SOURCE: "James Weldon Johnson and the Pastoral Tradition," in The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, Fall, 1975, pp. 417-21.

In the following essay, Redding investigates Johnson's use of dialect and the "Southern Negro idiom" in his poetry.

In a book entitled Some Versions Of Pastoral, published in 1935,' the English critic and poet William Empson set forth a definition of the pastoral that differed from both the ancient classical and the later Elizabethan concept, both of which comprehended poetry only. Empson's definition more or less ignored the elements of form, of meter, and of subject matter in order to emphasize technique and intent. He conceived of the pastoral as a "device for literary inversion," a method for "putting the complex into the simple," and of expressing, in whatever literary genre, "complex ideas through simple personages" and dramatizing these ideas through the imitation of actuality and the representation of the...