Publishing his own work after the death of the popular Negro poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1906 and before the emergence of the new Negro voices of Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen in the decade between 1917 and 1927, Fenton Johnson experienced a continual struggle, as he put it, to maintain his idealism and "to obtain a foothold in literature." Although the poems in his self-published books of poetry (1913, 1915, and 1916) were primarily written in artificial and imitative plantation dialect and genteel, imitative Victorian diction, his continuing struggle to present the life of his race in his work resulted in a handful of poems, published in anthologies and magazines from 1919 through the early 1930s, that sounded a new stylistic and thematic note in black poetry. Yet these poems failed to bring Johnson any recognition or any real possibility for the publication of another volume of poetry during his...