SOURCE: "The Heart of Blackness—M. B. Tolson's Poetry," in New Letters, Vol. 39, No. 3, March, 1973, pp. 63-76.

In the following essay, Basler recommends Tolson's poetry for a general readership as opposed to an exclusively African-American audience.

What American poet will symbolize and represent our milieu to readers in the future, as Shakespeare represents the Elizabethan, Milton the Puritan, or, to come closer, Whitman the Civil War era? Will it be Eliot? Pound? Sandburg? Frost? William Carlos Williams? Time may tell, perhaps is already telling, that although they spoke to us in a special voice, none knew us in our latitudinal-longitudinal complexity, or used quite our whole language with the love and imagination of a master. Will it be one of the younger generation of Roberts—Lowell, Duncan, Creeley, or—? I think not.

Even in our current concern with ecology, Eliot's The Waste Land seems something less than symbolic...