On Georgia Douglas Johnson

’s Poetry Essay, Research Paper

Eugenia W. Collier

In 1918, she published The Heart of a Woman, poems

exploring themes especially meaningful to women. With this volume, Johnson became the

first widely recognized African-American woman poet since Frances E. W. Harper. The

Heart of a Woman is about love, longing, disillusionment, and loneliness. The poems

reflect frustration with the strictures of women’s prescribed roles. In 1922, she

published a second volume, Bronze, which concerned racial themes.

In 1928, she published a volume of poems, An Autumn Love Cycle, which returned

to her earlier explorations of feminine themes. This volume is considered her best because

of its mature treatment of the theme of romantic love and because of its skillful use of

form. Her much-anthologized "I Want to Die While You Love Me" is in this volume.

Johnson continued to write, but publication became increasingly difficult. In 1962, she

published Share My World, poems containing the wisdom culled from a lifetime of

experience. She remained active into her eighties, until she died suddenly of a stroke in

1966. Because her papers were not saved, much of her work was lost.

Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poems are skillfully crafted lyrics cast in traditional

forms. They are, for the most part, gentle and delicate, using soft consonants and long,

low vowels. Their realm is emotion, often sadness and disappointment, but sometimes

fulfillment, strength, and spiritual triumph. Yet Johnson herself was never otherworldly.

She remained in the forefront of political and social events of her time. Her plays were

moving portrayals of the tragic impact of racism upon African Americans. Frequent themes

in both her poetry and drama are the alienation and dilemmas of the person of mixed blood

and the goal of integration into the American mainstream.

From The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. Ed.

Cathy N. Davidson, et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Copyright . 1995 by

Oxford University Press.

Winona Fletcher

["The Heart of a Woman], the title poem of the volume is also the first poem in

it, suggesting that it was intended to set a particular tone for the collection. Johnson

depicts "the heart of a woman" as a roaming figure, alien to its environment,

which finds its place about the "turrets and vales" of life; disappointed with

exploration, it returns to a reclusive existence ("enters some alien cage") and

"breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars." The heart of a woman,

therefore, is presented as a pathetic creature unable to secure for itself a place in the

world; it is attracted to withdrawing from that harsh, unnurturing environment.

"The Heart of a Woman" does coincide with the flights of imagination

characteristic of the poems Johnson has composed. They abound with dreams; nature (its

beauty and its changes); love or pain too acute for expression; wordless kisses;

loneliness, seclusion, and isolation; the transitoriness of existence; lack of

fulfillment; and brief moments of bliss.

From The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 51: Afro-American Writers from the

Harlem Renaissance to 1940. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Trudier Harris.

Copyright . 1987 by the Gale Group.

Gloria T. Hull

The Heart of a Woman . . . does "lift the veil" from some of

"woman’s" less smiling faces. Clearly, she is aware of the oppressiveness and

pain of the traditional female lot. Her title poem, which opens the volume, begins the

revelations with its metaphor of a woman’s heart as a bird that wings "forth with the

dawn" over "life’s turrets and vales," then

… falls back with the night,

And enters some alien cage in its plight,

And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars

While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

The use of "alien cage" and "sheltering bars" is especially notable

here. She makes a similar point in "Smothered Fires," where "a woman with a

burning flame" keeps it covered through the years, suppressing the baleful light that

would perforce arise, and in "When I Am Dead," whose speaker, having

"longed for light and fragrance" and yet dwelt "beneath willows,"

eschews a hypocritical "blooming legacy" on her funeral bier.

She explicitly crystallizes these moods in an iambic tetrameter quatrain entitled

"Foredoom":

Her life was dwarfed, and wed to blight,

Her very days were shades of night,

Her every dream was born entombed,

Her soul, a bud,–that never bloomed.

Here, and in similar poems, one might play it safe and read "objectively."

However, the import and poignancy of the works are intensified if they are viewed

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