Hailed by critics as perhaps the most technically sophisticated and modern poet of the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance, Anne Spencer, nonetheless, had to struggle against the label of "lady poet" and the call to join the ranks of her poetic sisters of the 1920s and 1930s by giving voice to the "true poetic spirit the lyric cry of Negro womanhood." She remained highly "individualistic," in the words of Sterling Brown, Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee, the editors of The Negro Caravan (1941), and her mentor and friend James Weldon Johnson suggested that her poems were "perhaps too unconventional." Her work was largely unpublished during her lifetime except for some thirty poems that Johnson himself shepherded into print, and it is yet to be collected in a separate volume, although forty-two of the fifty extant poems and fragments have been published as an appendix to J. Lee Greene's...