After a period of nearly sixty years, the judgment of knowledgeable critics has coalesced to grant Georgia Douglas Camp Johnson, poet, playwright, and composer, a place among the best writers of the early twentieth century. Omitted from most popular anthologies and textbooks, even when her black contemporaries gained admission, she was labeled "minor" primarily because as a black woman of the genteel school she was overshadowed by what J. Saunders Redding calls the "masculine literature of the `New Negro.'" In another sense, Johnson lived in the shadow of genteel poet Sara Teasdale, with whom she was most frequently compared at the beginning of her career. Both poets wrote romantic, conventional verse, usually designated "small poems" because of their length (four to eight lines with occasional poems of up to fourteen lines); both wrote lyrics that were drawn from simple introspection and instinct; neither concerned herself with religion...