I’ve been researching the year 1927 for a project and came across an issue of The Crisis Magazine for that year. In this issue, several new artists were featured. Even though they were not the focus of my research, I became curious about who these people were and who they became. I knew of Countee Cullen but the others … I began by looking up Blanche Taylor Dickinson. The article in The Crisis notes that she “received honorable mention for her poem, “That Hill,” in The Crisis contest of 1926. Four of her poems have recently been accepted to appear in “Present Day Poets.” She was featured alongside Cullen, Loren R. Miller, Anita Scott Coleman and Eulalie Spence.
Three years earlier, Dickinson had written W. E. B. Du Bois, co-founder and editor of The Crisis. “I am a teacher and a reader of The Crisis but am just becoming a suscriber. You edit a fine magazine and it is a great factor in helping to bring us more and more into the recognition of the opposite race.” Enclosed with the letter were poems but no envelope with return postage because, as Dickinson wrote, if the poems were unacceptable to Du Bois, “you have a waste basket handy I am sure.”
Du Bois read her poems and then sent a reply, despite her lack of return postage. “You have some poetic feelings but are not good enough to publish. You must read more poetry. Buy Rittenhouse’s Little Book of Modern British Verse.”
Dickinson does indeed read Rittenhouse and other compilations. In 1925 she wrote Du Bois once more.
“Once before I was ‘nervy’ enough to write you a personal letter and you were kind enough to advise. So pardon this second intrusion and say, ‘She is determined to hold out to the end.’ I have read or you might say studied the book you mentioned … and feel that I have profited thereby. I have made a study of several others, too. Now if I could see a few expressions of mine in our own magazine, CRISIS, I imagine I should feel as I imagine one feels in your own sphere. I am not working for money now but for RECOGNITION. It is unwomanly of me to beg favor of your staff but I do ask please read these lines from the angle of the writer and others less favored and see what you can find in them that deserves criticism or comment.”
Du Bois’s reply? “I do not think that the poems which are enclosed are quite good enough for publication but I do think that the course of study upon which you are embarked is worth while and I hope you will keep it up.”
Dickinson, who’d been writing since childhood, would continue to work at her craft and her poetry would be published in a number of publications during the late 1920s. A little but not a lot is written about her life. Born in 1896 to a prosperous Kentucky farmer, she did well in school (including having her writing published), attended university, became a school teacher and worked as a journalist. She married a truck driver and moved around a bit. In 1929 she interviewed Amelia Earhart for the newspaper, Baltimore Afro-American. In 1930 Dickinson would deliver a speech about “The Cultural Values of Negro Poetry,” but little writing can be found after this time.
Her poetry is quite moving and suggestive of how she (or perhaps women around her) may have felt about life as a woman in the 1920s in general and as an educated African American woman specifically.
“Ah, I know what happiness is …
It is a timid little fawn
Creeping softly up to me
For one caress, then gone
Before I’m through with it …
Away, like dark from dawn!”
— excerpt from poem, A Sonnet and a Rondeau, 1927
Her words can be raw as in this excerpt from, The Good Wife, appearing in a 1932 newspaper, where her words reference the to-this-day divisive issues of class, color and even education level within the African American experience.
All day long
I been sipping suds.
Money making’s mine-
Money spending’s Bud’s.
Folks keep asking,
How could I
Let a man black as Bud
Take my eye.
I keep rubbing
‘Till my po’ head swim.
‘T ain’t worthwhile to answer
‘Cause Bud ain’t courted them!
Her work can be found online and in print anthologies from and about the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. Blanche Taylor Dickinson died in 1972.
Sources & Additional Reading
http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b168-i213
http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b169-i545
http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b169-i546
Shadowed Dreams: Women of the Harlem Renaissance by Maureen Honey
Kentucky African American Encyclopedia edited by Smith, McDaniel and Hardin, p. 142
New Negro Artists, The Crisis, February 1927, p. 206
The Good Wife, The Greeley Daily Tribune, October 10, 1932, p. 3.
Revelation, https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/revelation-16
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