SOURCE: "The Search for a Language, 1746-1923," in Black Poetry in America: Two Essays in Historical Interpretation, Louisiana State University Press, 1974, pp. 1-36.

In the following excerpt, Jackson and Rubin recount Johnson 's influential creation of a true black voice in American poetry.

When James Weldon Johnson, putting together his first book of verse in 1917, entitled the final section "Croons and Jingles," he was making an ironic comment not only upon his own early work but upon the situation of the American poet who was black. For by croons and jingles, Johnson was referring to the modes of poetry in which the black poet was expected to write. He could produce sentimental songs like Johnson's own "Sence You Went Away":

 Seems lak to me dat ev'ything is wrong,
Seems lak to me dat day's jes twice es long,
Seems lak to me de bird's forgot his song,
Sence...