SOURCE: James Weldon Johnson, Twayne Publishers, 1987,123 p.

In the following excerpt, Fleming traces Johnson's development from a writer of conventional poetry to one of experimental free verse in God's Trombones.

During his Atlanta years Johnson began to write poetry. From the 1890s through his publication of Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917) the form and subject matter of his poems are characteristic of the period in which he wrote; that is, they are written in conventional stanzaic forms, in rhymed verse, and they address subjects that are either the conventional subject matter of the poet or the specialized subject matter of the Afro-American poet, as handed down from early protest writers such as George Moses Horton and Frances Watkins Harper. During the 1920s, however, Johnson began to experiment with more modern forms, eventually producing in God's Trombones (1927) a free verse form calculated to recall the style and rhythm of...