Sterling A. Brown’s task in his first poetry collection,
Southern Road(1932),
was to construct a new poetic language which could encompass the diversities and specificities of African American life in the twentieth century. Coming to prominence a decade after Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes had signalled a new era of African American poetry, Brown reinstated folk poetry into the Black tradition, and this is the greatest achievement of
Southern Road.The first introduction to Southern Road was written by James Weldon Johnson, former leader of the NAACP, who had included five of the collection’s poems in his revised Book of American Negro Poetry in 1931. Johnson lauds Brown’s “unique” work for “bringing about the more propitious era in which the Negro artist now
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Citation: Round, Sian. "Southern Road". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 October 2022 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1921, accessed 21 November 2024.]
