One of the youngest and brightest of the Harlem Renaissance poets (she was five years younger than Langston Hughes and twenty-one years younger than Georgia Douglas Johnson), Helene Johnson is remembered today for perhaps a half dozen poems that capture the concerns and convey the promise and excitement associated with the Harlem literary scene of the mid 1920s. For a brief period beginning in 1925, when her work began appearing regularly in the National Urban League's Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, as well as in several important anthologies and, on one occasion, in Vanity Fair magazine, she, along with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps, and Sterling Brown, was repeatedly hailed as representing the best of the younger generation of poets who were part of the New Negro movement. Ultimately, however, she did not fulfill her brilliant promise and in retrospect can only be considered a minor poet...