Modern, Modernist, Afro-Modernist: Melvin B. Tolson in the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract

Critical reengagement with Melvin B. Tolson’s writing from the 1930s and 1940s makes clear that his later Afro-Modernist epics, Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965), are not merely anomalies out of sync with the developments of modernism, nor even distanced from African American schools of writing. Rather, Tolson’s engagement with the contemporary poetic practices of his time results in a traceable trajectory from modern free verse, influenced by Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg; to experimental modernist practice in the 1940s, drawing from T. S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s methods; and finally to the development of Afro-Modernist innovation in Libretto and Harlem Gallery, as he realizes his own vision for the Afro-Modernist epic. As he becomes more fluent in his own particular modernist practice, Tolson’s task of decolonizing what Aldon Nielsen describes as “the colonized master text of modernism,” (244) results in a “rearticulation of modernism [that] led him eventually to assert African progenitors in the realm of technique” (247). Tolson’s Afro-Modernism is marked by a diasporic worldview in which multiple lineages, including those from Africa, Europe, and Asia, are incorporated into his work.¹ This diasporic imagination, which is inherently transnational, is present in the Afro-Modernist epics of Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka as well. Each of these poets turned to the epic form to include large swaths of diasporic history in their retellings of African American genealogies.