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Helene Johnson
“It’s very difficult
for a poor person to be that unfastened.
They have to eat. In
order to
eat, you have to be fastened and tightly…you don’t have too much time
to go in
another direction. And to write anything
(it can be poetry or anything at all), you have to have time. You have to sit and rock like a fool or look
out the window, and something will come by.”
-Helene Johnson
Biography-Criticism
Helene Johnson was on born July 7, 1906, in Boston,
Massachusetts to Ella Benson Johnson and George William Johnson. She was an only child, and her parents
separated shortly after her birth, so she never knew her father or his
family.
Johnson spent most of her childhood in the Brookline section
of Boston, where she lived with her mother’s family, which included her
cousin,
the noted novelist Dorothy West. They
spent most of their summers at Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard Island.
Johnson and her cousins attended Boston’s Lafayette School,
the Martin School, and the Boston Girls’ Latin School.
She also took writing courses at Boston
University and joined the Saturday Evening Quill Club, an organization
of
aspiring black Boston writers. Johnson
and West moved to New York in 1927 and attended Columbia University’s
Extension
Division where they studied with the novelist Johnson Erskine.
Johnson’s writing career started in 1924, when she submitted
the poem “Trees at Night” to the Urban League’s official magazine, Opportunity. Her poem was accepted and eventually appeared
in the journal. Johnson won honorable
mention for her poem “Trees at Night” at the magazine’s first annual
literary
awards ceremony in May of 1925. Johnson went on to win first, fourth,
and
seventh honorable mentions for her poems “Fulfillment,” “Magula,” and
“The
Road” at the Opportunity awards dinner in 1926. Her last poem
was
published in May 1935.
Johnson married William Hubbell in 1933. In
1940, Johnson gave birth to her only
child, Abigail Calachaly Hubbell.
Johnson continued to live in New York where
she raised her daughter
until her death on July 6, 1995, the day before her eighty-ninth
birthday.
Because Johnson’s career was short and that there is very
little of her work published, she remains relativity unknown. Even though Johnson stayed out of the public
eye, her peers spoke very highly of her.
Miss Johnson “possesses true lyric talent,”
observed James Weldon
Johnson in 1931. Similarly, in a 1998
interview, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa observed
that
Johnson was the youngest and most talented of the Harlem Renaissance
poets.
Selected Bibliography
Works by the
Author
“Trees at Night” Opportunity
(May 1925)
“Night” Opportunity
(January 1926)
“Metamorphism” Opportunity
(March 1926)
“Fulfillment” Opportunity
(June 1926)
“Fiat Lux” The
Messenger (July 1926) Opportunity
(December 1928)
“The Little Love” The
Messenger (July 1926)
“Futility” Opportunity
(August 1926)
“Mother” Opportunity
(September 1926)
“Love in Midsummer” The
Messenger (October 1926)
“Magula” Palms
(October 1926) Caroling Dusk (1927)
“Bottled” Vanity Fair
(May 1927) Caroling Dust (1927)
“Poem” Caroling Dusk (1927) The Book Of American
Negro Poetry (1931)
”Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” Caroling Dusk (1927) Ebony
and Topaz (1927)
“What Do I Care For Morning” Caroling Dusk (1927)
“A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America” Harlem
(November 1928)
“Cui Bono?” Harlem
(November 1928)
“I Am Not Proud” Saturday
Evening Quill (April 1929)
Works about the
Author
Mitchell, Verner D. ed. This Waiting for Love: Helene
Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance,
Amherst: U of Massachusetts P,
2000.
Honey, Maureen ed. Shadowed Dreams: Woman’s Poetry of the
Harlem Renaissance, New
Brunswick: Rutgers, 1989
Cullen, Countee ed. Caroling Dusk Anthology of Verse by Black
Poets, New York: Harper, 1927
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and McKay, Nellie Y. ed. African
American Literature New York:
Norton, 1997
Related Links
http://www.nku.edu/~gregoryj/lit/j/johnsonha.html
-Selected poems
http://www.angelfire.com/poetry/writingsonthewall/helenejohnson.html
-Selected poems
http://www.aaregistry.com/pdetai.php3?id=408
-The poem Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem
http://www.uncc.edu/mcnair/ebony.htm
-Biography and selected poems
This page was researched and
submitted by Linda
Lewis. Please contact the editor
with any questions or
suggestions. |
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