came out of his 1930s experiences in Harlem, and he had started the book back then. It was meant to be (and is) a panoramic view – but also a street-level view – of the life in Harlem as he saw it and experienced it, seen through the lives of three black artists, their concerns, their lives, the hot spots they frequented, how they felt about art, how they felt about the world. Voices, Harlem Gallery is filled with voices. The most important voice – or the one that everybody remembers is Hideho Heights, a man known as “poet laureate of Harlem”. The “curator” part of the title is important in understanding Tolson’s methodology and vision for the book. (He died in 1966. There would only be “Book One,” sadly.) Tolson “curated” Harlem, for the “gallery show” that was the book.
Here’s Hideho Heights:
and I, like the brims of old hats,
slouched at a sepulchered table in the Zulu Club.
Frog Legs Lux and his Indigo Combo
spoke with tongues that sent their devotees
out of this world!
Another poem by Melvin B. Tolson. (His poem about Abraham Lincoln is also superb, but it’s very long, too long to post here. Many of his poems are quite long. They all should be sought out and read.)
An Ex-Judge at the Bar
Bartender, make it straight and make it two—
One for the you in me and the me in you.
Now let us put our heads together: one
Is half enough for malice, sense, or fun.
I know, Bartender, yes, I know when the Law
Should wag its tail or rip with fang and claw.
When Pilate washed his hands, that neat event
Set for us judges a Caesarean precedent.
What I shall tell you now, as man is man,
You’ll find in neither Bible nor Koran.
It happened after my return from France
At the bar in Tony’s Lady of Romance.
We boys drank pros and cons, sang Dixie; and then,
The bar a Sahara, we pledged to meet again.
But lo, on the bar there stood in naked scorn
The Goddess Justice, like September Morn.
Who blindfolds Justice on the courthouse roof
While the lawyers weave the sleight-of-hand of proof?
I listened, Bartender, with my heart and head,
As the Goddess Justice unbandaged her eyes and said:
“To make the world safe for Democracy,
You lost a leg in Flanders fields—oui, oui?
To gain the judge’s seat, you twined the noose
That swung the Negro higher than a goose.”
Bartender, who has dotted every i?
Crossed every t? Put legs on every y?
Therefore, I challenged her: “Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him who first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”
The boys guffawed, and Justice began to laugh
Like a maniac on a broken phonograph.
Bartender, make it straight and make it three—
One for the Negro . . . one for you and me.
QUOTES:
Langston Hughes:
No highbrow. Students revere him and love him. Kids from the cotton fields like him. Cow punchers understand him … He’s a great talker.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Perhaps no work more successfully synthesizes the twin legacies of the Harlem Renaissance and Euro-American modernism than Harlem Gallery. As indicated by its subtitle, Book I, The Curator, this twenty-four part poem, divided into sections headed with letters of the Greek alphabet, was originally intended to be the first of a five-part poetic sequence on the history of African Americans. Like the modernist sequences of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Hart Crane, Tolson’s was an ambitious poem of epic proportions, interweaving multiple voices, narratives, and references. Allusion is the poem’s primary device for sustaining compression, efficiently summoning stories, characters, historical events, and previous texts from a stunning array of sources. Upon the publication of his magnum opus, Tolson was said to have “out-pounded Pound.” Neoligisms, convoluted syntax, multiple layers of irony, and strained figures of speech also help create a forbidding verbal texture.
Robert Donald Spector:
Here is a poet whose language, comprehensiveness, and values demand a critical sensitivity rarely found in any establishment… Whatever his reputation in the present critical climate, Tolson stands firmly as a great American poet.
Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Melvin Tolson, who began his career in the Harlem Renaissance but wrote his best poetry later, fused the folk-based, oral aesthetic of poets such as [Langston] Hughes and [Sterling] Brown with the allusive strategies of Euro-American modernism in Harlem Gallery )1965), one of the last great high modernist poems. If high modernism is often grim, Tolson evinces a high-spirited delight in his ability to master, manipulate, and shift among different styles and idioms. He nimbly leaps rhetorical registers, from the curt abbreviations of slang to the over-elaborations of pedantry. Stuffed-shirt classicism jostles alongside racy innuendo. Since high modernism is already itself a culturally mixed aesthetic, and since Harlem Renaissance poets such as Hughes and Brown harness both black and white influences, Tolson further hybridizes two distinct yet already hybrid modes of poetry.
Donald B. Gibson, Reference Guide to American Literature:
On the basis of his first volume of poetry [Rendezvous with America] …it would hardly have been possible to predict the kind of poet Melvin Tolson was to be a decade later. A poet who writes ‘I gaze upon her silken loveliness / She is a passionflower of joy and pain / On the golden bed I came back to possess’ does not show particular promise. Likewise the lines ‘America is the Black Man’s country / The Red Man’s, the Yellow Man’s / The Brown Man’s, the White Man’s’ are not suggestive of the great lines yet to come.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Perhaps the premier African American poet in the high modernist tradition, Melvin Tolson was one of the most densely allusive and verbally dazzling poets of the twentieth century … Oblique and multilayered, rhetorically mannered and fiercely learned, the long poetic sequence Harlem Gallery was published at a time when the reigning paradigm in American poetry emphasized direct self-expression (the autobiographical proclivities of confessional poetry) and political assertion (the nationalist imperatives of the Black Arts Movement). Long after his death, as poets explore other possibilities, the significance of Tolson’s contribution is becoming apparently.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Nothing here is straightforward: Tolson continually signifies, riffs, and embroiders.
Robert M. Farnsworth, on “Dark Symphony”:
[The poem] celebrates the historic contribution of black Americans and their struggle to gain recognition for their achievements, ending with a proud and defiant prediction of black accomplishment and cultural realization.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry on Rendezvous with America:
… explores class antagonism and race relations in America, while also reflecting Tolson’s interest in New Negro progressivism, which defied old racial stereotypes to foster a new African-American psychology.
Donald B. Gibson on “Libretto for the Republic of Liberia”:
“[There is] a system of tensions not unlike the dynamic forces holding an atom or a galaxy together. Each element threatens to go off on its own; yet as long as the balance of forces remains constant, the system functions.
Robert Donald Spector:
One of America’s great poets.
Blyden Jackson, on “Harlem Gallery” in New Republic:
The brotherhood of man and the universality of serious art …catalyze [the poem’s] perceptions.
Donald B. Gibson, on “An Ex-Judge at the Bar”:
In style and content [it is] very much like a good deal of the later poetry and untypical of the rather commonplace character of much of the first volume. [It is] in tone typically Tolsonian. The juxtaposition of the formal and the informal, the classical and the contemporary, the familiar and the unusual accounts in large measure for the unique character of Tolson’s best poetry
Donald Gibson:
Tolson, by virtue of an extraordinary mind and intelligence, keeps a vast array of disparate elements in constant relationship. His poetry is, therefore, coherent, and its primary effect is of the containment and control of vast reserves of energy.
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry on Harlem Gallery:
The poem celebrates both traditions, but aligns itself with neither, revealing each to be partial and flawed when uninformed by its opposite. It enacts the implicit tension between the terms Harlem and Gallery. The relation between the Harlem Renaissance and Euro-modernism is one of the great puzzles of twentieth-century poetry, and it is embodied in the jazzy yet intricately allusive sections of Tolson’s masterpiece.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
